R.E.M. – Green – 1988
I’ve always wondered if REM named this album Green because they made so much of it from their deal with Warner Brothers.
At least once during a Listening Post I “liveblog” one album. All that means is I listen to the album and write about each song as they play.
1. Pop Song 89. Wow, REM, generic title much? This is as poppy as I ever thought REM could get. There’s a meta-sarcasm in Stipe’s voice as he asks “Should we talk about the weather? Should we talk about the government?” As if both are time killers when you’ve run out of things to talk about. Interesting considering just how much singing about the government REM has been doing over their career.
2. Get Up. Seems designed to get an audience moving. I’m sure its about more than that but that’s all I get from it. It’s a little thin and reedy, due to Mills’ backing vox, and the chorus’ “dreams complicate my life” is confounding since I keep reading about how Stipe and others like Berry would get song ideas or ideas for parts of songs from dreams. (Stipe dreamt he was at a party and everyone there had the initials, “LB”, hence that part of their biggest hit.
3. You Are The Everything. I know it’s not supposed to be meant this way but I always thought Michael was “very scared for this world” because he feels like “he can barely sing”. Talk about hubris! A harbinger of what’s to come on the next two albums and one of the finest pieces in the band’s catalog.
4. Stand. Oh, that calliope sound. This song, like much of the album and the one that preceded it, is mired deeply in the 80s, it’s the sound of that decade. More so for me than madonna or Duran Duran or anyone. This song, with it’s accompanying video and the gender role mockery stood on the precipice of biting the hand and knowing more about the hand than the hand did. It’s kind of a dumb song, really.
5. World Leader Pretend. If I am remembering correctly this was the only song for which the lyrics were provided in the cd. I’m too lazy to get my cd out of the case, so I’ll just go with that. I remember thinking at the time; wow, talk about being pretentious. Really think this message needs to be out there, be understood, Stipe, that you had to include the lyrics? I still think it’s a wee pretentious. And when I say, “Wee”, I mean “Brazen”. That’s not really the worst part. The worst part is the song is sort of boring. Egregious.
6. The Wrong Child Now THIS is pretentious. A meandering tone poem on nonsense. And I’m pretty sure that it was at this point that I stopped listening in 1988.
7. Orange Crush. There I am, sitting in the little box office of The Tiffany Theater on Sunset. Listening to the radio. George HW Bush has been named the official nominee of the GOP and this song came on. And all I could think was, “You couldn’t come up with a better metaphor for Agent Orange than Orange Crush? As disappointing a single as Queen’s Body Language 6 years earlier.
8. Turn You Inside Out – Have you heard the album Monster? All of the seeds for that record are right here in this song. If you didn’t like Monster you will not like this song.
8. Hairshirt Hello, Mandolin. Why not let Peter play you while Stipey caterwauls in the foreground? Mills, you put some harmonious synths behind it and pluck your bass and we’ll call it a song. Yeah, that’ll work. Wow, if we could just make this something that someone would actually want to hear we could record it and put it on an album called Automatic for the People….
9. I Remember California – This sounds way too much like “Odd Fellows Local 151” that I can’t get past it. Nor can I get past just how much I seem to hate this record…
11. Untitled – Oh, remember “hidden tracks”? The dumbest thing ever in the history of music (and I’m including 8 tracks. Pleasant enough, if completely unmemorable.
I guess there’s a good reason why I never listened to Green after I bought the day it was released. It’s horrible. Rather than writing great songs and pushing the envelope of what their music can do, they pushed the envelope in the other direction. Toward experimentation. Which is fine, if that’s what i signed up for. If I buy a Captain Beefheart album or a Flaming Lips album, I know what I’m getting. Even if they diverge from a debut. But REM’s shift away from what made them so interesting and wonderful is so off putting that I wonder if I can keep this up.
Grade: D
ASide: Stand, Orange Crush
BlindSide: You Are the Everything
DownSide: The Wrong Child, Orange Crush, Hairshirt
This is the first time since I’ve been doing this blog that a single (represented by the ASide moniker) also was one of the worst songs on the record.
