I’m not Commodity
Here’s my radio show updates. Forgot to link one of them last week so there’s two.
And here's my next Project R.E.M installment:
As someone who didn’t live through it, I think it’s really difficult to get into the context of R.E.M’s Monster. Obviously, throughout this project I’ve been building up my own mental context for each of the albums as I go along, but it’s one thing to be like “In 1983, Murmur sounded like basically nothing else” and then look up that the big chart toppers of that year were MJ and The Police, which sound nothing like Murmur. It’s another thing to wrap my head around an album that sold a Platinum amount of copies but then, infamously, became a used CD section staple (as all the reviews from the 25 year anniversary edition will tell you).
It is somewhat apparent in the music why this might have happened. A first listen (especially after running back AFTP and OOT) will probably make you think “this is more rock than the last two” as the gauzy guitars cover-up a lot of Stipe’s singing and a quick google search will tell you that the album signaled the band’s return to touring, so for many it was viewed as an attempt at Arena rock. But for starters, I don’t really think that it sounds so cataclysmically different that the band feels like its dishonoring its roots. I’ve also been told that it’s ironic. Steven Hyden has called it an “arena rock album about arena rock” (whatever that means). So, I’m obviously inclined to think about what the band is actually doing on here (says the guy who has a newsletter about thinking about music).
The context around this is much different than that of 1991. I imagine that to a lot of big music heads Grunge/Alternative always felt like more of an astro-turfed marketing trend than a real youth movement, but a lot of teens saw their concerns and anger about the world and their personal angst reflected in music for the first time when “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Losing My Religion,” and “Jeremy” all hit in the same year. The artists involved largely thought they were rebels charting new territory.
Come 1994, the mainstream music industry was deep into throwing all their money at anything “alternative” that could come up with a radio hook (cue the part where the music writer goes “The BUTTHOLE SURFERs released an album on CAPITOL in ‘93”). Dookie and Weezer are both 10’s so this isn’t necessarily a value judgement, but I think you can see why the class of ‘91 may have been disillusioned with their own image by this time. Nirvana had made In Utero with Steve Albini the previous year, Pearl Jam was getting weird on Vitalogy as they toured around Vs, and our Athens boys were making their own songs about the perils of celebrity which they just so happened to finish recording a month after Cobain’s suicide.
For Michael Stipe, the specific predicament is obviously dealing with his sexuality and how it relates to his fame. 1994 was probably when he was the most famous and he also happened to come out as queer at this time. It kicks an immense amount of ass that Stipe was out as queer on a press run constantly talking about how Horny his new album was, but the way the album actually deals with his identity is also fascinating. On “Crush With Eyeliner” he’s referencing the New York Dolls with sleazy vocal delivery and then the next song he’s skewering shrewd business tactics and how they manipulate personal identity for profit: “Make your money with a pretty face/Make it easy with product placement/Make it charged with controversy/I'm straight, I'm queer, I'm bi.” In this new era of rainbow capitalism these lyrics serve as a prescient warning.
This is where I do buy Steven Hyden’s interpretation, but I’d say right here Stipe is more critical of glam rock than arena rock. Glam rock was a place where exploration of gender expression was easily written off as performance art thing and in a way Queerness was able to breach the mainstream in a new way, but it also had its limits. David Bowie and Lou Reed though not (really) straight could arguably present in that way and gain acceptance among unknowing members of the general public, but many of their muses and collaborators never got the same platform that they did. So now, here’s Michael Stipe out in the mainstream writing lyrics about how the mainstream can distort deeply personal aspects about one’s personal identity. Coming from the guy who released “Everybody Hurts” only two years prior, this is a staggering shift.
One of the things that I’d like to get into later on in my deep dive is taking a look at how R.E.M’s ideas about their music have shifted in the press over time. I think the question of “how honest should I be” effects all young musicians and you can catch plenty of really old interviews where the band is mostly just joking around with the press and not taking themselves too seriously and then newer ones where they’re more candid about what they were doing behind the scenes, so I’d like to see what kind of shifts in storytelling happen over the years. On Monster that’s pretty much directly implanted within the album. You almost get a different side of Stipe every time you hear it. While revealing more personal information around his sexuality to the public, Stipe was also burying his audience in contradicting signifiers and characters. The result is one of the more compelling “disillusioned with rock-stardom” albums in an era chock full of them.
-Donovan Burtan