The best song on ‘Accelerate’, according to Michael Stipe
There’s nothing quite like a long-tenured band making a “return to their roots” album to remind you that, really, you can never go home. Whether it’s U2 with Songs of Innocence/Experience or Green Day with Father of All…, the story is always the same—a jaded band of millionaires trying to force themselves back into trousers they long since outgrew. It can be either intentionally or unintentionally cringe, with almost no in-between. Unless, of course, you’re lucky enough to be REM.
In 2008, Michael Stipe’s group released Accelerate, a record explicitly pitched as a back-to-basics guitar record after a few albums floated around in vague electronic productions and synth-y miasma. While it wasn’t the commercial smash the band were hoping for, it was a critical hit and contained one song that sums up everything that made that record so special. The record’s lead single ‘Supernatural Superserious’.
Crunching in on Peter Buck’s swaggeringly simple Rickenbacker chords, there’s an argument to be made that ‘Supernatural…’ isn’t actually a throwback to classic REM. For one, it’s a lot more direct than most of their work on the likes of Document and Green. Buck forsaking his trademark picking for more straight-ahead rawk riffage, and Stipe singing with more vocal and lyrical clarity than he ever would have had the confidence to do in his band’s heyday.
That lyrical clarity is also the heart of this song. Stipe’s warm, almost comforting voice says it’s OK if “The details smart, but the story’s the same / You don’t have to explain / You don’t have to explain / Humiliation of your teenage station”. In an interview with Jessica Letkemann for Billboard conducted in 2008, Stipe went into surprising detail about the song’s themes of teenage humiliation and how those moments inform our adulthood.
When asked what inspired them to write it as people who weren’t just adults but were pushing 50 at the time, Stipe said, “I have friends — who are adults — who move with such grace and poise through life and, in fact. completely embrace the incredibly stupid aspects of growing up and the humiliating teenage moments. They can totally laugh about and make fun of themselves and allow themselves to be, I think, more of a complete adult because of it.”
The reason ‘Supernatural…’ manages to thread the “back to basics” needle better than any other band is quite simple. It’s because neither the song nor the album it came from is trying to convince the listener that no time has passed. It’s not 1987 anymore, and that’s a good thing. With experience, we can take the best of what we’ve done before and improve it with more wisdom and care than we ever showed in our teenage years and our 20s.
It’s telling that, as we creep up to 20 years on from that album, the band still look upon the record fondly. It didn’t bring them back to being one of the world’s biggest bands, but that’s what experience and hindsight are all about. They knew that they never really wanted to be that big and instead embraced their role as elder statesmen to the people who really understood them and really needed them. To this day, as he’s detailed in many interviews, Stipe still ranks ‘Supernatural Superserious’ as one of the best songs the band ever recorded and a song that he’s still immensely proud of.
This is a genuinely underrated classic in a world where the term ‘underrated’ is overused. If this is the first time you’re reading about it, give the song and the record it’s from a spin. You won’t regret it.
