I wrote a bit about R.E.M. and Troy Davis and the hikers jailed in Iran and pop critics and The Interwebs, for The Rumpus. Here’s a peek:
By evening, my various feeds took on a competitive tone. Many on Twitter commented humorously they could feel the attention of white people shifting away from Davis and onto indie rock nostalgia as homages to R.E.M. started making the rounds. Later a graphic went viral on Facebook. It showed Troy Davis’ face next to text that read: “I’m glad everybody’s upset about Facebook changing.”
Point taken – some things are a bigger deal than others and it’s good to have perspective. White people like indie rock and are not frequently killed by our government. I got it. But also … something about the mean-spiritedness of it all didn’t sit right with me. Why are we so invested in judging each other’s real-time filtering of current events online? Of course a rock band breaking up isn’t as important as Troy Davis being killed. But that doesn’t mean people aren’t touched in real and important ways by it.
I have to be honest: I didn’t exactly know they were together. I’m an R.E.M. fan, but I still tend to think of 1994’s Monster as their “new” album, because I’m pretty sure that’s the last of their albums I bought. However, lately, in part because I’ve been around a lot of mandolins recently, I’ve been revisiting their earlier albums and remembering how much I loved this band, and why.
They’re good. Really good. They make me raise my head up and sing along and sometimes even jump up and down. They clearly know way more about music — structure, harmony, all that academic stuff — than many of their contemporaries. They send me back to times and places far from here. They last.
In fact, they often get better over time: Automatic for the People and Monster were almost dirty secrets for me at the time of their releases, because R.E.M. was by that time firmly a popular band and grunge was happening and they weren’t “hard” or “loud”; I joined in with other alternative posers in whispering that R.E.M. were “sellouts” while at night I still listened to Drive over and over until I could fall asleep. Now, without such a time-based pop culture context (and partially because compared to a lot of popular rock bands now, R.E.M. is so obviously cool and dark and different), those “mainstream” albums of theirs play even better.
R.E.M.’s songs consisted of rock structures, harmonic vocals, and fine-tuned songwriting — with countryish suggestions via fingerpicking and a bit of twang in Michael Stipe’s voice. They were not a country band, but they were a rock band from Georgia. They wrote about some of the same things punk and grunge bands wrote about, but they felt… quieter. And they were good. Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills, Michael Stipe: all in their own rights deft and skilled musicians who were so self-possessed they didn’t showboat with their sound, but instead were a group. This was a band, not a lead singer and some backing musicians (I’m speaking about their music and sound here, not about their cultural/celebrity image, which was decidedly and increasingly Stipe-centric). They even all sang harmony.
At the time, people thought this band was political, in the way that at the time a sixth grade me wearing a “save the rainforests” sweatshirt on the first day of school was considered political. In other words: not exactly activism, but earnest and concerned, especially in the face of most pop music of the 80s.
Party to their political earnestness and their emergence from an independent record label, was R.E.M.’s status as the poster band for “college radio”: alternative, indie, whatever you want to call it. I had heard about this when my friends got me into them in high school, but I was a decade too late to understand what college radio in the 80s meant to people who were actually in college in the 80s. I was a child in the 80s; by the time I got into R.E.M., I didn’t know about radio and the way it could build alternative cultures in the face of pop destruction and Reagan-era conformity. I didn’t know about the unique sounds this band was creating or that they were truly unique sounds– or how big their influence was on most of the other bands I loved in the 90s.
Here’s a fun exercise: put on “Old Man Kensey,” from Fables of the Reconstruction. The slow bass intro, the strength of single, dark plucked guitar notes. A droning repetition to the rhythm and the voice. Speed this up a tiny bit, put a little more angst and raw pain in the voice, make it louder and switch out the chorus pedal for a fuzzy distortion and let the song explode at the chorus … and it’s a Nirvana song. Something in the way. Repeat.
For me and my friends, who worshipped Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Madonna and Pavement equally, R.E.M. was about mix tapes and poetic phrasings, long sessions spent driving and singing along in bad harmony, a romanticized image of southern America, and hints at the political wrapped in the eternal emotions of rock and roll. But mostly, despite their cohesiveness as a group, R.E.M. was about the words.
Stipe is a poet. Let’s just be honest here. In the video for “fall on me”, one of my possibly favorite songs of all time, we see only the lyrics, in all caps, sans punctuation, running over upside-down images of humanity’s earthly follies:
Did you notice the lyrics?
A melody and a counter melody. The sky and the sky. There’s a problem feathers iron. Lifting and falling and there was a moment somewhere – my dad’s backyard, a bootleg live R.E.M. mix tape copied over and over via friend and friend, in the hammock, discovering the most immediate way for me to feel grounded: to lie on my back and look at the sky, through overhead leaves if possible, and pray — and ask — that it not fall on me.
Also something about the way humans think we can own things we can’t own.
This was poetry. This was a musical era in rock in which a lyricist could ramble free-associatively in semi-linked metaphors and imagistic expressions of emotion, and still mean something. The best lyricists of a certain kind still do this – Cobain, Malkmus, Jeff Tweedy? Thom Yorke almost gets there but doesn’t let go enough — but it is becoming increasingly rare in rock music, as hooks and guest-spots and statements take over our sonic media like so many status updates.
So I’ll throw on this record and be in the backyard, still years too late to know anything about context, and I’ll be only in poems, in finger-picked poems, under the sky, beginning to fall all over again.
At night everything smells like roses, and it isn’t raining. But when you wake up, you know you’re just visiting. A tourist. It’s okay; that doesn’t mean your feet don’t hurt. But you walk on, eventually.
And years later, when you listen to certain albums, you can feel eternally linked to the places you were when you discovered them. And you can feel sick of them, sometimes, but that doesn’t mean the love isn’t there.
When you woke me up and I was dreaming in thick metaphorical surrender, messy consciousness and deep sobs and all, I immediately wanted to go back.
But every time, something pulls me out, and every time, I can’t forgive it. But I let it win.
Side 3.
Fitter Happier. Electioneering. Climbing Up the Walls. No Surprises.
OK Computer is not technically a concept album, but it’s an album – a work meant to be heard all together, in a row. What happens when it’s split into different movements, not even the standard two but four sides of a record, with three songs maximum fitting on each side? Turns out, despite the weight and sensory glee of the physical medium, this is an album born to be on CD: vinyl separates “Karma Police” from “Fitter Happier,” which is wrong.
That said…
___
Fitter Happier Getting along better with your associate employee contemporaries has its moments.
This computer-voiced checklist “song” now annoys me as a beginning. As a subset of Karma Police–fading up from the rush-hour drudgery of that catchy little number in which cool kids with Hitler Hairdos still denote what is and isn’t acceptable behavior, absorb us and then decimate us from inside the circle—it’s good. But now? Just get me through your fake computer voice to Electioneering, the song of guitar-loving madness that pulls no punches. Don’t even listen to the words.
___
Electioneering
“How can so many assholes like this album?” asks Jeannie, as we’re hiding underneath the counter in one of the big cubbyholes reserved for stacks of scratched vinyl rejects. It’s early in the shift, so it’s empty. She loves it, this record, she rolls around in it beneath starry nights and I am learning to do the same. We like to drive her truck to the coast or to closer but equally exotic spots like bridges and forest-thick parks, and normally in her truck we listen to old skate punk, Descendents, Superchunk. Sometimes it’s Journey for the fun of singing out loud. But also we both really, really love Radiohead right now. And we aren’t sure why everybody else loves it, too. All day long we answer inquiries from men who look like they’d rather slap us than listen to us, rich guys with convertible cars, drunk herds of boys in pastel collared shirts, housewives who probably haven’t paid their maids in months but are excited to drop $20 on a brand new compact disc they heard about on NPR and get one extra, for the kids.
“I don’t think they listen to the words,” I venture, burrowing deeper beneath the sightline of the growing line at the register.
“Yeah. Well. Nobody likes surprises,” she says.
___
Climbing up the Walls
The downright-mean-est thing about having a retail job is the double insult of Monday holidays. There you are, you’re at work, it’s Monday, a nice slow rainy only-middle-aged-men-who-buy-bargain-classical-records-come-in-today Monday. But it happens to be a holiday — perhaps the ironically named Labor Day, on which retail clerks battle it out behind the dusty counter, sleepily suggesting bestselling titles to office workers who are our age and here, set free for one glorious weekday of their lives, inexplicably in shorts in the 50 degree morning, inexplicably drawn to buy things at 10am. On Monday holidays, not only do you have to work: you’re slammed.
With three phone lines blinking and a post-it note already swimming in penciled titles to run out and check for, plus a line of at least 10 in-the-flesh music fans waiting to pay, I answer: “GoodmorningeverydaymusichowcanIhelpyou?”
“Oh, hello there,” Her voice is old. “Is this the recording store?”
“Yes, how can I help you?” Chop-chop, lady. I’m a machine here.
“I was wondering, you see, I was sitting here, and I’m trying to remember—I was wondering whether you know the name”—
“Are you looking for a certain album?” Chop-chop, spit it out already. Beep.
“Well I don’t know whether you know the name of that machine…”
“I’m sorry? Are you looking for a record?” Eyes roll, debit cards are being pawed as paying customer-feet shuffle.
“Well; ah, no. But I was wondering whether you might tell me the name of this device— it’s connected to the telephone.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but I’m really busy right now, so if you’re not looking for a record I can’t help you. Did you try the library?”
This usually works. Older people still use the library. Pawn it off on someone else, someone not slammed.
“Yes well you see the library’s closed today. It’s Labor Day, you see.”
As I know all too well, and labor to find the last grain of servicing politesse left in me. “OK… well I’m not sure what you’re asking me here but I’m really busy so―”
“I can’t remember the name of…. it records messages.”
“What? Look, lady…”
”It answers the telephone when I can’t. What do they call that, I know it has a precise name…”
“Are you talking about voicemail? I’m sorry, I don’t understand…”
“Yes, well I just can’t seem to re—”
“OK, I’m sorry, I have to hang up now―”
More people now in line, in a hurry although they don’t have anywhere to go, lattes in hand and shorts freshly ironed and they don’t know why the rude tattooed girl at the counter keeps talking on the phone. Probably gossiping with some slacker friend. Eyes roll, chop-chop. Machines these days.
Somewhere, something goes forward and something goes backward and voices meet.
“It’s a machine, you see, and it answers your phone for you….?”
“An answering machine? Look, I have to hang up now, Goodbye, thanks for calling.”
“Yes, thank you, but are you sure―”
“―.”
I am saved from the line by the same labor laws that refuse to honor this day with a fucking paid day off for hourly workers: the Ten Minute Break.
___
No Surprises
Outside sitting on the doorstep by the back entrance I can stop for a breath and see her as she really is: alone, in a cheap rent-controlled studio apartment with the blinds closed, and she can’t call her daughters because they’re away at the river vacationing or something, and she can’t leave the house because she’s afraid she won’t remember where it is when she comes back, and perhaps her kitchen smells because she can’t clean it up, and perhaps she is unable to understand why she can’t remember what this little black box on her end-table is, she knows why it’s there and what it does, why it’s connected to her rotary phone by its grey thin cable that stretches delicately beneath the paper taped to the side of the device bearing emergency phone numbers written in the hand of her eldest child. And she knows that the nice lady at the library would know, and address her by name as Mrs. ______, but they don’t answer down there for some reason, even though it’s a Monday— oh it’s a holiday says the non-human voice who answers, and she’ll never understand why they don’t work on a day named for work—
When she was years ago, she went to marches on this day, yelling and flourishing and brandishing her mind, bringing down the reign of rules and those who hold them over us with every step.
She then remembers, because she does remember a lot of things, that they were always so helpful down at that little store on that street downtown when her and her husband used to shop there for vocal albums, and she calls them just wanting to know the name of the machine that answers.
And they answer. She is surprised.
But then the young lady is awfully rude, almost automatic, but Mrs. ______ doesn’t know why. Mrs. ____ only hopes the girl will know things she doesn’t anymore. As an answer she receives only confusing feelings: a shadow sense-memory of what it was once like to know these words, and a great tiredness at the intense effort involved in trying to recreate how she came to know things, like how does she know the way from the kitchen to the bedroom in the dark?
These senses, plus the feeling that someone is annoyed with her, someone doesn’t have time.
___
You don’t have to understand the words to feel them.
Side 2.
Exit Music (For a film). Let Down. Karma Police.
Downtown. Downtown. Downtown.
We forget this about OK Computer: it’s not that big. When you split it up side by side, it’s even less big. A small voice and acoustic strum is often a beginning.
Last night found you pressed close between bodies and backpacks. The buzz of impending hearing-damage, the vague eroticism of bass in your stomach. Live and in motion. Not alone.
But this morning you are fuzzy when you wake. Small-voiced and acoustic.
You open your eyes and see new things: a lamp not your own, grey light slowly fading up through windows in directions you aren’t familiar with, your jeans on the floor next to someone else’s. Stacks of books and CDs, but not the ones whose spines you’ve memorized. Car keys and a pile of floppy disks on a smooth light desk. A bit further beyond the reach of your focus: a bare wooden bathroom door. It’s been humming since it got light out, which was not long after you recall calling it a night with the fair-haired and passed-out person next to you in this bed. Now from the door there are sounds of splashes and flushes and voices and who-the-hell-knows-what, so you lie still until they abate, roll over, discover a large window next to your pillow. You wedge your face between the slats of the blinds and watch the neighborhood out the window.
House by house they arise, in tandem, armed with dog leashes and unbelted bathrobes, awakened to porches splayed open by routine. They all seem to understand, inherently, what time it is. They all seem to know, complicit, what day it is. Saturday. 10am. No office today. Weekend clothes. Active homeowning. The Subaru needs to be washed. The cats need to curl. Those lavender bushes need some pruning. Honey, can you run some errands before the game? I made a list. Young newlyweds next door don ironed jeans and clean college sweatshirts and untangle the hose from the hydrangeas. Across the street, a matched pair of retirees act like it isn’t the same as any other day and brave the porch-swing with newspapers and polyester slippers embroidered “Oma” and “Opa.”
You let the blinds snap back, remove the dead-weight of the arm around your waist, roll onto the floor next to your jeans. Kneeling, you excavate your shoulder bag, pick up chunky black shoes, stand in a rush of exploded blood cells, and make for the door.
__
What happens with this song is that it’s the second side of something, and it starts slow. Because it’s starting again, on its own mid-stride legs, it’s not the relax-out you might expect, the breath of programming after the roughed-up mania of what preceded. What happens is what happens when you put something first that isn’t usually first: exit music, for a film. The film is the narrative truth-cliché, the morning after, the way we pack and leave. The twist is when we tire of it:
Now we are one, in everlasting peace, we hope that you choke.
___
___
The next scene is against and with the movement as a whole.
While you are tasting the dirt of the previous day in your tongue, others are scrubbed and ready to shop.
The bed you woke up in is located in a small residential neighborhood, but it is not far from where you work. From the bathroom to the living room to the door you walk. Put shoes on in the driveway. Turn a corner just a minute and end up downtown and remember you do not live this type of life. You have commuted in shortcut: you know the right coffee place, but you didn’t travel to get there.
When you pass the first office building, empty as a weekend pause-button, you feel the beat pick up, hinting at darkness. You’ve stepped out of a fantasy experience of strangeness, exotic and rhythm-driven novelty, dangerous risk. And you’ve found yourself out on a familiar street, deep inside the drab realization that you are not lost. Better luck next time. You have to go to work.
Maybe if you were in a car, like everyone else, commuting at appropriate hours, in fresh-pressed cotton, on bridges and over highways, not under them. You’re coming, walking, working. They’re going, speeding, shopping. It’s the reverse-commute of the other half: we who live schedules in opposition to the flow of urban traffic. It’s being the only one on the bus on their way to work, and not going home. It’s realizing that doesn’t make you different, actually. You wish you could change your tshirt, but instead you fall into the trickle of people on the sidewalk. Disappointed people. When you arrive and you punch in at the clock in the office, you wish you could really just punch it.
___
___
This was when we didn’t all have computers in our bedrooms.
This is when we talk about the era.
Remember: we thought it was going to be something, the turn of the century. Remember when this was our fear?
If the progress of the songs on OK Computer can be read as a the musical denouement of the last millennium, if tracks like “Let Down” and “Electioneering” indicated a weariness of soul, a sarcastic self-aware somberness that embodies a generation stuck between computers and telephones, between analog and digital – if that, then “Karma Police” is when we really fucked up. It’s when we decided we were cool.
It starts normally enough, like we’re in the 90s: Everyone is going to or from work. Scraggly young people with the previous night’s exploits still on their breath are opening small stores, white paper coffee cups in hand. We sell goods there, but we don’t actually change anyone.
We sit on the loading dock behind the store and smoke cigarettes sometimes, watch our brothers and sisters across the street.
Across the street, other young people are building the era: monetizers in sneakers and shoulder bags and clothes bought new are opening glass doors in what once were buildings that housed goods. They are entering rooms full of tables and screens, incongruously lined up beneath walls made of brick and mortar. They talk about goods there but they don’t actually touch anything.
An acoustic guitar in an insatiable strum, a beat, sounds like alternative rock when it was an alternative to something.
Later, in the next millennium, we can try to join them. We can jump in and out, between the across-the-street existences, and we can feel how easy it is, to re-create the clock. We can make nouns into verbs if we want to, let the songs play themselves. The other young people look over at us, and they love us and desire us and they don’t see us at all. They smile like a cat and gesture to the brick, the glass, the shoulder bags, the lack of touching. They say, This is what you’ll get:
You get to join the club, be on payroll, walk forward knowing we stand in your blindspot at all waking moments.
___
The person you left behind in the clean bedroom around the corner is off the clock, still sleeping. It’s the weekend and the world is being built around you.
He’s not gonna call.
___
___
So you take back the guitar, the marching-forward progress of everything bass, pull it back in the mix and echo out with a high song:
For a minute there, I lost myself.
Strings would be appropriate here, inside your reckoning.
A hum and Oh of Greek-like chorus in song behind you.
The Ah and Eh of what is fast also becoming programmed: synthesized.
Sirens break it up as they always do, but the sirens are coming from inside the house. We are clearly moving towards digital.
