by Bryce Napier and Tom Demi, first published November 10th, 2015.
R.E.M. was an institution for nearly 30 years, through a career that ran the classic arc of underground adulation to commercial mega-success to audience ambivalence to being re-embraced as elder statesmen. They announced their retirement as a recording band following the release of their 15th studio album, 2011's Collapse Into Now. As a collector, I bought all of the albums. As a listener, however, I was a laissez-faire sort of R.E.M. fan: I liked them, but they were never my favorite band. They did their thing, and either it appealed to me or it didn't. My own reasons and circumstances dictated whether I made time for newly-acquired material (and I did not follow them from the outset, so that acquisition process was not strictly chronological). If I'm honest, my initial impressions of the albums have gone mostly unchallenged, and the ones that didn't resonate with me right away have never been afforded the opportunity for re-assessment. Until now, anyway.
We fired up the Sirius satellite radio in the Mazda a few months ago. As a child of the '80s, the First Wave station (featuring the alternative music of that decade) became a staple. For whatever reason, they seemed to have a proclivity for the lesser tracks in the R.E.M. catalog (defining "lesser," for my purposes, as "not appearing on the Eponymous collection," which is what stood in for their earliest works in my collection until the early 1990s). Out driving one afternoon, one of these songs caught my attention in a pleasant way. The car's radio display informed me it was "7 Chinese Bros," from 1984's Reckoning. I began to mull over, in equal parts wonder and dismay, how this was a song I'd had immediate access to for more than two decades, yet it was almost completely unfamiliar to me. I was already aware how I'd purchased-then-ignored their latter-day records. Now that their body of work has reached its presumptive conclusion, I thought it might be interesting to re-evaluate the output of R.E.M. with fresh ears. To that end, I have invited Tom to travel through their discography with me. He is also an avid music fan, but, unlike me, has been following the band from the beginning. I thought that the differing perspectives of an early and a late adopter—and the manner in which our ages and circumstances have informed our individual experiences of the music of R.E.M.—would make for an entertaining dialogue. This is not an attempt to definitively rank their albums, though comparisons are likely inevitable. Nor is it an attempt to define their legacy, nor to argue whose opinion is "correct." Each album will get its own post to be the primary object of discussion.
It seems to me that, as the one who was there from the get-go, Tom should introduce their debut, so I'll turn it over to him. (And we'll right-align his text to help keep the authors clear.) Are we ready? Okay, let’s do this thing.
Murmur
released April 12, 1983 I.R.S. records
“...the album quickly cast a spell: the ringing guitars, the brief snatches of meaning discernible in Michael Stipe’s vocals, the hints of dark humor...”
I'm sure the first time I ever heard of R.E.M. must have been during my freshman year at college ('82-'83). Having been born in 1964, I was at just the right age to be bombarded with the rush of punk and new wave in the late '70s and early '80s. I had close friends who got deeper into the aggressive stuff (Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks, Stiff Little Fingers, Ramones) than I did. As a Beatles freak, I leaned toward the more melodic and experimental end of the spectrum: Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, XTC, and the Clash, when they started to branch out stylistically.
The only magazine I subscribed to at the time was Rolling Stone, and I devoured their record reviews with every issue, also keeping up with whatever hip new music they saw fit to mention. Certainly by early 1983, R.E.M. had to have been mentioned, but it's also quite likely that my first exposure to them was via the video for "Radio Free Europe" on MTV. I was intrigued by the song and the video, and by the fall of 1983, they dominated discussion in music circles. They even came to play at our student center at Rutgers, and a friend in my dorm asked me to go, but I just wasn't ready.
Then for Christmas, a friend of mine back home gave me the Murmur LP, completely unsolicited. He said he was torn between that album and Aztec Camera's current one, and kind of chose at random. The first time I listened to it, I thought it was cool but thought that nothing really stood out. So I listened again, and the album quickly cast a spell: the ringing guitars, the brief snatches of meaning discernible in Michael Stipe's vocals, the hints of dark humor, and the layers of instrumentation that revealed themselves further with each listen.
My favorite track early on was "Shaking Through," with Stipe's slow, keening vocals stretching over that jaunty country-ish rhythm, reaching a fever pitch in the nearly wordless bridge underscored by bright piano chords (an R.E.M. trademark they would return to many times). I was captivated by the way the vocals built up in layers only to suddenly disintegrate and drop you perfectly back into the verse structure again. It's hard to pick out other standouts, because I came to love every song unconditionally except perhaps "9-9" and "West Of The Fields," but I think only because they featured an aggressiveness that seemed out of character at the time (though that would certainly change!).
So in early '84, I was listening to this album nearly every day, only vaguely aware that they had released an EP in 1982, not to mention the original "Radio Free Europe" single from 1981. Full immersion lay ahead in the very near future for me, but it wouldn’t happen until their next new album came out and sealed the deal.
Rolling Stone named it their album of the year in '83, I believe. I was in elementary school (not to mention living in England) when the record came out, so it flew nowhere near my cultural radar. By the time I got around to listening to Murmur, it was already considered a sacred text, the jumping-off point for the alternative radio of the 1980s. As such, it didn't occur to me to approach it as simply an album's worth of music. The baggage brought by "importance"—which operates on a different plane than a straightforward assessment of whether or not a piece of music is an enjoyable listen—usually weakens my experience of a recording. I feel primed to be blown away; to learn a whole new language; to have my life course-corrected by wisdom and insight I'd never be capable of on my own. When it inevitably fails to clear that ridiculously high bar, there's a letdown that is incommensurate with the quality of the music, and I seldom return to it. I suppose it's easy to forget that if there was a new language being invented, being introduced to that album after that language had been learned and incorporated by subsequent bands dilutes the impact.
Maybe the most surprising thing, listening to it now, is that it's pop music. Pop music with a heavy blanket thrown over it, perhaps, but pop music nonetheless. I found that the simple act of turning it up brightens it considerably. In my reductive memory, it was a downbeat record, but that's not really the case at all. It's downcast, certainly—it's insular, as it appears to pay no attention to the trends of the era (which is probably why it’s so easy to describe as "timeless"); musically, however, it's quite sprightly. Rootsy. "Shaking Through" has emerged as a gem for me as well, 32 years later. The sore thumb for me, stylistically, is "We Walk," which sounds like a cover of a Lesley Gore song. Not that it's a bad thing for a song to conjure mental images of a teenage girl in a poodle skirt and saddle shoes clasping her wrist behind her back as she wistfully remembers that unrequited summer love; it just doesn't seem to fit in with the other songs to my ear.
You've already alluded to the most notorious thing about this record: Michael Stipe's murky, enigmatic vocals. There are dual layers of opacity there. First comes the struggle to discern the actual words he's singing, followed by the struggle to interpret what those words are about. Even when his voice is relatively clear in the mix, what it sounds like to me makes me doubt I'm hearing it right. "Eleven gallows on your sleeve" (from "Perfect Circle")—is that right, Michael? For how many years did I say "Call me in to talk" while singing along with "Talk About The Passion" before I found out it was "Combien de temps"? And those were the easy ones. I have my doubts he's singing about a "…sieve we could gather throw-up in" (early on in "Sitting Still"), yet I could explicate that into something (a sieve would be an inadequate container for vomit, as some of it would leak through; just as we can't completely contain unpleasantness in our lives, because it will always seep into our worldview, or something like that) that I can't with the gallows line. I'm pretty sure he's not singing love songs, not visualizing dystopian robot futures, not exhorting us to dance. There's a sense that he is singing about profound concepts that can only be presented in puzzle form, because one has to piece these great truths together for himself to fully appreciate their depths. Which is probably nonsense, but another aspect of my expectations while taking on a work where "masterpiece" is the consensus.
What's your take on the difficult nature of the lyrics?
I certainly put myself through some mental gymnastics trying to figure out those lyrics. I did find out about that French phrase in "Talk About The Passion" while I was still a college student, because I remember writing an English class paper about rock lyrics and using that as an example. As for "Sitting Still," I always imagined those two lines as something like, "We could find a nemesis / We could gather, throw a fit." In the end, it doesn't really matter, I think, partially because Stipe has admitted that some of those early lyrics weren't necessarily real words anyway, but also because the mystery and the varying interpretations are what give the songs deeper resonance, every listener bringing a unique perspective that can't fully be put into words.
That’s funny what you say about "We Walk." I suspect that your impression of that song's atmosphere may have its roots in those woozy Julee Cruise retro-'50s tunes from Twin Peaks (maybe?). From that perspective, I can see that, but for me, hearing it in 1983, I just found it playful and joyous and childlike in the best possible way (and it's also cool that those thunderclap-like noises were actually the sounds of colliding billiard balls being recorded from another room in the building).
And yes, Rolling Stone and many other magazines picked Murmur as their top album of the year. Interesting that the U.K. had such little exposure to them at the time, and that didn't really change until the Warner Brothers record deal and Green in 1988, but that's another story! Meanwhile, Murmur remains my favorite album of theirs… except for one that was released many, many years later.
John Mellencamp (as John Cougar) had a chart hit in the UK with "Jack And Diane" in 1982, but it was almost viewed as a novelty record by British audiences. The UK was waist-deep in the New Romantics at the time, and not remotely interested in Americana. And there's something deeply American about Murmur. Not flag-waving American, or self-conscious pastiche of American musical styles, but it sounds like the Georgia swamp from which it hails (aided, no doubt, by that cover art). Going back to it for this project has raised my estimation of it considerably. Instead of feeling like a dose of medicine that needs swallowing to bolster my understanding of music history (which is where I started, and where I've been for 20 years), I can appreciate it for itself. Ironic that it takes unburdening the album of its towering stature to allow me to enjoy it as a great record, but there you have it. It probably won't break into the ranks of my established R.E.M. favorites, but it has asserted itself as something I might choose to put on, not as homework, but as music. That's something.
It looks like we're all wrapped up here, so let's move on to Reckoning.