R.E.M. - Monster

Understanding Monster:

1) it's the R.E.M. album, not the Steppenwolf album.

2) i didn't like it then, but now i do.

Got it? Great. Good night everybody.

Ok, ok, there's more to it than that. It's actually a fascinating album, and it isn't simply another R.E.M. album like you might think. I've talked about quite a few albums that were interrupted by real world things: riots, medical emergencies, airplanes crashing into skyscrapers, etc., and this album had a couple of its own. We'll get there, we just have to set up the real context first.

Critics mistakenly labeled this album Grunge. You already know i don't think that's a genre, but it does have some common tropes of the time period: crunchy distortion, character pieces, and a cynical view of celebrity and fame. The monster is fame, and the deaths of River Phoenix and Kurt Cobain are an integral part of the album because they were Michael Stipe's actual friends. River ODed while they were demoing the 40 something songs that spawned this album, and Kurt killed himself just as they were finishing up and Michael was getting ready to help him work on the next Nirvana album. Best laid plans. Rain Phoenix does background vocals on Bang and Blame. The Phoenix family, by the way, were missionaries to Venezuela as part of The Children of God cult, and that did play a large part in River's mental instability. Joaquin seems well adjusted, though (could you hear my eyes roll on that one?).

So what was the original goal? Well, they were tired of the soft, slow, acoustic experimentation of their last two albums, and all agreed to make some kind of loud, electric guitar forward opus. Stipe ended up surprising everyone by singing as a bunch of different but equally jaded protagonists, some male, some female. However, as we all know, he gives his themes an entire continent to graze, so you get an assorted array of approaches to the downside of being famous for something.

The most famous story of course is the opening track, a truly bizarre moment in Dan Rather's life immortalized in an R.E.M. single. For me, i vividly remember people describing this album as half "fun," half filler, and a mere placeholder in the band's discography. Nope, i wouldn't call any of it fun. What's the Frequency slows down because Mills's appendix burst while recording it, Berry had a brain hemorrhage on the ensuing tour, their friends died while they were making it and nearly breaking up, they didn't like being famous like every other band at the time, to me this album has always sounded like riding the struggle bus.

But Bottle, you say, Shiny Happy People. 

And i reply, what the hell is wrong with you? That was a sarcastic mistranslation of an actual Chinese propaganda response to the Tiananmen Massacre. To paraphrase Stipe, it's a pop song for children to assure them that the world isn't a terrifying cess-pool, please don't include a recording of it in the time capsule you blast off into space for distant aliens to decode.

Esoteric ennui is the baseline for R.E.M., and these random excursions are quite jarring in their original context. So no, this isn't R.E.M.'s "rock" album, it's what they produced in the face of their world crashing to rubble all around them. I knew something wasn't quite right way back then, but i didn't have all that accumulated biographical knowledge to really put my finger on it. I know i've said that music doesn't point to some subconscious psychological impulse, and it still doesn't: this is intentional. This is an album about how much no fun they were having, and that really does put the whole thing in a proper perspective. As just another R.E.M. album, i agree it's "meh," but as a document of R.E.M. in 1994, this IS their razorblade suitcase while Gavin is literally in the middle of making Sixteen Stone. Put all that together, and yeah this is pretty stellar.