by Tom Demi and Bryce Napier, first published December 11, 2015
Monster
released September 27, 1994
Warner Bros. Records
“Stipe took the concepts of jealousy and obsession to the nth degree, penning what for my money are his most visceral and confrontational lyrics ever.”
The "monster," according to the lyrics of "Circus Envy," was jealousy, as found in an obsessive relationship, but it was also certainly a cheeky allusion to the fame and influence R.E.M. had amassed. What do you do in 1994 when you've got the world's ear? Make Important Statements, like the U2 of the late '80s? Or maybe send up the concept of success itself in a loud, glitzy spectacle, like the U2 of 1993's Zooropa album and subsequent tour? With Monster, R.E.M. chose the latter course, which dovetailed conveniently with the buzzing guitars of the now all-encompassing grunge movement, not to mention their previously stated pledge that they would not tour again until they had "arena-ready" music. And here it was.
It may have struck some observers as bandwagon-jumping (akin to 1978–79, when everyone from Rod Stewart to Ethel Merman to the Muppets was "going disco"), while others may have been blindsided by the abrupt change in style ("We threw out the mandolins for this one," said Peter Buck), but it can't be denied that R.E.M. dove into this project with purpose and focus. Even nerdy Mike Mills reinvented himself, with a wild rock-star frizz of hair and spangly new threads. The result was a bold and brash album full of hooks but very little of the empathy and warmth of much of Automatic For The People. In their place, Michael Stipe took the concepts of jealousy and obsession (reportedly from his own romantic experience) to the nth degree, penning what for my money are his most visceral and confrontational lyrics ever.
Many of the songs are come-ons or brush-offs ("Call my name, / Here I come," "Don't fuck with me"), and high drama abounds ("These words, / They haunt me, hunt me down, / Catch in my throat, make me pray / To say this love's confined") with very little resolution. The album even ends with the suggestion that the singer has moved on to a dangerous new obsession and, listener, watch out: it may be "You." In between, thankfully, are moments of humor ("I've got my telescope hid in the haystack," "she's a sad tomato," not to mention the whole idea of devoting a song to the newsman Dan Rather's bizarre "What's the frequency?" encounter), and Stipe gets playful with the media's own obsession with his still-unconfirmed sexuality ("I'm straight, / I'm queer, / I'm bi").
The problem, though, is that this guitar barrage starts to become a tad relentless by the time you're in the second half of the album, and musical ideas begin to repeat themselves (Is this "I Took Your Name" or "Crush With Eyeliner"?). It's true, these songs played great onstage in arenas, but I wonder, Bryce, if you find the album experience a bit of a test of endurance.
I'd like to think that, if I'd been involved in the creation of Monster, I would've allowed Peter Buck one song—"Crush With Eyeliner," perhaps—to muck around with the delay pedal with impunity. Then I would have confiscated the damn thing. It is an endurance test for me. However, it strikes me more as glam than grunge. And glam would have been an intriguing new avenue for them to explore, if only the whole thing wasn't so inhospitable. Annie Lennox is the only artist I can think of who can pull off icy and passionate simultaneously. Well, maybe David Bowie. Not so much R.E.M., though.
I remember it as a pummeling record, but with the exceptions of "Star 69" and "Circus Envy," the tempos are shockingly sluggish. Yet it's also their longest album to date. If they'd kept it a blitzkrieg blast, or toned down the blown-speaker sonic assault, or permeated it with some warmth, or taken an incrementally different approach on any of those aspects on a track-by-track basis, it could have been incredible. Accelerate is the template for the album this should have been, in my opinion. Even "Tongue," the one departure from the barrage of guitar noise, distorts from my speakers like it was miked too close during recording. How do you crank this music up to rock out to it when it sounds like a buzzsaw even at low volume?
This leads me to my longstanding theory regarding Monster: R.E.M.'s fame and influence is the titular monster, as you suggest, and it's a beast that has gone out of control. I know that the party line was that they wanted a "rock" record to take on the road, but it feels to me like an exercise in dismantling their pedestal; unburdening some of the pressures of fame by shedding a large percentage of their fanbase. It was an uneasy accord they had reached with stardom that remained just this side of acceptable as long as the people seemed to be enjoying it for what it was. When the first real signs of audience fatigue and backlash reared up in the long-term response to Automatic, the band's response was to record a loud, long, cold, fuzzy, abrasive, sleazy, sneering, disaffected album, so that you'd hate it, and then you'd fuck off, and then they could finally get back to making music that didn't have to be beloved by everyone in possession of a radio. That's my theory, anyway.
Whether or not my theory holds water, it's more or less what happened. Monster moved units comparable to their previous two records (over four million in the US), making it the number three bestseller of their career, but not so many of those discs sold remained in their buyers' collections. Used record stores could have re-wallpapered their interiors in out-of-focus-bear-head motif with all the copies of Monster that got returned. And their next record would sell but a quarter of those figures, officially ending their heyday in the American market.
Fair enough about the record being more glam than grunge, but the grunge movement did give them carte blanche (carte blange?) to explore the loud guitars, or so they assumed anyway. Whether or not they were actually trying to piss off the general public is a trickier question, but it did have that effect on their singles sales in the U.S., as only "Bang And Blame" even reached the Top 20, ending up as their last-ever U.S. Top 40 hit. So, yeah, so much for radio songs, and I noticed those used CD racks bursting with orange, too. Elsewhere, though, it did much better, giving them two Top 10s from an album in the U.K. for the only time ever ("Kenneth" and "Currencies"), while "Bang And Blame" hit #1(!) in Canada. In any event, they were still big enough to warrant a hugely profitable contract when they re-signed with Warner in 1996.
The tour in 1995 was a smashing success, partly due to the fact that it had been six years since their last one, but it was not without its setbacks: Berry, Mills, and Stipe each had medical issues overseas that caused many reshufflings of tour dates. But the tour rolled along, and I saw them in October at the CoreStates Spectrum (as it was then known) in Philadelphia. As I suggested in an earlier post, the audience here seemed like they could have been watching any number of big-name musical acts; they were enthusiastic, but it just didn't have the same feeling of connection as before. To maintain the energy level, the band's setlist focused on the most recent material, completely ignoring the first three albums and barely brushing even the late '80s. For me, the most exciting aspect of the show was hearing them debut a handful of brash, brand-new compositions, including "Revolution," which I was sure was destined for future success (oh, well, it only came out on a soundtrack album, with minimal impact).
Meanwhile, my personal life was tracking with Stipe's, insofar as experiencing romantic drama—after years out of the swim of things, I suddenly found my gay self in a relationship with a woman. There were high highs and low lows, and it had the ultimate effect of focusing my attention on the gender I was born to be attracted to (i.e., not hers). This may be the reason I find the lyrics on this album particularly resonant, although I still defend them to this day as some of Stipe's most astute and inspired.
In spite of the snark I've laid down up to this point, I was not one of the people who turned in his copy of Monster. As a work of art it is fascinating, if not a lot of fun to listen to. Counterintuitively, the one song from the album that I bought into completely was the most amorphous blob of the bunch, "Let Me In." It's a cathedral of guitar noise that never lets up, and stays with just guitar and voice until the second run through the chorus, when a tambourine played halfway down the block from the recording studio enters to whisper a hint of a beat. The guitar is later reinforced by some plaintive organ, but it never switches gears. It's like Stipe's voice is caged within this wall of noise while he paradoxically begs for someone else to open up to him. I find it touching. (And, in a longer aside, my approach to this project has been to fact check the things I think I know, to ensure that I actually do know them. Beyond that, I let my conjecture and opinions roam free, because the whole point of this endeavor, for me, is to see how my memories and impressions of the music have evolved over this particular band's long career, not write a term paper about them. So I don't want to pretend that I know more than I actually do, because I'm no authority on R.E.M. Anyway, I always knew about Stipe and Cobain's mutual admiration, and I always liked "Let Me In." What I didn't know until a couple of days ago, while fact-checking Stipe and Cobain's relationship, is that Michael had seen his friend Kurt shutting down, and tried pitching a collaboration project to get him out of the house and thinking about something other than his own misery. He failed. "Let Me In" was written by Stipe in response to Cobain's suicide, which gives new depth to a song I already liked.)
Listening now, I can hear the album ends strong. After "Let Me In" comes "Circus Envy" and the sinister stalk of "You." I believe I'd enjoy both songs a lot under a less My Bloody Valentine production method. The Monster-ization of them tempers the enthusiasm, but I do think there's interesting music under all that feedback. And there's interesting experiments that also get lost beneath the noise, like Stipe's falsetto on "Tongue." Taken one at a time, two-thirds of the album is actually quite listenable. As a beginning-to-end experience, though, it's arduous. Very arduous.
Lastly, a fun fact (for the general populace, if not for Tom, who surely already knows this): The East Coast leg of tours almost always sees consecutive stops in Washington, DC, and Philadelphia, or vice versa. I was living in northern Virginia by this time, and I saw them on this tour—the only time I've ever caught them live—at USAir Arena (as it was then known), erstwhile home of the Washington Bullets (as they were then known). It was because, as Tom mentioned above, opportunities to see them live had run thin, not because I was anxious to hear the new material live, and so it was a late decision for my wife and me to go. Unfortunately, that meant we got seats in the stands behind the stage. But not even directly behind the stage. On a clock dial, if they were performing toward 12 o'clock, we were in crummy seats with a crummy view at about 7:30. And holy crap, it was loud. All the songs sounded like "Let Me In" to my fragile ears. It was only the second big arena show I'd ever been to (the first being a Peter Gabriel show while we were still in Michigan); tellingly, I've never been to another indoor concert of that scale since. In any case, even though Tom and I wouldn't cross paths for the better part of another decade, I now know we were both at R.E.M. shows within a couple of days of each other in 1995, which is kind of cool.