\\\///\\\/// It's the ILX SUPER SUMMER R.E.M. POLL OF POLLS RESULTS THREAD \\\///\\\///

When I was 14 I had a Life's Rich Pageant-era poster of REM with the phrases Walked Swam Hunted Danced Sang. I'm not sure how this is relevant to any discussion going on, but I gotta be me.

yeah I'm not sure if the natives are Native Americans anymore, but just those who are the ones who are part of the status quo, the "baggage" as you put it. As I'm reading the "we are not your allies" part, Stipe is expressing sympathy for them, as they're the ones who stand to lose through reformation. This also takes a pivot of narrative perspective, because the "we" in that line isn't the same as the "we" who are going to start a new country up.

also I want to make it clear that I have no idea what I'm talking about

I've always thought it was about Native Americans.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51Bi5DKjtXL._SL500_AA240_.jpg

#15: Gardening At Night
9 votes, 78 points
Highest position: #1 (Z S)
Position in Chronic Town poll: #2 (12 points)

i used to debate the merits of gardening at night with my trig teacher.
― blackmail.is.my.life (blackmail.is.my.life), Saturday, April 30, 2005 11:53 AM Bookmark

...I was a freshman at UGA when it came out, and I can still remember buying it, taking it back to my dorm room, and listening to it over and over, just boggled that someone from Athens did something that good. And then the person who reviewed it in the Red and Black (college daily) actually made a comparison (in re "Gardening at Night") that it was as good as something the Beatles could have done, which both shocked me and struck me as totally true. ...
― Lee G (Lee G), Friday, November 7, 2003 10:15 AM Bookmark

Damn, how did I miss this? From the noms my top 5 would be Fall on Me, Electrolite, Find the River, Country Feedback and The Lifting.

"Gardening at Night" (and the rest of Chronic Town) was the track that really made me a R.E.M. fan, and the way I came upon it was sorta strange. I hadn't heard any earlier R.E.M. (pre-Green) at all when I bought Dead Letter Office on a whim one day. That one didn't really sell me on the band either, being a collection of oddities/covers. And in fact, I didn't even make it all the way through the CD for a few years. However, I was lucky enough to buy the version of DLO that had Chronic Town appended to the end. I didn't realize those tracks were even on there, and I was boggled that all of a sudden this CD gets INCREDIBLE during the last few tracks! Eventually I figured out what was going on and was steered toward Murmur, Fables and Reckoning. To this day I still find mid-period R.E.M. a little boring (not a popular opinion on this thread, I'm sure!), but I love love LOVE those first few.

depends what you consider mid-period, Z S, I certainly think Chronic Town - Green is a way better run than Out of Time - New Adventures, for instance, and I'd guess most on the thread would agree? Well, let's see how the top 14 plays out.

In voting in this poll I found myself favoring the early records in ways that disappointed me, since I don't want to be "that" kind of REM fan. But I love lots of midperiod REM, just not as much as Reckoning in particular.

Re. "Gardening At Night": I got into REM with Document and then Eponymous on a cassette borrowed from a mysterious classmate in 9th grade. So I knew "Gardening At Night" from Eponymous before I knew the Chronic Town version. I like that "alt. vocal mix": Stipe sounds more brittle, less gentle, though the gentleness is still there on the "been there twice" part. (Is that a chorus? A bridge?). "Fun" fact: I quoted this song (along with many other REM songs) in my HS valedictory address. Since this was in suburban ATL I'd like to think the references weren't entirely lost on the audience.

Yeah, I also got to this via Eponymous - where honestly I think it works a lot better, part of the general "file under grain" ambience. Sorta slows down "Chronic Town" too much, but I guess a debut EP needs to show everything the band can do.. woulda been better shelved til Murmur IMO.

I'm rewatching the excellent doc Athens, GA - Inside/Out, and I just realized that Swan Swan H wasn't even nominated! It definitely would have made my top 5.

Crappy VCR transfer that cuts off the first part of the song, but

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3CtOivDSTE

That doc also reveals that Athens band Time Toy invented the Spin Doctors.

That's a great clip, with Stipe playing the drunken hobo in his mannerisms. I love the fashion too. Full version here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_QG6tr9mjo

I wouldn't have voted for "Swan Swan H" but I dig it: great accordion, an invocation of the name of Satan that catches your ear, esp. since the content of the song is hard to suss out (as usual), and it ends fantastically...leading right into the party smash.

There we go, much better clip, thanks

One of the very best r.e.m. bridges imo

http://justhonorgod.com/Portals/8/kiosk%20bridge%20day%201.jpg

#14 (tie): Moral Kiosk
10 votes, 92 points
Highest position: #1 (Charlie Howard, rat bat bruce)
Position in Murmur poll: tie for #3 (7 votes)

<3 moral kiosk

― Matt P, Thursday, December 11, 2008 1:47 PM Bookmark

http://991.com/newgallery/REM-Drive-10321.jpg

#14 (tie): Drive
10 votes, 92 points
Highest position: #1 (kornrulez)
Position in Automatic For The People poll: #1 (16 votes)

This album is too personal for me to say much about on here. It came out at one of my most emo times of life, just off to college thousands of miles from home, like a complete unknown. I'd gone so far because nobody tells me where to go, baby. REM had been my favorite band for years, and growing up in Georgia their work spoke to me physically: I knew those places they sung about. My mother sent me Automatic in a care package (I hadn't asked) and it ripped me apart. I spent a dark-ish night of the soul about a month ago with it and it still hits home. I voted for "Drive" Doing my best to articulate why in public language: because nobody tells me what to do, baby. But freedom has costs, not just for those left behind, but for the one leaving. "Drive" pairs what reads on paper as a celebration of freedom with a serious lament of a tune, funeral organ standing out. It continues to remind me that I buy my rootlessness at the expense of important goods, and as I drive away again wondering why I can't help but leave but why I feel so sad, "Drive" comforts me. And so does the album.

― Euler, Tuesday, January 13, 2009 9:48 AM Bookmark

^^^ one of my all-time fave ILM posts, really the kind of thing I log on here for.

yeah, booming post.

I just wrote something about "Moral Kiosk" the other day:

http://thisiheard.blogspot.com

also drive offers Peter Buck playing an platoon of honest to god Les Pauls through an honest to god Marshall, as a love letter to Brian May (who of course plays single coils through an AC30 but that's not important right now because no Buck lead had ever sounded fatter or meaner...)

"Moral Kiosk" is great. Everyone brings their A game to the performance: Buck's riff and the bends punctuating each line of the verse; Berry changes up his playing repeatedly, so much to listen for, so many little details; and in tandem with Mills' prominent groove it's a song that's great for cutting some rug (maybe a side of the band we don't talk about enough? at least the early band); and Stipe's hoots and hollers on the chorus, and the various grunts that punctuate other parts of the song: maybe he's bringing memories of military events to the surface? I have no idea what the song's "about" but as with the rest of early REM "aboutness" wasn't the idea: just dance, gonna be ok.

Agreed, one of the best things on Murmur, and along with "9-9," feels the closest to the almost-terrifying post-punk sock-hop of Chronic Town. I like how it feels like the various parts of the song have almost just been pasted together, but sheer momentum gets you from one to the next. Great rollicking listen.

http://elnirvana.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/losing-my-religion-rem.jpg

#13: Losing My Religion
12 votes, 93 points
Highest position: #2 (Charlie Howard)
Position in Out of Time poll: #2 (6 points)

I actually got clotheslined by some Another Bad Creation fans in elementary school for having the R.E.M. "Losing My Religion" cassingle as they chanted "R.E.M. Sux!" I'd hate to think what would have happened if I sang the song.

― Anthony Miccio (Anthony Miccio), Thursday, December 12, 2002 10:27 PM Bookmark

man... every now and then this song catches you when you're not expecting it, and you forget that you've heard it a million times and you forget that the video was pretentious as fuck and completely inescapable and you remember that it's absolutely stunning.

It's hard to hear this song with open ears anymore and it still strikes me as a weird single...but on the other hand, you can dance to it: at a goth kicker dance party, maybe. Actually that sounds really fun.

I like this OK but it's below the median of "Out of Time" for me (but then again I am the weirdo who stalwartly backs "Radio Song" and "Shiny Happy People" which I think is a nonstandard view of this record.) I think the best material on this record is the weird, sparse stuff like "Low," "Belong," and "Me In Honey," a sound that's new to this album and to which I don't think they really returned. While "Losing my Religion" and "Near Wild Honey" represent for me the band recognizing that they've sort of hit the point of exhaustion when it comes to writing a certain kind of strummy, slightly abstract pop song.

I'm mostly with you up to your last sentence, and then I'm not. I take it you're thinking of e.g. "Driver 8", "Fall On Me", and maybe "You Are The Everything" as among this "certain kind of strummy, slightly abstract pop song"? If that's right (and it's not easy to think of other examples, at least if you mean "pop song" as "potential hit" as I do), then I think it's better to see "Losing My Religion" as a realization of that ideal, rather than some recognition of exhaustion (I take it from having mined that vein as far as it will go).

I'll go out on a limb a bit and say that the cultural hugeness of "Losing My Religion" in 1991/2 worked like this: good catchy pop song, a bit dark, but oh! that video, let me pay more attention to the song, oh, it's "about itself", about the band in the spotlight (and now they're huge so they really are in the spotlight) and Stipey is an icon...which is my sorta-incoherent way of narrating the feedback loop by which I think the song took on its hugeness: its sound and soundness of pop structure as a song but also as having a great video and then turning in on itself, containing a commentary on itself and their new fame.

Also didn't hurt that the title was suggestive of some sort of Deep and Profound personal crisis, even though the actual connotations of the phrase are a bit more pedestrian. Never been sure which way Stipe was really going with it. I guess it's officially a song about opening up to a crush and trying to interpret the few available signals, etc., but it would also work extremely well as a coming-out narrative, with "corner" as "closet."

I wasn't really paying attention when this was a hit, but I was exposed to it through Weird Al's use of it in a polka medley (yup) so it still felt well-worn by the time I got around to the actual song. But I do like it - - agreed with rogermexico that it sort of surprises me each time. The "that was just a dream!" section is dazzling.

http://cnx.org/content/m11636/latest/BluesScale.png

#12: These Days
11 votes, 94 points
Highest position: #2 (rogermexico, rat bat bruce)
Position in Lifes Rich Pageant poll: #3 (6 points)

huh, not one I'd have voted for, but I like it; it keeps the momentum going in its slot on the album, and it ends really well.

This has at times been my very favorite of their songs. Never before and never again did they rev up the tone enough to sell a line like "We are hope, despite the times." Maybe the "Enemy sighted, enemy met" part of "Exhuming McCarthy" comes close, or -- as familiar as it's become "Time I had some time alone." But those are moments, while "These Days" keeps it up start to finish.

Oh, that's nice. I've fixed on the snarl and menace of the song over the years, but as you're putting it, the snarl is meant to bring us to awareness, all of a sudden, that there is hope (and maybe that they're the hope, not you, at this time, so get your act together). Is this the first of the REM motivational anthems, then?

This song reminds me of the shows I saw in the mid-'80s. Whatever the thoughts might have been about the records (with the changes in producers), I definitely thought that, just as a band, they were getting better and better. Their presence onstage in '85 was very different than it had been the year before and by '86 they had taken it up another notch.

Is this the first of the REM motivational anthems, then?

Think so. When I think about where on their earlier record they approach the SOUND, I can think of maybe "Little America" and "Life and How to Live It" and parts of "Can't Get There From Here." I think when they shout on these songs they're shouting "Help I'm lost" (explicitly in Little America obv.) and in particular I take the title of "Life and How to Live It" to be meant sarcastically, i.e. the song pretends to no such knowledge. Whereas "These Days" and "I Believe" I take to be completely in earnest. (I like "These Days" better, though.)

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_tRg73iZIquM/SZATPiilk6I/AAAAAAAAa-A/JWl-U323qcA/s320/rem+night.jpg

#11: Nightswimming
11 votes, 95 points
Highest position: #1 (brontosaur)
Position in Automatic For The People poll: #3 (14 votes)

unless i am very much mistaken (more than likely). there is a prominent oboe in the last half of Nightswimming by REM.

and irrespective of it being an oboe or not, it sounds brilliant!

― Richard H., Sunday, September 2, 2001 8:00 PM Bookmark

Some interesting discussion here: Does Michael Stipe write good lyrics? . I love this song for the same reasons as I think anyone else would, so it's interesting to see it tackled more from a craft angle than from a personal/emotional one.

girl i fancied as a freshman was an oboe player, and Nightswimming was her favourite song because of that.

"I'm not sure all these people understand."

I'll skip the personal/emotional angle (suffice it to say that there's a lot of that for me with this song, so much so that it's almost suffocating to talk about). Such a late summer record: hard to listen to in April! These things, they go away. John Paul Jones' arrangement: a hammer of the quiet gods? Friends of friends played on this song. My wife just listened to it with me, her first time: we've not been nightswimming. She's not sure if it's melancholy or sad: I don't get the difference, but we are side by side in orbit now.

Anybody who doesn't like the sound of an oboe is dead inside imo

I like the sound of an oboe but not "Nightswimming," which arrived too late in my life to resonate with the already-ebbing chord in me of the feeling it's meant to evoke. Encountered for the first time as an adult it reads as maudlin. Or maybe what I'm trying to do is contrast with "These Days" above -- I think some of the lines require selling and the song doesn't sell them, to me.

i hope i never feel that old

You hope you never feel 21?

would say closer to 18 tbh

http://permastallplus.com/layouts/images/higbys.jpg

#10: Country Feedback
11 votes, 96 points
Highest position: #1 (Lostandfound, Ari (whenuweremine), cwkiii)
Position in Out of Time poll: tie for #1 (10 votes)

i've always thought R.E.M.'s "Country Feedback" was an awesome song title and kinda wished the song sounded more like something that the title (or this thread) describes

― some dude, Thursday, February 25, 2010 8:51 PM Bookmark

(that's on Has any band dared to mix country and noise-rock? )

"Country Feedback" for how evocative the line "these clothes don't fit us right" is...

― Mozarella sticks. Think about it. (kenan), Monday, October 27, 2008 2:41 AM Bookmark

shuffling through my ipod a few days back and this came on. still amazing.

I'd like to hear more about why this song is rated so highly. I like it a lot, and love the album it's from, but it's never struck me as a highlight of the album. I like it if I think of it as parody: "here's this kinda dirgy tune, we're gonna sing some vaguely mopey lyrics just to be in character". I guess it's a grungy moment in the year that punk broke?

Listening to it now and it's hard to articulate - just a really evocative song, very old-school Stipe in terms of the indirectness of the lyric but relatively new-school in that it's at least clear that it's a love song (well, relationship/breakup song). All kinds of stuff going on in here - the dregs of sex ("you come to me with a bone in your hand") the general sense of a relationship performing what its participants think it's supposed to be ("these clothes don't fit us right"), and the great repeated finale:

It's crazy what you could have had
I need this

...in which the protag oscillates between trying to throw the breakup in the other's face (you're giving up THIS??? what a fool!) and revealing his own vulnerability. I dunno. I don't have a singular tight reading of this song and it's not my favorite on the record ("Me In Honey" is just unstoppable) but it's a very nice song. Would make a nice comparison with "Tongue" I think.

Country Feedback was my favourite REM song when I was a teenager. Incredibly evocative - something about the interplay between the roar of the pulled lower E and the over distorted whine of the higher strings while Michael fills in the middle with "I need this", a highly effective yet simple lyrical trope.

It does seem to pre-empt Monster somehow.

I always thought it was "You come to me with the phone in your hand" ...