‘Stand’: the philosophy behind a “stupid” REM classic
Whenever one gets too close to defining REM, they have this cat-like ability to go and be the complete opposite. This band, whose chiming indie-rock could have come from the Minneapolis or New York underground, are actually as southern as sweet tea and grits. A band who could be a byword for Ken-doll-like sexlessness have songs as sensual as ‘Nightswimming’ and ‘Star Me Kitten’.
Most of all, no matter how rigidly joyless they could get, they always had a sense of fun just waiting to burst through. The best example of all their magnificent contradictions coming together on record is their 1989 record Green.
Having just broken into the mainstream with 1987’s masterful Document, Green was a chance to prove that there was genuine mainstream appeal in the underground of American rock and that ‘The One I Love’ reaching the top ten hadn’t been a fluke. Having just signed a mega-deal with Warner Brothers that guaranteed the band full creative control over their music, fans were keen to hear the most boundary-pushing and progressive music of their whole career.
What they got, in the form of Green’s first two singles, ‘Orange Crush’ and ‘Stand’… weren’t that. They were upbeat guitar anthems instead. The former was at least an edgy anti-war piece, but ‘Stand’ began to make fans believe that REM were doing that most dreaded of meaningless music fan buzzwords, “selling out.”
The irony of this was that ‘Stand’ was arguably the clearest example of what the band had been trying to do with Green from the very beginning, which was, in Michael Stipe’s words, “not write REM songs.” Just as the heavy riffage of ‘I Remember California’, and the mandolin-picking sensitivity of ‘You Are The Everything’ were dramatic departures from the band’s icy post-punk, so was ‘Stand’ with its cartoonish pop hooks.
A conscious attempt to ape the bubblegum bangers of The Archies and The Monkees, the band have described creating ‘Stand’ as an attempt to make the most stupid song they could… without that necessarily being a bad thing. In the pages of their book It Crawled From The South, Stipe described ‘Stand’ as “perhaps the stupidest statements ever written in lyric form.”
He elaborated on this in an interview with MTV, saying the band “threw these super bubblegummy songs at me, and I said, ‘I’ll raise you and see you one.’ And I wrote the most insane lyrics that I could possibly write. It was a very intentional thing to do that.” In true REM fashion, though, the moment you write ‘Stand’ off as a throwaway novelty song paying tribute to the Banana Splits, you take a second look at the lyrics and find that Stipe may have been selling himself short there.
For such a silly song, Mike Mills points out in an interview with Rolling Stone that it “actually (has) a pretty serious theme of, ‘Be who you are and accept what you have.’” Stipe himself talked about this with Q Magazine in 1998, saying, “It’s about making decisions and actually living your life rather than letting it happen.”
So, next time you’re listening to something that sounds like a throwaway pop song, listen a little deeper. You never know what you might learn. Unless it’s ‘Shiny Happy People’, though. There’s no excusing that.
