Anti-Climacus

SWAN SWAN H/ALL I HAVE TO DO IS DREAM: It's difficult, I think, to say much of anything about R.E.M. Rather, it's difficult for me to say anything about them: they are so completely formative of my ideas of what is cool that I lack the ability to see them any other way. Ironist and sincere; taking up politics and pushing it away (Michael Stipe has, or had, the gift of writing political songs so obscure that you wouldn't know it to listen to them (see "The Flowers of Guatemala"). If there must be political songs, they should be of this kind); emphasizing the value of the local and particular, especially the southern, though, as Marcus Gray's It Crawled From the South notes, none of the members of the band were actually born in the south (so one can appropriate or identify with traditions regardless of whether one was raised in them, though on the condition, I think, that one never quite forgets that one has chosen to do this). Thus this:



Which is bizarrely anachronistic: four guys playing acoustic instruments in a place that looks like it might've come from the post-Civil War era Stipe is evoking (and, nota bene, playing live: this is back when Michael Stipe didn't believe in lip-syncing, and so it's that rarest of things: a video of a performance).

Also, from the same movie, this, just because it's a great song.