dellpickle76
Fruit Bat
Trainspotting + R.E.M fan boyand goth-adjacent gym rat
130 posts
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Various pauline doodles I've drawn over the course of a couple months (slow ik). Think I've had my fill 😭
Zoom in on strawberry fields paul 'cos it's my fav out of the bunch
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363: R.E.M. // Murmur
Murmur
R.E.M.
1983, IRS
Some Short, Disconnected Statements on the Matter of Murmur
1. Insert the following into Waring blender
The Velvet Underground, Pylon, the Byrds, Gang of Four, Patti Smith, the Feelies, Joy Division, the Method Actors, Big Star, the dB’s, the Monkees. Press “Blend” button. (I’ve never owned a blender; I don’t know what the buttons say.)
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2. Easy formula for a great band
Having one temperamental genius songwriter guy sounds kind of hard to maintain. Have you considered simply getting four people who are really excellent and distinctive at the respective things they do (at least three of them great singers), who all write well, get along, lack substance abuse issues, have good taste, and modest egos? Why don’t more bands do this?
3. Notes on the early discourse
A lot of the things people wrote back in the early ‘80s to champion this band were dumb as hell. R.E.M. weren’t good because they didn’t use keyboards or synths; pop music didn’t need to be returned to its "honest" folk-rock roots; giving them a thumbs up for not wearing flashy clothes and makeup is dork behaviour.
They were good because they made weird music that derived organically from their time (early ‘80s), place (a college town in the South), and selves (bright, independent, adventurous, sincere, ¼ gay).
Anyone who listened to Chronic Town or Murmur, with their post-punky murk and lyrical references to Laocoön and Marat, and thought to themselves, “As yes, the second coming of Roger McGuinn, this will put those effete new wavers to flight,” was an idiot.
4. Veteran of the psychic war
Somewhere around age 22, R.E.M. took over the mantle Metallica had held as My Favourite Band in the World Forever and Ever, and I proceeded to be almost as annoying about them as I had been Hetfield and the boys. I posted a lot about them; rigged “best music” polls on random message boards I didn’t even post on in their favour; cornered people at parties; crowbarred them into playlists; grumpily chose to dislike bands I saw as stealing their shine; etc. etc. Some (some) of this is maybe cute in retrospect, but really: don’t be like this about music. If you love a band this much, learn how to play their songs on an instrument; write a few poems; paint something. Worst case: review them.
5. Learning nothing, 2024
6. Athens: Lyrics & Enunciation
The matter of what exactly Stipe was singing on the early R.E.M. records was a subject of intense speculation, and eventually, parody. Some of the mystery’s in the mixing, some’s in his Georgian accent, and some’s in his enunciation (never quite as mushy as people claimed, but not exactly Ella Fitzgerald either). But most of it’s in the arbitrary decisions he makes with regard to syntax that cause even accurate transcriptions to seem implausible. Stipe is probably a little bit autistic, which goes some way to explaining the impressionistic intuitiveness of his words, and also went to art school, which fetishizes that sort of thing, but he was always shy of people seeing the words to something like “Sitting Still” on the page because he thought he might be exposed as a nincompoop. “Up to par and Katie bars / The kitchen side, but not me in / Sitting top of the big hill / Waste of time sitting still,” goes the chorus, according to at least one gnostic sect, but the important passage is the one everyone agrees on, when the stream of impassioned babble releases into a howled “I can hear you / Can you hear me?”
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Later on, when he would sing more clearly over airy arrangements, with the lyrics neatly printed in the booklet, he’d occasionally try one of those old sound-over-sense moves and embarrass himself (“Leaving New York was never my proud” still rankles). But Murmur’s eternal elusiveness is in the way fragments of sense catch your ear from out of its sleeptalk glossolalia:
“The pilgrimage has gained momentum”
“Conversation fear”
“Lighted, lighted / Laughing in tune”
“Hear the howl of the rope / A question”
“A perfect circle of acquaintances and friends / Drink another, coin a phrase”
“Shaking through / Opportune”
“Take oasis”
“Heaven assumes / Shoulders high in the room”
“Did we miss anything?”
7. Permission to be arbitrary
I remember sitting in the basement of my college house with my old hometown buddy Brad (mostly a metal/classic rock guy), playing him “Shaking Through” and explaining one of the things I love about old R.E.M. is that it’s great music to yell to. I don’t know how much he really got it, but we were drunk and it’s a catchy song, so we howled and made keening, wordless, Stipean noises along with it and the next few until one of my roommates came and asked us to keep it down.
Also: one theory for why cats purr when they’re injured is that the vibrations somehow reduce pain and encourage healing. From many experiences humming these songs while wrapped up in headphones and bedsheets in the middle of a day that’s passing like a kidney stone, I can confirm.
8. Note on the modern discourse: Influence?
Black Francis, Kurt Cobain, Bob Mould, Steve Malkmus, Bob Pollard, and Thom Yorke loved R.E.M. So did, to his own apparent consternation, Metallica’s Cliff Burton. Still, you sit down with someone and listen to those musicians with the goal of showing them the R.E.M. influence (don’t do this, why would you do this?) and it’s honestly pretty oblique. Most of the bands who directly aped aspects of R.E.M.'s early sound were at best pleasantly minor (see Captured Tracks’ Strum & Thrum comp), and the ones who seemed to be listening most closely to their ‘90s efforts were not who you want.
Their ultimate influence was probably simply showing what an art-first, indie-adjacent rock band could accomplish by sticking to their guns and bending the system to their desires instead of being bent by it. They were like a Velvet Underground for the college rock era, except everyone talented who heard them was inspired to start a band that didn’t sound much like them. They always used their spotlight to introduce people to other bands and, when they really got huge, they modeled how to deal with success. There don’t seem to be many R.E.M. stories, Peter Buck’s airplane incident aside, about them being anything other than kind. That’s a fundamentally less exciting type of influence than most other “great” bands have. But I do think it’s kinda cool they were the wise old heads for an entire national movement of alternative music.
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Of course, it still bugs me people don’t think they’re cool. Murmur at least, should be considered cool. And Reckoning, mostly. Chronic Town for sure. Some of Fables. Am I crazy for saying some of Monster and New Adventures even? I’ll stop. I’ll go on.
9(-9). The music
They were a pop band, they were an art band; they sounded like children, and like craggy old men buried in kudzu weed; natural and pretentious; date-stamped and timeless. Decide yourself. Happy 41st birthday Murmur.
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363/365
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finished reckoning, now that I'm done with all 9 of the first patterns I made maybe I'll move on to the next batch
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TODAY IN HISTORY: Belka and Strelka, pride of the Soviet Union, became the first dogs to fly in space and return safely to Earth, August 19, 1960.
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From SPEX magazine, January 1989. Photo by Peter Boettcher.
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Peter Buck, Michael Stipe, Billy Berry, Mike Mills. Photo: Tom Sheehan, 1984.
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only always 🖤💘
hi everyone. does anybody else miss something they can never return to. anyone else being swallowed whole by grief. anyone else clinging to love as a life preserver
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Pointer
By: Unknown photographer
From: Disney��s Wonderful World of Knowledge
1973
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page 276 of “The babyhood of wild beasts” (1917)
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"you don't know [insert popular tiktok trend]? you must live under a rock" Well i do. for your information i actually live in a thriving soil ecosystem complete with damp moss and various insects including pill bugs, beetles, and ants
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some loser: humans are innately selfish creatures
my psych book:
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I believe ‘Lifes Rich Pageant’ and ‘Document’ would be more cohesive if ‘Begin the Begin’ and ‘King of Birds’ switched places. Time travel isn’t possible so obviously there’s no way of changing this, but they seem a little out of place on their respective albums. ‘Begin the Begin’ and ‘Finest Worksong’ are siblings, and such is the case with ‘The Flowers of Guatemala’ and ‘King of Birds’.
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Grey seal pup
By: E. A. Smith
From: Natural History Magazine
1962
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I remember when I was little and we would travel down to the ocean at Christmas time and every night my parents would tuck me into bed and play this song on my dad's i-pod, quietly, to put me to sleep. They would shut my bedroom door just a little bit so that there was still a stream of light coming from the hallway, and I would slowly drift off to sleep to the sounds of my family talking in the living room and the distant sounds of waves down by the ocean, with Man On The Moon playing softly on repeat next to me.
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