Lifes Rich Pageant

Begin the Begin

The first time I saw R.E.M. perform “Begin the Begin” was the last time I saw them in concert, which was kind of a long time ago: It was the night after George W Bush won a second term as the President of the United States back in 2004. The band opened the show with “It’s The End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” which was very unexpected and droll way of dealing with the crushing disappointment, but as soon as they ended, the launched into “Begin The Begin,” and the context underscored everything great about the tune.

Most obviously, “Begin The Begin” rocks with great force and urgency. Within a couple seconds of the intro, the entire band sounds focused and driven, as if on a life or death mission. It’s not the heaviest or fastest song they’ve ever written, but it’s certainly one of the most aggressive. On one hand, it seems designed to shake the listener out of their apathy, and on the other, it’s meant to inspire and motivate. “Begin The Begin” isn’t a passive sort of protest song, it’s not just some bitter commentary on the poor state of the world; it’s a call to arms. By the second minute of the song, the thesis of Lifes Rich Pageant as a whole is laid bare: You don’t like the way things are? You hate the way our institutions have become corrupted? Well, let’s begin again.

Much to his credit, Michael Stipe doesn’t ever pretend that a new beginning is something that could come easy. He’s not spouting revolutionary language for the sake of it, but instead acknowledging that real, lasting change is something that takes time, work, and often a great deal of failure. “Begin the Begin” isn’t about the short term; it’s not an exhortation to riot. It’s asking the listener to become an active participant in their society — if there’s any hope of standing up to the powers that be, you have to engage, create, and build. You need to have a voice, and more than that, a voice that can and will be heard. After all, “silence means security, silences means approval.”

(Originally posted on February 1, 2008)

These Days

Lifes Rich Pageant marks the beginning of R.E.M.’s blatantly political period. Admirably, R.E.M. didn’t leap into the deep end of facile sloganeering, but instead crafted lyrics that mixed social/political critiques with an expression of optimistic idealism and self-aware humility. “These Days” in particular comes off like a rock n’ roll stump speech, with Michael Stipe semi-coherently hitting all of his talking points and selling us on his vision without letting us know exactly what that might entail. Applying the aesthetics of a political speech to a rock song is a brilliant move, especially when you consider that there’s quite a lot in common between hitting the campaign trail and touring in support of an album. The most important effect of “These Days” is that without saying all that much, it makes the listener believe that the band is extremely passionate about something, and that mysterious something involves imagining a better future. Throughout the song, the emphasis is placed on inclusiveness, to the point of mocking its own starry-eyed sincerity when Michael claims “we have many things in common, name three,” and the rest of the band sing “three, three, three!” in reply. The humor is absolutely necessary — without an acknowledgment of its irony, the song would actually seem a bit disingenuous.

(Originally posted on November 18, 2007)

Fall On Me

In terms of craft, “Fall On Me” may very well be the finest pop song in the R.E.M. catalog. Like many of the best pop tunes, it lands in that rare sweet spot between complexity and simplicity in which every element of the song flows together so perfectly that the listener is so caught up in the effect of the composition that they may never stop to consider its components.

Hey, you know what? Let’s stop to consider the components.

1. There are several guitars — both acoustic and electric — playing on “Fall On Me,” but the arrangement is so light and airy that even when the song thickens on the chorus, the piece still feels light and airy. The shift in textures from one moment to the next is exceptionally subtle, and the mix is so crisp and clean that it’s hard to imagine there were actually any overdubs at all.

2. Mike Mills absolutely shines on this song. Most obviously, his high harmony vocals provide a crucial counterpoint hook in the chorus, but perhaps more importantly, his bass line lends the composition both a sense of lateral motion and emotional weight. Whereas Michael Stipe’s vocals and Peter Buck’s guitar arpeggios seem to either ascend or hover over the ground, Mills parts tether the piece to the ground, and give voice to the understated melancholy at the heart of the song.

3. Though the lyrics of “Fall On Me” are somewhat vague for what essentially amounts to a protest song calling attention to our complicity in the deterioration of our natural environment, Michael Stipe’s voice and vocal melody is especially earnest and straight-forward. Arguably, this is the first truly mature performance of his career, and among the first Stipe performances to fully trade out slurred phrasing for a skewed approximation of R&B and gospel melisma.

4. Without Bill Berry, “Fall On Me” would be just another pretty folk-pop song. Without upsetting the tone of the piece, his performance on the drums is remarkably brisk and assertive, which keeps the song from coming across as either wimpy or ethereal. Basically, the band applied 80s production value — loud, reverbed, hard-hitting drums — to a 60s-style harmony-driven pop tune, and the result is something that feels rather timeless. If Mills’ parts connect the song to the ground, Berry’s parts (including his low vocal harmonies) are the earth itself — heavy, steady, and firm.

(Originally posted on April 26, 2008)

Cuyahoga

1) Ideally, the post for “Cuyahoga” would be a field trip. I’d gather you all up and we’d go someplace beautiful on the most gorgeous day of the year. The sky would be a perfect baby blue, and it would seem enormous above us. Puffs of white clouds would hang in the air, so perfect and vivid that it would almost seem unreal. We’d be surrounded by green leaves, and water, and plants and birds and rocks and things. Anyway, we’d be there, and not here with our computers, nowhere near each other or the natural world.

2) From my review of R.E.M.’s show at Madison Square Garden on the day after George W Bush was elected to a second term:

Stipe introduced “Cuyahoga” as a song taking place in Ohio, which resulted in loud booing from all over the arena. Still, there was loud applause every time he sang the line “let’s put our heads together and start a new country up,” which was more reassuring. On my way out of the arena, I overheard two guys who looked like ex-frat dudes talk about how great it was that Michael didn’t talk much because they can’t stand “liberal whining.” Sigh. A few minutes later, I saw a cute girl in a bright orange t-shirt with homemade lettering which read “I’ve got my spine, I’ve got my Orange Crush,” which kinda sorta canceled out those goons.

3) “Cuyahoga” may be a lament, but it’s also one of the most optimistic politically themed songs in the R.E.M. songbook. Even better, its optimism is not cheap and facile. The lyrics make a point of acknowledging the fact that we need to collaborate and work hard for change, because without that effort and emphasis on community, we stand to lose so much. This song was released in 1986. Think about how much we’ve lost — in America, around the world — since then, and how much worse it could be in another 21 years if nothing really changes.

(Originally posted on July 2, 2007)

Hyena

About one third of Lifes Rich Pageant is comprised of tracks that were either adapted from previously scrapped songs or worked out in the studio to make up for a lack of new material. “Hyena” was originally written back in 1984, and was a concert staple on the tours for Reckoning and Fables of the Reconstruction before it was finally fleshed out in the studio with producer Don Gehman. They were wise to keep it under wraps for so long. The original demo, which can be heard on the bonus disc of the recent And I Feel Fine hits compilation, is more than a little undercooked. The beat is not brisk enough, the guitar tone is muddy, and the dual lead vocal is far too messy. Gehman got it exactly right — the final studio recording feels extraordinarily sunny, breezy, and streamlined. Mike Mills’ vocals are pushed into the background enough so that he barely registers until the chorus, and though the track loses a bit of its original novelty, Stipe’s superior melody and lyrics are allowed enough room to flourish.

Lyrically, “Hyena” makes much more sense in the context of Lifes Rich Pageant than it would have on either of that record’s predecessors. The song is essentially an allegory comparing the way powerful nations assert their dominance over small, impoverished regions to the ruthlessness of the food chain, which ties in nicely with the album’s general theme of connecting human politics to the natural world. However, despite the fact that it’s a rather clever satire of American foreign policy, its words may be a bit too vague and esoteric to be rhetorically effective.

(Originally posted on May 16, 2007)

Underneath the Bunker

“Underneath The Bunker” sounds like ethnic music, but it’s so jumbled and odd that it’s hard to place it properly — it’s a bit Latin, a bit Greek, a bit gah, who knows. It seems like a moment of weirdness and levity in the middle of Lifes Rich Pageant, but given its lyrics implication of war and/or nuclear devastation, it actually may be the bleakest cut on the record. Michael Stipe doesn’t even turn up til near the end of the song, and even then, he’s virtually unrecognizable what with the severe distortion and his odd, put-on accent. Its inclusion on the album is totally counter-intuitive, but somehow it works perfectly as a bridge between “Hyena” and “The Flowers of Guatemala.” I can’t imagine what possessed the band to push for the song’s inclusion, but it worked out fairly well.

(Originally posted on September 11, 2007)

The Flowers of Guatemala

There isn’t much in the lyrics of “The Flowers Of Guatemala” to indicate that Michael Stipe is singing about the disappearance of dissidents in Guatemala, or that the flowers in question are covering mass graves. I would never have known that this was the subject of the song if I hadn’t read quotes from Stipe and Peter Buck explaining its context.

Here’s an example from Marcus Gray’s It Crawled From The South:

“Forty people a week disappear in Guatemala,” said Peter, following the album’s release. “Why? Where do they go? Why do we support that?” Of the song itself, he said, “It doesn’t mention political oppression or the death squads, but I think it gets across.”

Hmm. I don’t know. I’m pretty sure that I read about this right around the time I bought Lifes Rich Pageant, so I have no way of knowing what I’d get out of it, though Michael sounds rather troubled when he sings “there’s something here I find hard to ignore.”

Musically, “The Flowers Of Guatemala” is a key song in the band’s catalog, at least in the sense that its combination of gentle, sentimental arpeggiation and ambient distortion make it an ancestor of “Everybody Hurts” and “Strange Currencies.” It’s a gorgeous, graceful tune full of little details that give it a strange, spectral glow — the feedback hum is understated and mournful, the metallic percussive accents add a certain sparkle to the piece, and Mike Mills’ backing vocals seem pass through the chords like a pained apparition.

(Originally posted on July 24, 2007)

I Believe

If R.E.M. has a credo, it is most certainly “I Believe.” Though the song has its share of self-deprecating jokes and baffling Michael Stipe-isms, it is essentially a litany of virtues and aphorisms that inform the band’s outlook on politics and life in general. It’s earnest, but it’s also rather playful. One of the best tricks in the song is the way Stipe strings together aphorisms until they collapse into nonsense, which has the curious effect of making the listener reflect on the actual meaning of cliches that normally go in one ear and out the other. Some may take Stipe’s humor and obscure language as a sign of immaturity and a need to cling to inscrutability like a security blanket, but it’s actually essential to the piece, not simply because it keeps the lyrics from getting too Pollyanna-ish and preachy, but in that Stipe values levity and mystery just as much as change, honor, and “time as an abstract.”

Stipe sings about his adult convictions in the context of his experiences as a little kid. He recalls childhood illnesses, outdoor adventures, and the moral codes encouraged by scouting, and rather obviously wishes to reconnect with his former innocence and curiosity about the world. At its core, “I Believe” is a song that expresses a desire to regain the idealism of childhood, and to cast off the ethical compromises that mark adulthood. The sentiment of “I Believe” is ultimately rather poignant because both the audience and the singer know the truth: Though you can draw on youthful idealism and do great things, you can’t turn back the clock and become naive again.

A baffling Michael Stipe-ism note: The line “example is the checker to the key” makes very little sense in or out of context, but according to Marcus Gray’s It Crawled From The South, it is a reference to Michael’s car at the time — a checkered cab.

(Originally posted on July 19, 2008)

What If We Give It Away?

“What If We Give It Away?” is a re-written version of a song called “Get On Their Way” that dates back to 1980. I know this only because I’ve read this several times in the past — I have never actually heard “Get On Their Way,” and so aside from obviously having very different lyrics, I don’t know how much the song changed between the time it was originally penned and when it was reworked for Lifes Rich Pageant. It’s a fine, catchy song with an airy, sunny arrangement, but as much as I enjoy it, it’s hard for me not to think of it as being a filler track. Perhaps that’s the wrong word to use — “filler” implies that it’s just taking up space and weighing the album down, but that’s not really the case. The song fits perfectly into the sequence of Lifes Rich Pageant: The music maintains the record’s breezy, early summer vibe and its words nod in the general direction of the set’s political themes. There’s very little to complain about in “What If We Give It Away?,” but it just can’t help but seem a bit minor in comparison to most of its neighboring tracks.

(Originally posted on June 3, 2007)

Just A Touch

Somewhere on this planet (most likely in Missouri), there is a video cassette titled It Takes a Nation of Midgets to Hold Us Back. I filmed the majority of its contents on a camcorder in 1996, and it was intended to be a gift for an acquaintance of my friend Todd, who filmed everything else, and appears in most of the scenes. The idea was to show her around the Hudson Valley and (hopefully) to make her laugh. It’s a weird tape, full of goofy tangents and jokes that were probably only really funny to the two of us at that moment in time. She never actually received the tape. I held on to it for the longest time, and now Todd has it. He and I are not currently in touch, and I’ll probably never watch it again.

I mention all of this because “Just A Touch” is very prominently featured at the beginning of the tape. We kick off the movie in the same way that we began all our little adventures — riding in Todd’s Suzuki Swift down Main Street in my home town. Normally, this part of Cold Spring is very quaint and bustling with tourists from the city shopping for antiques and whatnot, but on this particular winter day, the town looks miserable, grey, empty, and nearly inhabitable. “Just A Touch” plays over the car stereo — my selection, my tape — and the contrast between its wild, cheerful tone and the bleak imagery is (unintentionally) hilarious.

“Just A Touch” is one of the rowdiest, most joyful numbers in the entire R.E.M. discography, and though it appears on 1986’s Lifes Rich Pageant, it actually dates back to their pre-Chronic Town period as a party band in Athens, Georgia. If I recall correctly, it’s got something to do with Michael Stipe’s confused recollection of the day Elvis Presley died, but the lyrics are besides the point — it’s all about the spirit of the performance, and the reckless enthusiasm expressed in every moment of the recording. Stipe sounds especially unhinged, particularly toward the end when he’s totally flipping out before seeming to fall over with his final shout: “I’m so goddamn young!!!” Few songs sound as fully alive as “Just A Touch,” and if the Presley thing is true, the King couldn’t have asked for a more fitting tribute.

(Originally posted on April 2, 2007)

Swan Swan H

A large number of R.E.M. songs from the mid-80s play around with the iconography of the American south, but “Swan Swan H” is the one tune that shows up decked out in the full regalia of a Civil War reenactment. Whereas most other R.E.M. tracks from the era dropped lyrical hints and nudged the listener in the direction of obscure regional language and historical references, “Swan Swan H” is rather bold and literal. Essentially, it’s a self-conscious attempt to write an straight forward folk ballad. The lyrics stick to period references (ironically, the one song actually about life during the Reconstruction does not appear on the album Fables of the Reconstruction), but they are unmistakably Stipe-ish in the way the verses side-step a clear narrative in favor of snippets of evocative imagery and odd turns of phrase. “Swan Swan H” is a fine composition with a strong, memorable melody, but if it were not, its old-timey affectations would be almost unbearably annoying and pretentious. It’s very successful as an experiment in songwriting, but the band have been wise not to revisit this aesthetic territory in the time since.

That said, this one has got to be Colin Meloy‘s favorite R.E.M. song, right?

(Originally posted on April 17, 2007)

Superman

“Superman” doesn’t quite qualify as a bonus track, but it’s not exactly the proper conclusion of Lifes Rich Pageant. Coming on after a brief period of silence after the somber “Swan Swan H,” the cheery tune serves as an encore of sorts for the record. Though R.E.M. made a habit of significantly altering the tone of many of the songs they covered in the ’80s, “Superman” is rather faithful to the original studio recording by the Clique. This is most likely due to the incredible obscurity of the source material, but also probably because there’s really not a lot to fix. The song is perfectly formed, and any shift in tone would disrupt the irony of a perky song about a creepy guy who wishes that he had the powers of Superman so that he could more effectively stalk a girl. Though Michael Stipe appears on the track, Mike Mills’ voice dominates the recording, and he sells both the meekness and the sinister edge of the song’s character without tipping too far in either direction.

(Originally posted on October 31, 2007)