Just like starting that concert with Airportman
I think R.E.M.’s commercial decline began with Monster. It was just too weird for all the folks that jumped on board with Shiny Happy People and Everybody Hurts. It sold a sackload because, at that point, they were the biggest band in the world. But most of the people who bought it were hoping for something that sounded like Out of Time or Automatic, and it didn’t. Hence its reputation as a bargain bin staple.
I read something once saying that the difference between R.E.M. and U2 was that U2 wanted to be the biggest band in the world and R.E.M. wanted to be the best band in the world. So while R.E.M. pushed the creative boundaries, their commercial appeal naturally tailed off. U2 stuck to crowd-pleasing and remained hugely popular.
For what it’s worth, I think that analysis is brutally harsh on U2. (Listen to Zooropa or Pop, and tell me those are ‘commercial’ albums.) But, for whatever reason, R.E.M.’s commercial appeal waned after Monster.
The second element to this, for me, is context. Everyone (apart from maybe the people on this board 
) thinks R.E.M. ‘lost it’. But no-one agrees when! Some people think Fables was their last great album. Some think it was Document. Some think they lost it when Bill Berry left. Fair enough, but y’all are missing out on some good stuff.
Ultimately, I think music is inextricably linked to where a person is in their life when they hear it. If you were at college in the USA in the early 80’s, it’s fair to say the IRS albums will mean much more to you than Collapse Into Now. If, like me, you discovered the band as a young teenager with Out of Time, those early 90’s albums will mean a lot to you. Yes, even Shiny Happy People!
For me, I never really saw a drop off in quality. I probably like at least two of the post-Berry albums better than Murmur. If I was hyper-critical, I’d say that Accelerate and Collapse Into Now were the only albums that didn’t really push the boundaries. But, to be fair, short of recording the fabled ‘farts and Benny Hill jokes’ album, I’m not sure what there was left for them to do.
Sorry for the very lengthy post. This is supposed to be about hot takes, so here’s mine:
R.E.M. never lost it.
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It’s true that Monster marked a change in the band’s commercial fortunes, yet no one ever seems to explain why. It has nothing to do with the quality of the music. It’s because it’s an openly queer album and the first since Stipe was effectively forced to speak publicly about his sexuality. The nineties were still a very homophobic decade, and rock music has always had an element of belligerent masculinity about it. Stipe broke many taboos at a great professional risk, and he (and his loyal bandmates) unfortunately receive little credit for that.
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I sooo agree with Texarcana and Me in Honey.
Me in Honey is close to one of my favorite songs off of that album. Country Feedback and Losing my Religion are #1 and #2
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R.E.M. rocked long before Monster. Turn You Inside Out, Burning Hell, Fireplace, ITEOTWAWKI(AIFF) just to name drop a few. Most critics stop at popular songs. Looking back, even 9-9 and Feeling Gravitys Pull coulda been on Monster. I’m not a big U2 fan, but I think R.E.M.s “new” fans (in the nineties) kinda lumped the two bands together. I’m not trying to put U2 down, I realize they are talented, they’re just not my bag. R.E.M. never made a "bad"album, just ones I don’t like as much. I’m kind of the odd man out. I really am not much of a CIN fan, at all, but think Reveal, Up and Accelerate are among their best post Bill works. But that’s just my opinion. At the end of the day, we like what we like.
My .02.
Sorry, I don’t mean to be disrespectful in any possible way, but I think that, as objectively as possible, that take is entirely wrong. It’s not an attack at all, I swear. I’ll take a kind of “scientific stance” here and say that 1) “no one ever seems to explain why” is false, because I’ve seen plenty of people, especially on Facebook, comment on exactly the reason why that happened, and they’re correct. More about that in the next paragraphs. 2) Most people simply don’t care that JMS publicly spoke about being queer or whatever, and that is in no way the explanation for that phenomenon. Yes, they wanted to know if he was gay (people always want to know), and if he was HIV positive (ditto). Unfortunately, it’s just a kind of morbid curiosity people have, but not a basis for accepting or rejecting the band.
R.E.M. became a very mainstream band with “Losing my religion”. Many people bought OOT because of that and “Shiny happy people”. That’s just a simple fact: those are the songs that first projected the band into the “major pop-rock band territory” and to radio audiences. There is no questioning that.
Then people (not diehard fans like us, but the general audience) took that clue and just followed them a bit further with Automatic. “Oh, it’s that band again, and again on the radio. What are they up to? Oh, that’s nice”. And they saw a pattern there, because there was one indeed: quiet, somber, acoustic, gentler sounds in both albums. That brought a wide appeal to that general audience. They saw no reason to “abandon” the band then.
But this so-called general audience is lazy as all f*** – because people are damn lazy! – and they never sought out the band’s previous works. They just consumed what was on the radio. Maybe they got to know “Stand”, maybe “TOiL” and “ITEOTW”, but that was about it. People just follow the fads and they are always in for the next fad. And Monster was a radical departure from that “quiet, somber, acoustic, gentler sounds”. It’s a fantastic album, but it didn’t fit the narrative of R.E.M. being just about OOT and Automatic that most people expected.
Then Monster was criticized and returned to the dollar bins, and that general audience started following whatever next fad showed up at that time. Another band, another genre, whatever. This had nothing, or very little, to do with Stipe’s sexuality, even if you are right in saying the 90s were still quite homophobic. Freddie Mercury and Elton John, just to name two prominent examples, were already very well accepted as the icons they are until this day.
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Absolutely agree about Monster. They did pick up a lot of fairweather fans by basically having two “Rumours” moments in consecutive years. Out of Time and Automatic have sold almost 40m copies between them. I was a teen and they were my favourite band but it was quite pronounced how many of my friends parents bought those albums. The softer sound and emotive lyrics and melodies had massively wide appeal. They spawned a huge amount of not exactly copycat bands, but bands that capitalised on the popularity of those albums. Counting Crows, Hootie and the Blowfish etc. Like I said, I wouldn’t accuse them of copying REM but they definitely rode on their coat tails somewhat. There was even that horrible label for a while, AOR - Adult Orientated Rock. Urgh.
A ridiculous loud, grungy glam rock album was never going sit well with Mr and Mrs Birtwistle down the road. Monster wasn’t a flop. It sold about 4m copies in its first year. It just killed the “biggest band” in the world momentum and then scared off the fairweather fans. Kurt Cobain tried to do that intentionally with In Utero. No wonder he admired REM so much. They just wanted to make a sexy glam rock album to tour with, almost like they were oblivious to the fame that had grown and without any consideration to mainstream artist marketing decisions. Totally authentic “we don’t care”. Lovely stuff.
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In 2022 it’s easy to talk openly about Freddie Mercury and Elton John and embrace them as pioneers, but during their peak period of commercial success they expressed themselves with a subtle wink and a nod. Freddie Mercury’s sexuality in particular was quietly ignored by the mainstream press even though he didn’t deny it on the rare occasions when he was asked about it. The excellent film critic and historian Mark Harris, who is gay, has written about this and is working on a book that will touch on this theme. When he was an editor at the (recently deceased) Entertainment Weekly in the nineties, he put out an issue about gay celebrities and included Stipe on the photo cover collage. He says that this is the issue that received the most backlash in his period at the magazine.
In any case while I understand your point of view that the 91-92 albums sound different than Monster, it just doesn’t match my personal experience (for whatever that’s worth). I remember young men who were insane for “Even Flow” equally loving “Losing My Religion.” Speaking purely of quality, I don’t think we can compare the situation to the fallout that Counting Crows experienced between their excellent, Van Morrison-inspired folk debut August and Everything After and Recovering the Satellites, which was a much weaker album regardless of its harder sound. Monster was a harder album, but it had exceptional singles, including one of the band’s best ballads which should have kept the fans of the band’s softer sound happy (though, I concede, it was foolishly omitted from the greatest hits packages, which then furthered the stigma surrounding the Monster album). The problem was that the album had fun with gender in a way that a lot of people would take years to catch up with. I think the band deserves more credit for that than they normally get.
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I’m a little ashamed of this opinion, but I gotta be real…
[Sigh] I’m not a big fan of Collapse into Now. It’s not for a lack of trying…there are members of other R.E.M. groups, that I’ve talked to about it. I’m not going to give any critique, except to say it didn’t stick. I’m not going to begrudge anyone who does enjoy it. Everyone has their favorite as well as least favorite album. It’s all subjective. There may come a day, when I hear it and all of a sudden…I’m like,“I get it!” That HAS happened before, it’s just not now.
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To me, CiN is their weakest, and it’s not even close to any other album. There are probably two songs in it I can say I like, and maybe 4 or 5 that… ugh…
I never bothered purchasing Collapse into Now. At the time of its release, I was pretty burned out on all things R.E.M., and I wanted a break. I was also not impressed with the singles back then.
I have been meaning to give that album a belated chance, so the resurrection of Murmurs is a good motivator to do so.
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I listened to Collapse into Now the first time in fucking years a couple of months back and I must say it’s slowly beginning to grow on me. I doubt it’ll ever scale the heights of Fables, Monster or New Adventures in Hi-Fi, though.
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Collapse Into Now would have been greatly improved had good songs like “That Someone is You” and “It Happened Today” not been truncated by shortness and wailing, respectively. You can tell that they rushed the final album so that they could unburden themselves. Pitchfork, however, was correct in highlighting “Walk it Back” as an exceptional song.
People liking Monster is a hot take for me.
Wait what? Do you mean fans or the misera plebs?
Anyone. I like most of the songs individually, but I can’t ever listen to more than 2-3 back to back. The production is very tiring.
Which is why I never buy into the “people wanted another soft album/people weren’t ready for REM to go grunge” explanations for Monster turning off a lot of people. I just don’t think it has the life that earlier albums do - the lyrics feel distant, I can’t think of great Mills backup vocals, the tremolo. It, to me, is a slog.
Not so much a hot take, but damn…I wish Houston was longer! It is like Song# 2 by Blur…great…but you just wish it wasn’t such a flash.
I could send you mine.
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I wish I knew how to gif on here…
I woulda utilized the hell outta the Kelso “burn!!!” gif right here.
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It’s not really a hot take, but REM put their friendships above the band, to the point where I think if it looked like their friendships would collapse, they’d have broken the band up.
I think that prioritization is a key reason for the sense of compromise over conflict (ie, Up’s length, Around the Sun’s weird recording schedule).
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