Is the “terrible” song Michael Stipe adored in his childhood to blame for REM’s worst track?
Whether you like it or not, you’re a product of the music you grew up around. Bruce Springsteen tells a great story about the first time he heard The Beatles and how it influenced the man he became.
“‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ came on the radio in 1964 – that was going to change my life because I was going to successfully pick the guitar up and learn how to play,” he said. “The keeper was in 1964, ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ on South Street with my mother driving.”
The majority of famous musicians have had a moment like this. It usually comes when they’re young, and they hear THAT musician for the first time, the one who is going to change their life and make them want to pursue music as a career. For a lot of artists, it was The Beatles, it varies depending on the kind of songwriter you wind up listening to.
How interesting, then, that one of the most prolific songwriters in recent decades didn’t have an experience like this. Michael Stipe previously admitted that music wasn’t a huge component within his family – when his parents first got a sound system, they went to a record shop to pick out some LPs, and they found themselves scratching their heads over what to pick, rummaging around the bargain bin and grabbing a few film soundtracks.
A lot of the major songs from Stipe’s childhood don’t come from musical legends, but instead from the television he was watching. “The only music that I really had was what was on pop radio in the middle-of-nowhere Texas and what was on TV: The Monkees, The Archies, and particularly The Banana Splits, who were a band of animals that were created for a children’s TV show. The big elephant was my favourite. It was bubblegum pop,” recalled Stipe.
“We begged my mother to get a certain type of breakfast cereal because you could cut out records that were imprinted on the back of the box.”
Michael Stipe
He continued, “Those records sounded terrible, with a lot of distortion, but it’s all we knew. There was the song ‘I Enjoy Being a Boy (In Love With You)’ by The Banana Splits. I could still sing it to you right now, a cappella – for $7,000.”
When you listen to the music of Bruce Springsteen, you can hear that Beatles influence pretty clearly, but when you listen to the music of REM, you can’t exactly hear The Banana Splits and their terrible bubblegum pop, can you? No. Or… maybe you can, it just depends on what song you’re listening to. The worst track that REM ever released is obviously up for debate, but one that people cite a great deal as a low point, and one that Stipe himself has confessed to despising, is their track ‘Shiny Happy People’.
Released in 1991, Stipe was quite clearly trying to channel the likes of The Banana Splits as he admitted he was trying to create “a fruity pop song written for children.” The result was a pretty dire offering, as this overly optimistic ballad is about as forcefully cringey as it gets.
While Stipe has never admitted whether or not there is a direct connection between this track and the bubblegum pop he listened to when he was younger, it’s pretty easy to see the resemblance. The result? A song so bad that even the man who wrote it can’t stand it.
“If there was one song that was sent into outer space to represent REM for the rest of time,” he concluded, “I would not want it to be ‘Shiny Happy People’.”
