Apologies, but I don’t understand everything you’re saying here but there’s a lot you’ve said about Monster being a “Queer” album and the public being put off by that. I personally don’t think that’s correct, but of course people take different things from music. I don’t like focusing on their private lives but although Michael dropped some things into interviews at this time, it wasn’t really any sort of focus. In fact, he’s gone on record in recent years saying he should’ve said more and been bolder but took the “who cares” route. I disagree with rock music being some overtly masculine genre. Some bands sure but rock music has always been a catalyst for pushing boundaries with too many examples to list way before REM were formed.
In terms of the music, there’s only really Tongue I can think of that plays with gender. That said, I don’t think “playing” is the right term. It’s just a song written from a female perspective, also something that wasn’t new.
It’s good that you can take so much of what you’ve hinted at from their music. Outside of maybe Everybody hurts, I’ve never found them direct enough to deliver clear messages that in turn could alienate fans. I just don’t see it at all. Glad you can though, that’s the beauty of it!
I like CiN in the context of being a farewell album. It’s the only album where they seemed to consciously write REM songs. It’s like a “best of” made up of new songs. Had it not been a swansong, I think most people would be rightly saying they were creatively over. But it is and I personally think it works. I also think CiN is far stronger than ATS and Accelerate, just without the creativity of at least trying to do something interesting which they were known for and the latter albums did at least attempt.
I agree with almost all of this, particularly the “best of made up of new songs” part. You’ve got the IRS years (That Someone is You, Mine Smell Like Honey); the commercial peak years (Uberlin, It Happened Today); the weird and wonderful early post-Berry years (Marlon Brando, Blue); and the power of Accelerate and their live performances (Discover, All the Best).
I remember liking it fine, but being a little disappointed that it wasn’t a bit more adventurous. After they called it a day it made a lot more sense. “Let’s give it one more time. Let’s show the kids how to do it.”
I like Around the Sun better though. (I guess that’s a hot take in itself!) But that goes back to context. When Around the Sun came out, I was in my second year at university, living away from home for the first time, and loving life. That album soundtracked a pretty enjoyable period of my life. And Electron Blue is probably my favourite song. Another hot take!
This sums up the Monster/commercial decline issue perfectly!
As much as Out of Time and Automatic appealed to R.E.M. fans, and serious music fans, they also appealed to Simply Red and Annie Lennox fans. Those people jumped off with Monster. (I don’t judge them for that. There are plenty of hardcore R.E.M. fans who struggled with it!)
Had they released Hi-Fi instead of Monster, I don’t think the commercial decline would have been as rapid, but it would still have happened. Monster was a really weird album. In a good way!
For two albums in the early 90s, R.E.M. really hit the zeitgeist. Everyone loved them. But it was an accident. Looking back, it was inevitable that it wouldn’t last.
Peter Buck once described them as being the acceptable edge of the unacceptable stuff. They weren’t meant to have sustained commercial success. They just wanted to be the best that they could be. And they hit the mark almost all the time.
The thing with Monster is that it was vastly ahead of its time. Its queerness was only one aspect of that. All those questions of identity it poses have really only become part of mainstream debate over the past five or so years. That, and people who only got into R.E.M. with the lushness of Out of Time and Automatic for the People were definitely in for a shock.
Agree with everything. And of course they never lost, they wanted to do it their way.
Also want to add this: integrity always defined R.E.M., at some point, mainstream came to them withouth them searching for it. Later, both them and mainstream went into separate directions. At that’s that. There’s quality in all their catalogue, there’s honesty and integrity in everything they did, and inovation. And that’s also way many great artist and bands are trully R.E.M. fans and take them as an influence. Not that they need validation from their peers.
On the “queerness” of Monster, I’ve always found the long-haired, overtly feminine, ahead of its time non-binary look Stipe sported in the “So. Central Rain” video to be a far more interesting take on “queer” than the cartoonish Lou Reed circa 1974 shaved head vibe of the ‘What’s the Frequency Kenneth” video.
Certainly, nothing on Monster is as overtly gay as the “Losing My Religion” video, with its hot shirtless guys pierced with arrows. And that blatantly homoerotic video was a key reason why that song became, by some distance, their biggest-ever hit. Monster isn’t disliked because people are afraid of the queerness of it, Monster is disliked because, with a few exceptions such as “Tongue,” the songwriting isn’t up to snuff, and, as on the electric half of Green and the entirety of Accelerate, R.E.M. were simply never as good at rocking out as they were at jangling and folking out. That’s my hot take, anyway.
Michael became very bland as a lyricist in the albums released this millennium.
I don’t like how any of the albums were produced this millennium.
Accelerate is by far their worst album in my eyes. Never understood the ‘Return to Form’ chat that came with it. Production/mixing on it is awful and there is no room for any of the songs to breath, so compressed. Sing for the Submarine in particular suffered from this.
Still my favourite band, but from Reveal onwards the quality definitely dipped.
As I’ve said elsewhere, while Around the Sun was a failure, at least it was an honest failure that reflected where they were as middle-aged artists. Accelerate, by contrast, was a forced attempt to pander to what they thought their audience wanted, which was even worse.
What will forever pain me about Accelerate is how incredible the material sounded at the Olympia. To me the production weakened it and the mix took whatever was left. I’d pay good money for a remix not optmised for lossy formats.
When Green was released in the fall of 1988, my high school self, who was already well-versed in the band’s earlier material at the time, was underwhelmed, because I felt that they had “sold out.”
34 years later, however, I have a kinder take on this material, and I believe that Green is a brilliantly well-paced work that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with their previous music. This album grows in stature with every subsequent listen these days, now that I am enjoying it on its own terms, far removed from the “too-cool-for-school” mindset of my teenage days.
Another hot take…
I consider R.E.M.’s Green world tour to be the band’s absolute career peak, where everything came together in terms of live performance intensity, popularity, and overall iconic aesthetics. Green may not be the band’s absolute best album, but I think that the tour was their time closest to the sun.
The Macon, GA show in 1989 was my first concert, during my senior year of high school. I can practically remember every detail of that evening.
I would too. The Dublin demos were also more open with less compression. If there was an over-reaction on the mixes of that and CIN it was the mix to lossy tendencies, or almost a “mix to a 45”
I get why they did it (I was there in fact during mixing for both), but the demo for On the Fly for instance shows what it could be.
They were definitely on when I saw them in Chapel Hill and Greensboro during the Green World tour in 1989 but I’m always going to have a huge soft spot for my first show which was in Durham during the Pageantry tour in 1986.
I saw them have what to my mind was a very off night in Savannah on the Green tour, but by the end of the tour, as documented on the Greensboro show on Green 25, with the end in sight, they were pretty clearly at a peak. But, by all accounts, including those of the band members themselves, the Green tour was a grind and a slog at points.
Pageantry was where it all came together, night in and night out, in my opinion.
During Little America and Reconstruction, on any given night, they could either be the best band in the world or go into full on Replacements self destruct mode.
This one could get me banned from Murmurs for life…
I’m not a big fan of Nightswimming…
I can’t explain why. I don’t hate it. I’m just not the biggest fan. It might be my least favorite off of Automatic for the People. Of course, a couple of my favorites are Monty Got a Raw Deal and Ignoreland (even if I still want it to be more hardcore, I still love it), so my taste is weird. Sweetness Follows is freakin genius, Peter Buck went to Mars or something to get that controlled feedback… in the middle of the song.
Agree that Peter doesn’t get enough credit for the controlled feedback thing he does on Automatic and New Adventures. It’s pretty easy to make a loud rock album like Monster, harder to blend feedback with acoustic guitars like he does on the two albums on either side of it.
I agree with others, saying E-bow maybe wasn’t what I would call the first single, but at the end of the day, it is a really good song. It is a nice blend of acoustic and electric. I would have made The Wakeup Bomb or So Fast, So Numb the lead singles. Those two would have made New Adventures…a much more accessible album, bouncing back from Monster.
