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

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.

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#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.

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#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

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#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" ...

I think "evocative" is the key to why this song is so loved by some and others don't get it (like me). "Evocative" is such an ineffable, personal feeling; if it hits you, it hits you hard, but the rest just don't feel it.

I'll put "Sweetness Follows," "World Leader Pretend" and most of Fables of the Reconstruction on my evocative list. "Country Feedback" is a lot of keening and whining to me (though it's not as bad in that regard as "The Wrong Child"--that one I actively dislike).

"Country Feedback" isn't so far from the songwriting of New Adventures In Hi-Fi, an album I don't really get (though my heart remains open). Yet I recognize that the latter album is super popular. So I wonder if love of this song is correlated with love of New Adventures.

I do love New Adventures, but I feel like "Country Feedback," for all its Evocativeness, is still way more directly zeroed-in on the heartstrings than most of the material on that record. Also, the sonic signatures (wailing steel guitar, sad strumming) are more familiar in terms of associations, like I hear those and I know I'm hearing a ballad, y'know?

But I will join Hideous Lump in detesting "The Wrong Child."

I think Stipe has often singled out "Country Feedback" as his favorite REM song and tbh I think that's one reason it gets lots of love. I think he sells "I need this." But yeah, it's no "Me In Honey."

Meanwhile though, I really never will get tired of this:

marathonpacks: I think it’s “Country Feedbag”

Matthew Perpetua: I am pretty sure that Michael Stipe wrote it about the closing of a beloved all-you-can-eat country buffet
“it’s crazy what you could’ve had — ribs, chicken, greens!”

you come to me with your fork in your hand

These clothes don't fit us right
the buffet's to blame

Euler, I fit your theory. "Country Feedback"is maybe my favourite R.E.M. song and NAIHF is my favourite R.E.M. album.

It would actually be kinda cool to hold the top 4 until each member of R.E.M. dies:

# 4 - Peter Buck RIP
# 3 - Michael Stipe RIP
# 2 - Mike Mills RIP
# 1 - Bill Berry RIP

Athens, GA finally finishes biodegrading in the year 13,200 AA (after apocalypse), cockroaches and single cell organisms rule the town - full lists/results are posted

It would be great to see the end of this!

Agreed, I am ready.

It might be quicker if we all just post our ballots here and work it ourselves.

no no, i will do it!!! Sorry guys! I am on extended archi-tourist vacay right now but i promise I will get these results out by the end of July. SUPER SUMMER 2010!!!

What, surely Buck outlives the rest. I see him starring in "It Might Get Loud 10" in 2045.

no no, i will do it!!! Sorry guys! I am on extended archi-tourist vacay right now but i promise I will get these results out by the end of July. SUPER SUMMER 2010!!!

― Doctor Casino, Tuesday, June 29, 2010 2:01 AM (2 weeks ago)

im holding YOU to this!

it's still the plan! i have been screaming around europe on a bus full of architecture students but the POLL OF POLLS has never left the corner of my mind!

yeah!, as nice a song as it is, please don't leave us with country feedback as the highest-ranked all-time rem song.

i'm so jealous. you should be having the time of your life!

in that case don't worry about it, have fun, it will be here when you come back from holiday.