Anti-Climacus

Desert Island Disc #3: R.E.M., Automatic for the People


Among the reasons to find R.E.M. a cut above the average band, they're one of the few who are both aware of and consciously invoke imagery and symbolism, with the idea that both need to be consistent not just across a song,* but across the album of which they're a part. This is part of the reason early R.E.M. albums play better as wholes than as a collection of individual tracks: not for nothing does Reckoning say "File Under Water" on the spine, or Document say "File Under Fire." The appeal of R.E.M. for the cultural upwardly mobile was the implicit promise that great music could point towards great other things. Their two big early 90s videos steal from Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and Soviet Realism and the opening scene of Fellini's 8 1/2.

Automatic for the People is understood to be a fall album--the imagery is consistently of death and loss and the fleetingness of all things. On this trip, listening to the album again, I realized there's exactly one time reference, in "Nightswimming": "September's coming soon." It's a summer song. This makes sense, in a way: "Nightswimming" is both a nostalgia piece and a song in which the singer anticipates the moment when his experience will be over before it's happened. These moments of prospect-in-retrospect (or the reverse) pervade the album. The time shifts (measured in careful changes of verb tense) of "Sweetness Follows" and "Everybody Hurts," send the message is that whatever the listener's experience is, no matter how bad, there will be a time after it when the experience will look and feel different. That temporal shift also makes it a great transitional album--remembering the past with nostalgia, thinking about the possibilities of the future--which makes for a reassuring listen when one is literally halfway between the old life and the new life, as I am this weekend.

"Find the River" is in the grand tradition of end-of-great-album songs which sum up, amplify and complicate the themes of the album. "Soul Survivor" from Exile on Main St. is the ur-example, and "Two-Headed Boy, Pt. 2" from In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is probably the best. Nothing much to note about it except that it's a great song, and cautiously optimistic. Also, dig Michael Stipe's terrible goatee and the fact that they're all wearing Ray-Bans. The 1990s, children. Weird times.

Assuming my math is correct, I bought and first listened to Automatic the summer before 6th grade, which should be 1993. I played this and Out of Time constantly over the course of that year, sometimes more than once a day. It's not out of the realm of possibility that I've listened to this album 1000 times (which would be approximately once a week for 18 years), and perhaps many more than that (five times on this trip alone--now seven since I started drafting this post). Yet there's always something new to notice. This time around, in addition to the lyrical conceit discussed above, I realized how many of the album's hooks play on established genre tropes but de-nature them: the guitar line in "Drive" is a straight-ahead acoustic blues, but doesn't sound like it; the rhythm of "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite" is derived from girl groups, but you'd never know it unless you listened for it; "Ignoreland" sounds the messiest but has the most precise instrumentation--and the most spaces between the notes--of all the songs on the album.


*On the most recent listen, it occurred to me that the lines "I know that this is vitriol/ no solution spleen-venting/ but I feel better having screamed don't you?" are one small example of consistent imagery for the duration of a lyrical thought. No mixed metaphors here.