REM: Classic or dud?

i almost wish the singles had been leave" then "departure" then "electrolite" for a farewell trilogy

i almost wish the singles had been leave" then "departure" then "electrolite" for a farewell trilogy

― da croupier, Sunday, November 11, 2012 6:30 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Actually, that had never occurred to me before... the 'Leave'/'Departure' plus references to being 'Outta here' (Electrolite) etc. If they'd stopped there the band could have easily made a case for 'coded messages' in the same way as they have done for Collapse Into Now, although in this case they would have been incredibly unintentional!

And am I the only one that wants to laugh out loud every time they hear Stipe sing "I want to wash you with my hair" on 'Be Mine'?

he wants to wash you with his pubes

I listened to New Adventures In Hi-Fi again last night, because it had been a while. The thing I love about the album is the way that it ends with 'Electrolite', as the instruments trail off leaving Michael Stipe to sing "I'm outta here". It's a fucking excellent way to end an album, and if R.E.M. had stopped there it would have been the perfect end to their recording career.

I attempted to listen to Monster afterwards, and I just didn't find that it excited me as much as New Adventures In Hi-Fi. The thing is, they HAD to make Monster in order to go on tour to make New Adventures In Hi-Fi, and it kinda shows. Monster sounds like a band trying to remember how to ROCK after Out Of Time and Automatic For The People, and New Adventures In Hi-Fi, with cuts like 'Depature', 'The Wake Up-Bomb', 'So Fast So Numb', sounds like a band in full-on, enthusiastic, excited rock-out mode.

I also listened to New Adventures last night: for my money, the real rock epics are "Undertow," "Leave," and "Low Desert."

It got me thinking, maybe Monster would have been a far more better record if the band had just went out on a short tour and road-tested it out in front of audiences first, shook the rust off and got back into the 'rock band' type of mindset, before subsequently recording it when the band were more comfortable. But as is, Monster sounds like a document of a band trying to re-learn how to be a rock band, rather than a document of a band confidently BEING a rock band.

The intentions behind making Monster were understandable ('we need a ROCK album, else we can't go on tour!'), but I don't think they were quite ready to make THAT particular album at the stage that they did.

Agreed. I said more or less the same thing yesterday, but Monster is the sound of R.E.M. in the studio self-consciously willing themselves to rock, whereas New Adventures is the sound of them on tour, in full rock mode, which produced far more rocking (and all-around better) results.

I thought R.E.M.'s line on Monster was they set out to make Self-Conscious Rock Songs, with Stipe putting quotation marks around the glam posing.

My opinion hasn't changed since '94: I love the thing, despite the occasional strain.

Pretty much every one of the band's post-"Automatic" albums would have sounded better, or at least benefited, if they were just recorded as a band in some big empty room rather than fussed over in the studio. Even something like "New Adventures" doesn't exactly sound like some shambling "Exile" recorded in back rooms on the fly, let alone "Zooropa," recorded much the same way. And everything after "Adventures" sounds coldly, airlessly anchored to a click track, as if no two members of the band were in the same room at the same time, which may very well have been the case. My dream final REM album would have come after "Up," with the three remaining members and no one else recording something with few overdubs in an old church or something. But really they went the complete opposite direction.

I just read a great, simple quote from Mick Jagger about being in a long-established group where things are done as much out of duty and contractual obligation as much as passion and creativity:

“When you’re at the beginning of your career, you’re in the band 24 hours a day. But as you get older you don’t want to be doing that. I think the band is fine being in the band, and the band rather likes not being in the band, too. That’s a good balance.”

quotes like Jagger

My opinion hasn't changed since '94: I love the thing, despite the occasional strain.

― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, November 11, 2012 6:47 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

My opinion on Monster now is far more warmer now than it was for a good number of years, to be honest. The only track on there that I'd say I out-and-out LOATHE is 'King Of Comedy', which I feel could have potentially been a decent track but doesn't seem suited to the treatment it received on the album.

Interesting to note the change in appearance of Mills & Stipe between Automatic For The People and Monster, too. Up until and including Automatic, Mills had this definite nerdy/geeky appearance, and suddenly with Monster (and definitely onwards ) it seems like he's trying to bury his inherent geekiness and try and look 'cool'...

Stipe, too, suddenly went from hat-wearing smartly-dressed eccentric to bald head, mini-beard, t-shirts and rock star posing.

Stipe's Monster-era image is such a hell of a contrast to any image he'd had up to that point!

I think the artificiality of Monster is one of its strengths. Rock in quotation marks? Perhaps. I kinda see the album as a queer pomo glam album, full of sex and paranoia. The production suits that. Admittedly, songs like Star 69 worked better live, but the likes of Crush With Eyeliner, Tongue and King of Comedy benefit from their inauthenticity. The fast rockers on New Adventures (Wake Up Bomb, Departure) are better as performances, but they're not particularly great songs and next to the weird things on Monster they sound rather too much like ordinary rock.

The great lost song of post-Berry REM is Beat A Drum. The 'demo' version which came as a b-side to Imitation of Life is incredibly beautiful - just Stipe singing a beautiful melody over piano and acoustic guitar. The fussy faux Brian Wilson treatment it got on Reveal ruins the impact of the melody and lyrics, not least in the chorus, where the aching pause between lines is filled with a parping horn motif. That said, I do like some stuff on Reveal, not least The Lifting and the hazy exotica stuff like Beachball. Imitation of Life is ok, but a bit REM jangle pop by numbers. I'll Take The Rain is one of their worst, kinda like if Diane Warren and U2 got together to write a stinky stadium ballad.

i would def rather listen to a collection of demos from the post-Berry period than the albums besides Up

I kinda see the album as a queer pomo glam album, full of sex and paranoia.

Oh yeah. And the band alluded to Roxy Music in interviews around this time.

If only they sounded like Roxy Music. "Monster" is some wan glam.

Problem was, there was neither an Eno nor even a Jobson (or a Ronson) in R.E.M. Which wouldn't be an issue otherwise, but maybe they could've, I dunno, drafted Allen Ravenstine in or something.

Granted, it's not entirely successful as pomo glam or rock in quotation marks. Roxy Music or Sparks it ain't. It's as if they were self-consciously trying to respond to both grunge and the pomo trash aesthetic of Achtung Baby, while drawing on their love of Bowie and Iggy, but not really pulling it off. Yet it's that wrongness that makes the album all the more intriguing for me.

I can't deny my personal relationship with Monster or New Adventures either. They were the first two new REM albums to come out after I became a fan on the back of Automatic, so I'll always have a sentimental attachment to them, especially as they came in those formative teenage years. I heard Monster a few months before any of the IRS stuff, which might seem like an odd way in. I was really excited for New Adventures and I remember waiting to hear E Bow with fevered anticipation. I still think it's one of their best songs. Listening to it recently I came up with a semi-serious notion that it's their oblique hip-hop song. Talky verses over a shuffling beat, then a female vocalist on the chorus, except being REM it's Patti and not an r 'n b diva... the bit just before the second or third chorus where Stipe goes 'here we go again' reminds me of the way 90s rappers might introduce a pop chorus.

such a thrill for me to watch and hear them play "E-Bow" at the Tibetan Freedom Concert, the Thom Yorke part not so much.

I love Monster. I think it might be the most unique, alien album within REM's entire discography.

E-bow is a classic. I always feel sorry for the rem fans that hate it so much

E-Bow The Letter is about the only REM song I like from, I dunno, the 90s or something.

xpost Mike Mills and his glamming up circa Monster. I know it's not really rational, but I think that's the great signifier of REM ceasing to be the band they were, and losing the way, albeit gradually. Nothing says, "Being a rock star has gone to my head" like someone who used to look like a teaching assistant dyeing their hair and wearing spangly shirts. Sometimes I truly believe that Mike Mills glamming up was actually the cause of REM going shit.

when did peter buck add that "sexy lady" decal to his guitar

http://reviewstalker.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/REM-Automatic_for_The_People-pic-300x240.jpg

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-EFUMGAE9qUE/Ti-1pFOzImI/AAAAAAAAAHc/LpjyGNo_qfY/s1600/REM+-+Group.jpg

why is Peter Buck wearing that shirt and allowed to stay in the band?

tbf if they'd stuck to the goobers in vests look they would have been left behind like most late '80s college faves

tbf if they'd stuck to the goobers in vests look they would have been left behind like most late '80s college faves

― da croupier, Monday, November 12, 2012 3:11 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, that's not only fair but very true. However, having been used to the way the band looked circa Out Of Time and Automatic For The People, it did feel like a very sudden (even jarring) change, and it did take a little while to get used to! I remember them coming back with 'What's The Frequency, Kenneth?' and seeing how the band looked and thinking "hang on, what the fuck is going on here? This doesn't feel right!". I appreciate they had find ways of 'moving on', though, and doing different things, and I eventually got used to it. At the time though, it was a bit of a surprise!

Stipe went downhill as a frontman when he got rid of the hair tbh. Over-obvious, silly face paint, terrible lyrics. He became in your face when even in 1992 he was a lot more reticent and at least trying to retain some enigma.

They wouldn't have been 'left behind' because they were already way beyond the late 80s college bands anyway.

This is true. It's not like they were Scruffy The Cat.

Tbf, Stipe was going overobvious silly face paint as far back as the Fables tour. Saw them in London, and he had a peroxide crop, enormous amounts of eyeshadow and the world DOG written backwards on his forehead in magic marker.

They wouldn't have been 'left behind' because they were already way beyond the late 80s college bands anyway.

― Master of Treacle, Monday, November 12, 2012 3:40 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

They would have still undoubtedly sold records, especially on the back of Automatic For The People, but they definitely would have looked incredibly out-of-sync with what was going on at the time. I suppose in their earlier years, they always DID look incredibly out-of-sync with what was going on at the time, and seemed content to be themselves. Around the time of Monster, though, it seemed this attitude changed and the emphasis was on holding onto that success and trying to remain as 'current' as they possibly could.

I remember a quote by Michael Stipe that I read somewhere: "I used to think “timelessness” was superimportant. Now I don't."

i think chalking the sound and look of the Monster period to attempting to be 'current' is oversimplified. sure, it was a shrewd time to turn up the guitars and rock out again, but it's not like they did anything to more resemble the long-haired grunge bands that had all already paid their respects to REM as forefathers, glam rock being a hip influence was still at least a couple years off from having any significant revival. .

even though REM were bigger and more respected than pretty much all their '80s contemporaries in '94, it's worth looking at this graveyard to see how quickly they could've just slipped off the radar: the biggest post-Nevermind hits on Modern Rock radio by older artists who began disappearing from the chart

Tbf, Stipe was going overobvious silly face paint as far back as the Fables tour. Saw them in London, and he had a peroxide crop, enormous amounts of eyeshadow and the world DOG written backwards on his forehead in magic marker.

― Manfred Mann meets Man Parrish (ithappens), Monday, November 12, 2012 7:48 AM (39 minutes ago)

The story of this gig is in one of the R.E.M. bios. He was super sick that night.

I saw them in 1985 (on the "Preconstruction" college tour, about a month before Fables was released), and he wasn't doing the silly face paint/silly hair thing at all. He wore an overcoat and a hat. And he dedicated "Second Guessing" to "Robert [sic] Murdoch for printing that I wear dresses. I don't wear dresses." (Murdoch owned the Chicago Sun-Times)

i think chalking the sound and look of the Monster period to attempting to be 'current' is oversimplified. sure, it was a shrewd time to turn up the guitars and rock out again, but it's not like they did anything to more resemble the long-haired grunge bands that had all already paid their respects to REM as forefathers, glam rock being a hip influence was still at least a couple years off from having any significant revival. .

― my hands tra cer (some dude), Monday, November 12, 2012 4:21 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm not saying they were out-and-out aping the grunge acts of the time, it would be absolutely ridiculous to insinuate that REM suddenly appeared looking and sounding like Soundgarden overnight. But, they definitely incorporated elements of what was then-current into their sound at this point, and the way the band looked was definitely more in sync with what was going on at that time too. Monster, even though it's still an REM record, is of its time in a way that no other REM record (or image, for that matter) seemed to be prior to it. For a band that used to pride itself on being apart from what was going on at the time, being themselves, and ploughing their own furrow, and for a band that HAD NEVER LOOKED LIKE THEY DID UNTIL THIS PARTICULAR ALBUM, it does smack a little bit of "well, we've sold loads of copies of Automatic For The People, and we want to make a rock record so we can go out on tour, and hey, all these hip new bands are namechecking us as an influence and Peter really digs Seattle, 'cuz he moved out there just recently and... uh... maybe if we 'rock' out as normal it'll just sound like Document or something, and uh... that's not quite the sound of 1994... uh..."

Simply put, everything about Monster seems as self-conscious as all hell - not just the album itself, but the people who made it.

Not to mention they started making more 'performance-based' videos around that time too, like the ones for 'What's The Frequency, Kenneth?' and 'Bang And Blame', whereas before they seemed to avoid that sort of thing.

I dunno, Green has some fairly straight performance based vids like Turn You Inside Out, then you've got Shiny Happy People and Sidewinder. The Monster vids are true to form in that there's a mix of performance and abstraction. Kenneth video plays with the conventions of performance videos by revealing the cameras filming them towards the end. Crush With Eyeliner is all about self-invention and artifice, so having Japanese kids pretending to be REM and doing a great job at being trashy pop stars is witty and apt. It's shot to look a bit like an early Wong War Kei movie, which only adds to the charm. So it's 90s irony all the way, rock videos in quotation marks. Tongue's video was a return to arty abstraction. Perhaps with New Adventures there was more of an emphasis on performance based vids. The series of vids or short films Stipe commissioned for CIN were great though, especially that young John Lennon guy dancing around Shoreditch and the pissing horse. And the John Giorno Warhol screen test for We All Go Back was beautiful. I suppose that was just a nice way of using up Warners money - just like they did when they commissioned arty videos for Out Of Time album tracks.

So. Central Rain is a performance video

True dat. I believe that was lead single from Reckoning, and they needed something for MTV, hence a straight performance vid. It's pretty naff though and doesn't capture the mystery of the band like the great Howard Finster fest that is Left of Reckoning. If I recall there aren't many other performance vids until Green - maybe some elements of performance alongside other stuff. There's the infamous footage of rolling stock promo for Driver 8, but that contrasts with the totally goofy and fun vid for Can't Get There From Here. They get a bit more pro around Document, although the imagery is often clunky - 'he's singing FIRE, so let's have some, er, fire' etc. Hats off to them for them the blatant homoeroticism of the Orange Crush vid though.

Being a huge REM fan in my teens I used to sit and watch and rewatch all the video collections (oh those pre youtube days...), hence my knowledge of them. It Crawled From The South has a detailed section about their vids.

yeah it definitely felt at the time of Document's big hits that they were one of the only bands all over MTV that made a big gesture of not always being in their videos, that was kind of their 'thing' for a while.

they needed something for MTV, hence a straight performance vid. It's pretty naff though

There's a version of this where Stipe's vocal is live. Never seen it, though.

Ah good point, I think that's the one on the Succumbs video. I think that was the deal - ok we'll do a performance video but it's gotta be live!

I think they gradually softened their stance on videos and MTV for both pragmatic and aesthetic reasons. Once it became clear that MTV could be used to their advantage, I think a lot of rockers embraced the form and its potential. I think REM found a pretty good balance with OOT, Automatic and Monster. The fact that Stipe is up front in several of the videos reflects his interest in the medium. Buck doesn't look very happy getting showered in water in the Drive vid. But then for a huge band to do a video like Nightswimming, with its beautiful non-salacious scenes of skinny dipping and the drop out in the middle, was really bold for the time. I'm sure that affected the song's chart placing, although I think there was an alternative TV safe version too. Some of the other vids seem compromised - the old fella pottering about in Find The River is nice, but the fake in the studio bits are dull.
In the later years the videos were often less inspired, but then there are nice vids like the Michael Moore one for All The Way To Reno, the gorgeous looking Daysleeper clip, and the gimmicky but cute Bad Day. But it's only with CIN that Stipe was given the leeway to say fuck it, if this director wants to give us a horse pissing then we're damn well having a horse pissing!

To pull my slightly disjointed posts together, I really appreciate the visual sensibility REM brought to their work through videos and stage sets. These were in some respects my introduction to art/indie film aesthetics and added to the mystery and appeal of the band. While their video output hasn't been particularly consistent, it is really cool that Stipe was able to indulge his interest in film on Warners' dollars, giving work to plenty of interesting people in the process.
Tourfilm deserves a mention here too in that it's the opposite of a verite style concert film, while still capturing the energy of the performance.

didn't buck and mills make a 'deal' with stipe in the later years that he could go off and make/commission whatever videos he wanted to promote the albums as long as they didn't have to be involved and do performance-style full band vids? i guess he was way more interested in that stuff than the other guys.

I think that was the deal with the CIN vids. And with the band about to split I guess Warners were happy to indulge them.
But yeah, I don't think the other guys have ever particularly enjoyed making videos.

I was dissing that Drive 8 vid but it's actually ok. All the James Herbert vids are up on youtube under Left of Reckoning. Life And How To Live It is performance based in that it's concert footage, but he messes with the speed and order of the frames and plays around with colour filters. Great! Green Grow is similar, but more smeary and flickery. Great! Nice that Stipe called him back in for All The Best from CIN. Ah, so JH was Stipe's teacher at college:

http://www.chicagoreader.com/Bleader/archives/2010/07/22/2137823-soundings-films-of-james-herbert

the full ROUGH CUT film is back up on You Tube. god knows why this never made it to DVD/vhs but its' great. larking about backstage at Saturday Night Live! looking for coats with Bill Murray! forgetting the words to Begun the Begin! etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYG7nNhzpN0

Ah great, I was just thinking about that doc. Remember taping it off late night Channel 4 back in the day but I managed to lose the first 15 minutes. My favourite bit: Stipe singing Brandy You're A Fine Girl in the limo.