R.E.M.'s Automatic for the People
(July 16, 2020)
(July 16, 2020)
So I happen to have a lot of CDs in my collection I've yet to listen to. A good stack of 25, to be precise. (2023 note: I found five more in my room after the series had started. These were marked as "extra" on the original Scratchpad entries. That's why the stack grew a bit bigger with time.)
I bet you weren't expecting some of those, yeah?
So, because I still enjoy rambling about music (not like one of the first things I did under the mariteaux name was review albums), I've resolved to do the following:
At the top of the stack is R.E.M.'s 1992 masterwork Automatic for the People.
Given how much I enjoy R.E.M.'s earlier stuff, this was one I was keen to revisit. I remember listening to this one a couple years back driving through Gettysburg (you know, the biggest battle of the Civil War?). It definitely fit the mood; death and sounding like death tend to go hand in hand. Problem is, I barely remember the sound of it. That bodes well, but hey, I didn't like Magnified at first either.
Story goes, on an upward trajectory as the dorky mandolin guys with a string of gradually more successful hits ("The One I Love"? No? Maybe "It's the End of the World as We Know It"? "Losing My Religion", heard that one?), R.E.M. intended to record an album of real hard rockers (as hard as R.E.M. can rock, anyway). Naturally, they then recorded the soppiest wet noodle of their entire catalog, full of these heavy, mature themes of death and the passage of time. People fucking love this album, the band fucking loves this album, and it too spawned some of R.E.M.'s biggest hits, namely "Everybody Hurts" and "Man on the Moon".
I'm not one of them. This album is fucking boring.
Right out of the gate, a clear problem of this album becomes apparent. The songs go nowhere. "Drive" has a neat sound to it, but it goes absolutely nowhere. "Monty Got a Raw Deal" goes nowhere, despite there being a little twinkle of a good song in there. I couldn't tell you what "Star Me Kitten" sounds like, despite listening to it twice now. to speak of. Songs begin and end on the exact same note.
Even R.E.M.'s earliest songs understood the concept of a bridge. "West of the Fields" is a monolith of a closer for sure, but at least it goes on a slight detour and Michael Stipe's vocal climbs the sky the tiniest bit before going back to the dark grey clouds on the verse. Even when they write something catchy, like on "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite" (which naturally the band doesn't care for), it doesn't really warrant coming back to because they have far better formed songs across all the albums that came before this one.
"Everybody Hurts" is salt in the wound. How Michael Stipe can shittalk "Shiny Happy People" and be perfectly okay with this one, despite "Everybody Hurts" being even fruitier arguably, I don't know. Four songs in and R.E.M. have given the world's well-meaning but ineffective crisis helpline ads their soundtrack. The moment this thing was used in Zootopia was the moment I realized just how ridiculous it actually is to listen to. All together now: "EEVVRYYYYBODY HURTTSSSSSSSSSSS."
I would love to know just how many people have had their view of R.E.M. colored in the negative over "Shiny Happy People" and "Everybody Hurts" especially. R.E.M., with Murmur up through Fables, were writing songs that just felt like they always existed. Utterly timeless. Every aspect of their sound was unique and effortless. They'd take a concept like background vocals and go totally back-to-basics with it, coming up with something that makes you go "shit, that hasn't been done before?" every time. Yet, thanks to the magic of hit singles, the R.E.M. that we remember is this one.
"Fall on Me" is a perfect example of the R.E.M. I love. Any other band would be keen on having a single vocal line in the chorus, probably just that "fall on me, don't" refrain, yet R.E.M. stacks not two, but three on top of one another. (Listen close in the last chorus–Bill Berry gets a "it's gonna fall" refrain in there too.) Everything has this distant, ominous boom to it that's excellent, the atmosphere is perfectly orchestrated. Peter Buck's guitar isn't just chugging along, it's chiming and melodic. While it's definitely got a less oblique meaning than, say, "Laughing", it keeps the politics relatively off the music, and even if not, it's so buoyant and catchy that it doesn't much matter. Where was this R.E.M. when Automatic was being recorded?
It's not that Automatic has a different sound, it's that it's a sound that doesn't sound anything like R.E.M. Even "Losing My Religion" is pretty clearly an R.E.M. song, quacking like one, walking like one, wordy like one. It's just a higher-budget version of the same band that wrote Lifes Rich Pageant. By the time you get to "Nightswimming", you start to wonder if the R.E.M. you knew even existed, if they just managed to put out seven fluke records in a row. But no, Monster came after this and kicks ass, so what the fuck happened?
I think it says something when I can pull any random "professional" retrospective of Automatic off the shelf and be unsure if it's a positive or negative one.
"Find the River" [...] is so lump-in-the-throat hypnotic that the tragically lame poetry achieves a certain inspiring grandeur of lameness.
Can't say I see the appeal.
No.
Yeah, I still think this one is boring. I can hear better what people like in it now, but it comes at the expense of everything I found interesting about R.E.M. in their first decade of existence, and I just have no need for it. A lot of the songs have really flat verses and then approach a cool refrain for the chorus ("Sweetness Follows", great example), and by sheer competency, they manage to make that work, but I don't listen to music for competency. There's also the tone-deaf overtones of a bunch of white liberals making capital-I Important music using African music as its base--as "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite" very much does. I skipped "Everybody Hurts" this time around. God, that song sucks.