As has been established, R.E.M is a band that love contrasts. Putting two contradictory ideas in a single sentence, music that counteracts with its subject matter and placing the main melody in the rhythm section are all just some examples of this. Lifes Rich Pageant (why do you hate my spellchecker R.E.M?) has the line that I think explains their reasoning best; as a band they will “rearrange your scales.” Emotionally, ideologically and musically they will play with preconceived notions until everything becomes a correct balance.
This album as a whole is a scale re-arranger. After the murk and dourness that categorised much of Fables of the Reconstruction here they go for the opposite, working with a new producer Don Gehman and returning home to America and creating a sound that is clear and colourful and that so vague yet so appropriate word: fun. The album feels like one big college party to itself. Albeit that corner of the party where people are holding glasses, burying their heads in a circle and discussing the ramifications of Proposition 8 loudly over the noise.
In this series I try my best to go for nuance, to explain my likes and dislikes by close examination of each of its parts. But before I do that allow me to break that for a moment in saying the music in Lifes Rich Pageant is just awesome. One or two in the R.E.M. canon might be better (one close enough that I have to be pretty vague for now) but I don’t think I can think of any album that rings out the “R.E.M. sound” more than this one. This is also odd considering just how much variety the album contains, building off the experimentations of Fables of the Reconstruction to work with banjos, organs and keyboard sounds. The first side of this album might be the single strongest run of songs in the band’s canon (though it isn’t like the second half is a considerable drop in quality). Until Monster it is the only album where they can go full on hard rock, some moments even lending comparisons to AC/DC.
In fact the music is so good it can distract you from the political nature of it all, as tends to happen at higher education parties [mileage varying]. After dabbling with some more direct subject in Fables here is what begins Stipe’s “political period” particularly here on issues of the environment (in case you missed it, the cover has pictures of two bison on it). As a topic this actually makes the most sense coming out of the band’s Southern Gothic period; they spent so much time cultivating an environment and landscape that they want to do their best to protect. And whilst Document would see Mike Stipe become clear in vocals and target than he has already can be on Lifes Rich Pageant – a by-product of a studio and period they were attempting to please an ever growing audience – here Stipe’s descriptions of worlds and animals also facilitates his appetite for creating them.
The beginning of “Begin the Begin” begins with the kind of feedback and riff structure that you could argue inspired the grunge scene, which considering Kurt Cobain was a huge fan of R.E.M. makes complete sense (contrasting ideas like Stipe would also be something Cobain loved). The outro meanwhile has fills that quite cannily mimic the sounds that five years later Angus Young would use for the opening to “Thunderstruck”. As all this comparisons indicate the music here hits hard, starting its clear and brighter sound with immediacy, doing for Fables as “Harborcoat” did for Murmur. Yet for R.E.M’s loudest song to date it is ironic that the song would contain the lyric “silence means security, silence means approval”. In a song that is pretty aggressive and direct, exemplifying a revolution against philanders and murders, it counteracts that with images of creating new worlds, combining two religious worlds to create a new one in “Martin Luther Zen”: R.E.M might be dealing with a “realer” world, but it is still the mythology that begins.
The hard-rocking times continue with “These Days,” a tune with propulsive Mills’ bass lines and hard hitting drums from Berry, this sound is a kind of dance-punk that wouldn’t actually sound out of place on Public Image Ltd or Billy Idol. As well as the aforementioned scales line, the most prominent images are of marching against the sea, of optimism despite the odds, that “we have hope despite the time”. It gets close to sloganeering, but R.E.M. also add self-deprecating humour to counteract that optimism, with Stipe asking the world to name “We have many things in common, name three” and the backing shouting out “three, three, three.” The song encourages the benefits of self-reliance, of not feeding off other people, but is ultimately an image of people working together to “carry each his burden”.
With “Fall on Me”, there seems to be a more clear example of the problems that we have to cover. Clear of course given sixteen quotation marks; by all accounts the ultimate feeling of “Fall on Me” is that of the world itself working against people, of oppression, but it expresses that through multiple ideas; from feathers and iron falling at the same time (actually feeling gravity’s pull!) to the idea that our progression in cities and consumerism directory affects the environment, and that has repercussions (this reading snagged a little from Soluter Cornilius Thoroughwood’s blog). Barring the drums, this is a folk country song like “Wendell Gee”, but Bill Berry manages to maintain into the rock aesthetic of the album. But the star of this track in many ways is Mike Mills, not just in his beautiful melodies on the bass, but the counteractions of his voice with Stipes before he himself is given the main stage asking the ultimate promise to the audience of keeping the sky safe.
The environmental themes continue in “Cuyahoga”, named after the Ohio River, and with that the overall country feel by Buck punctuated by fantastic Mills bass lines. The guitars and drums sway like the river in question, and Stipe describes this vignette with lines “lets burn down the river” which would be so absurd if it wasn’t so based in reality (rivers so polluted with oil that they set on fire). One could also say it follows on the basis of the previous two songs, with pleas to work as a team (“Let’s put our heads together, start a new country”) before walking into another bed of water. Although the final lines are almost pessimistic, saying to take pictures of the place before it essentially goes.
This melancholic moment is emphasised by the beginning of “Hyena,” with the quiet landscape being accentuated by piano. But that landscape soon moves into a description of the central animal in question, with the arpeggiated chords suddenly springing into action. But instead of the natural creature, being the symbol of a damaged environment, Stipe instead twists it back to consumerism, or at the very least how the animalistic in society prey among the vulnerable even when claiming to be a comforting hand. Mills’ backing vocal emphasise this most of all, his lyrics low in recording, as suppressed as the people the Hyena is praying on. But Stipe is very conscious of his voice as an instrument as well, especially in how Stipe uses his nasal chorus works like howls, like the cries of the central animal.
Following on from that, “Underneath the Bunker,” the short song the caps off the first side of Lifes Rich Pageant, sees Stipe’s voice so treated like an instrument that it doesn’t truly come in until very near the end. When it does is clearly processed through what sounds like a megaphone, the lyrics are the hardest to hear he has ever delivered, though eventually decipherable as panicked people hiding up and stockpiling in bunkers, maybe not even with people they wish to. But ultimately its strange instrumentation is appropriate to such a strange song, with conga drums and electric piano that definitely gives the song a definite Latin feel. But that riff being so strange sounding compared to the rest of the album links back to the strange guitar line that opened this album, creating a sort of mirroring effect of change over time, and in essence helping the first half to feel like such a complete run. That and the move into the bunkers during the night might explain why this was the “Dinner Side”, and Side two is “Supper Side”.
It also helps to ease in to the sonic experimentations that occur more in the album’s second half. On “The Flowers of Guatemala” the Buck arpeggios help give aid to a strange, metallic percussion that intentionally slogs along before the song kicks into gear (with a piano and the closest thing to a guitar solo from Peter Buck at this point in R.E.M. history). Stipe insists that this song is about the flowers on the grave of Guatemalan dissidents, and whilst that gives the sentimental ballad an edge I didn’t see that at all and I don’t think I would without the title aid. If anything, with the picture lines, I saw it as mirroring the events “Cuyahoga” by focusing on the land as opposed to river. Also, “Amanita” is a poisonous plant that covers over anything in its wake; in many ways it’s a return to the cover in Murmur.
In more cases of mirroring, the second song of side two “I Believe,” is an optimistic activism song in the vain of “These Days”, the second song from the first side. Unlike the punk sensibilities of that song though, this wrong foots the listener by starting off with a straight up banjo solo, before moving into a completely different song with a beautiful melodic line from Mills pushing things along. Like that other song though, all the calls for action with youthful idealism “Your adventure for today, what do you do/ Between the horns of the day?” is brought down to Earth, though an earth as constructed by Stipe-isms). For instance, “I believe my humour is wearing thin/ And change is what I believe in,” is soon undermined with “I believe my shirt is wearing thin/ And change is what I believe in.” He is so self-deprecating that he has self-deprecating jokes about his self-deprecating humour. Good ol’ Stipe.
While many songs on Lifes Rich Pageant have been about nature, “What if We Give it Away?” gives lines about walls and the places outside that separates it from that world. It still plays into the capitalism themes of the album, the people with ties avoiding the problems around them, and the central question met with a certain sense of derision. Compared to some of the vibrant fills of guitar on Lifes Rich Pageant, the verses on “What if We Give it Away?” are mainly defined by a quaver bass line and muted playing (albeit with the occasional fill of a 12 string) that probably makes it the weakest song on this album for me, but that isn’t saying much.
After the muted feelings R.E.M. goes back to essential hard rock for “Just a Touch.” It’s maybe the most jubilant performance on the album, with sliding piano lines banging against stabs of guitar and vibrant drums. If this song ties to anything particular on this album, it is the abandon of youth. This is so clear that by the end of the song Stipe just screams out “I’m so young, I’m so goddamn young” in a way that makes you feel just as alive as when the who did similar on their most famous song of youth. Apparently this started life as an Elvis tribute. If that is true they did Elvis tributes better than that other big 80’s band.
But after all the big party songs inevitably arrives the big come down, and for this album that is “Swan Swan H”. In many respects this is the “conclusion” of the album, with Stipe giving us the final signs of encompassing night, calls of nature’s animals who are “all free now,” and marching feet of youthful heroes. And it does this through the cries of a deathly country pastiche, with Berry’s drums almost in the distance as Mills and Buck both have their own beautifully melancholic melodies. The accordion sounds the intense cry for unity, and by the end it does unite those themes of salvation in youthful togetherness: “Whiskey is water/ the water is wine.”
But references to lines from the Bible are not the Christ allusion that Lifes Rich Pageant ends on. Like an encore, the album “reverses” to play us one last song called “Superman”, a cover of a song by Clique, a band who I’m not even going to pretend I have ever heard of. Despite not being the band’s own composition (though for notability it might as well be) this final song does share themes with what came prior. Not just in the Christ/Superman comparisons that I’m sure Zack Snyder has never heard of, but how it shares the youthful abandon that has so been the perspective of the album, with Superman being the idealised notions of truth and justice that the characters – and by some extension Stipe – want to fight for: “I am Superman and I know what’s happening. I am Superman, and I can do anything”. All that is certainly met with the music, so uplifting in its gliding guitar chords, its bouncy bass, the pulsating drum work and the way Mills and Stipes vocals just seamlessly blend together (though I cannot reconcile how much the backing keyboard sounds like the alarm to my old student flat). It’s all builds to something so unapologetically inspiring that it leaves the singer with a sense of true hope…until you realise it’s actually about a guy wanting the powers of Superman so he stalk a woman. Just like you wouldn’t play “The One I Love” at your wedding, I wouldn’t recommend playing this to impress your school girl crush.
Even amidst dark subjects like stalking, the perils of the corporate and the decay of the environment affecting us all, Lifes Rich Pageant with its apt title is full of a lively party atmosphere that makes it, in my opinion, the band’s most joyous record. It was also the signs that the band had ambitions beyond just the campuses, with rock designed to fill much bigger crowds. But before they would file the documents that would inevitably close that deal, we need to take care of some dead letters…
What did you think, though?
R.E.M Album Rankings
- Lifes Rich Pageant
- Murmur
- Reckoning
- Fables of the Reconstruction