R.E.M. – Automatic for the People – 1992
After all that over production the year before, all of which led to the biggest sales number an Athens, GA college rock band could have imagined, REM went back in the studio and stripped themselves down to the bare core.
Automatic for the People is, first and foremost, an album of songs. Haunting, elegiac, sad, terrifying, ironic, and every other adjective you can get in there.
It’s their masterpiece. Possibly the most powerful album of the Alternative Rock Era. Easily one of the 10 best of the 90s. I would rank it in my top 50 of all time.
“Drive” sets the tone. With it’s giant chords distorting all over the place, it’s full of fitful stops and starts (Drive, get it?). It’s also important to recognize that, at the time of this song, Stipe was having a lot of trouble (or maybe a little) coming to terms with the age difference between him and his fans. A4tP comes as the band had been recording professionally for 10 years. They were men in their 30s playing to an audience of teenagers.
The sadness continues with “Try Not To Breath” a song that reminds me of trying to run in a dream. Where you can’t get traction and your legs won’t work. That’s this song for me. Makes me want to cry every time I hear it.
“The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight” is a palette cleanser, a virtual pop song amidst the morass of death and sadness. And speaking of sadness, if I listen to “Everybody Hurts” and think about my late daughter, I’m a mess for the duration. It’s astounding how taking a simple three chord structure, basic arpeggios and what is, essentially a song about encouragement, can be so devastating. From PopSongs: “Everybody Hurts” is a public service, and its arrangement is precisely calibrated to appeal to a person in a state of melancholy, and subtly, gently lift them up into a feeling of hope. There are no empty promises, and no expectations of easy salvation in the song, but there is kindness, generosity, friendship, and the encouragement that pain and suffering are not everlasting things, and that we often have the power to flip those negative experiences into something beautiful and constructive.
I’m down with that.
“New Orleans Instrumental” is a perfect complement to “Everybody Hurts”. I liken it to taking a walk after some really good advice, letting it sink in and embarking on the rest of your life.
Is Automatic for the People about death? Yes. Is it sad? Yes. Is it morose? No. And that’s the distinction. Death surrounds this record so much that when it came out I and some friends believed that this would be the band’s swan song. That Stipe was writing about death the same way that Freddie Mercury was: Because his own was imminent. I guess we all were so terrified of AIDS that we would read it into just about every gay icon who focused on the end. It would make a lot of sense that Stipe would be fixated on death at this time, we were losing great artists, great people, just about at every turn to that disease.
But, in the end, A4tP celebrates life, the aforementioned encouragement song, the elegy for the great Montgomery Clift who had to hide his sexuality, the king of irony, Andy Kaufman. The album celebrates life while embracing and understanding death.
It’s important, in this context to recognize “Ignoreland”. This album came out while we were enduring the last breaths of the Regan/Bush era. Reagan didn’t mention AIDS during his entire first term. It was a harrowing time for gays. For the left. For artists. We are still feeling these repercussions today.
I can probably do without the Badalamenti-esque “Star Me Kitten” but that’s the only dank spot on the record.
(Coda report: The album proper ends perfectly nicely with the tender and nostalgic “Nightswimming” only to call the band back for the encore, my favorite song on the record, “Find the River”.)
For all their successes and failures, REM can say they made this album. And I’m grateful they did.
Grade: A+
ASide: Everybody Hurts, Drive, Man on the Moon, The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight, Nightswimming, Find the River
BlindSide: Try Not To Breath, Monty Got a Raw Deal, Ignoreland
DownSide: Star Me Kitten
