I hope you like R.E.M.
It’s been over a month since my last artist theme (Paul Simon) so I’m making up for it by spending some quality time on one of my favorite bands, the Athens, Georgia, quartet (and now trio) that pretty much created the alternative music scene in the early 80s.
Over the next three weeks, I’ll highlight a song from each of R.E.M.’s fifteen albums (including their debut EP, Chronic Town, which is up to bat today).
One of the unintended consequences of my theme weeks is that I’m quick to rule out artists I’ve already covered when pulling songs for the non-theme weeks. So a band like R.E.M., which I covered in a theme week over a year ago, hasn’t been featured on the blog since. And that just ain’t right.
So I’m going to make an effort to revisit some of my favorite bands a song at a time in the non-theme weeks from now on. I’ve now covered enough ground that repetition of artists is unavoidable. And I can think of few better bands than R.E.M. to revisit song-by-song. They have so damn many good ones.
This song is almost a parody of happy songs. And again, it’s a song that has been all but disowned by its writers. Michael Stipe reportedly hates ‘Shiny Happy People’ and kept it off the band’s greatest hits collection despite it charting relatively high.
I find it harmless enough. I like the little waltz-y string intro, though the chorus gets annoying pretty fast. I do like how Stipe’s voice sounds accompanied by B-52’s singer Kate Pierson’s. She was used to even better effect on Out of Time‘s final track, ‘Me in Honey.’
R.E.M.’s last four albums — Up, Reveal, Around the Sun and Accelerate — have been mild disappointments. Those records followed New Adventures in Hi-Fi, the excellent and underrated follow-up to Monster, and they were all recorded without drummer Bill Berry, who quit the band to live on his farm after surviving a brain aneurysm.
By no means is it a coincidence that R.E.M.’s weakest efforts followed the loss of Berry. I don’t know how much he contributed to the songwriting, but there is a chemistry in some bands that, once altered, can never be reclaimed.
R.E.M. followed Automatic for the People with the grunge and feedback overload of Monster, the most love-it-or-hate-it album in their catalog.
I fall into the “love” category, though I do lose patience for a couple of songs toward the end of the album. But the first ten songs are twisted and glorious, none more so than ‘Crush With Eyeliner.’
Meet Me In Montauk 