‘What’s The Frequency Kenneth’: The REM song deliberately made to be “inscrutable”
Why does the music of artists we love mean so much to us? Why is it that bands such as REM resonate on a deep level? Well, it all comes down to human connection.
Listening to good music isn’t just pleasant, but when you stumble upon lyrics that perfectly describe how you’re feeling, or that capture the way you perceive something, you experience something much deeper than just sound itself. Artists mean so much to people because they make the world much less of a lonely place, and it’s their ability to describe how you’re feeling that has such an effect.
Michael Stipe fully understands just how vital music can be when it comes to making these connections with different people through music. A lot of his songs use beautiful lyricism in a bid to convey feelings of both love and loss. For instance, his classic ‘Losing My Religion’ plays on faith to represent how it feels to lose touch with someone.
“I love the idea of writing a song about requited love,” he once said in an interview, “About holding back, reaching forward, and then pulling back again. The thing for me that is most thrilling is you don’t know if the person I’m reaching out for is aware of me. If they even know I exist. It’s this really tearful, heartfelt thing that found its way into one of the best pieces of music the band ever gave me.”
It’s clear that there are some lyrics which Stipe has written with the intention for them to be understood. As is the case with ‘Losing My Religion’, he wanted listeners to understand that the song is about requited love, but that there are also layers to peel back about how justified said love is.
While Stipe approached some songs in this way, there are other songs where he took a much more abstract approach towards conveying meaning effectively. When he chose to try to write about generational gaps and the complications that come with them, Stipe decided it would be best to reflect that confusion by creating equally confusing lyrics. The result was the song ‘What’s The Frequency Kenneth’, a track which fans were incredibly confused by, and that no one knew the meaning of until Stipe explained it.
“I was writing a song about a generational gap and a character who’s desperately trying to understand a younger generation’s perspective and failing miserably at it,” he explained, “And the phrase ‘Kenneth what’s the frequency?’ or ‘What’s the frequency Kenneth?’ ( I think I turned it) represents inscrutability. It’s the big question, no one knew what it meant, that it represented trying and trying and trying, but not arriving at any answer. So, it’s inscrutable.”
Stipe’s understanding of songwriting is inspired. He appreciates the fact that, given that people turn to music for connection, it can be effective to use lyrics to convey a definitive meaning. However, he also appreciates that an abstract approach towards art can also work. When you listen to REM’s discography, the different methods that Stipe takes towards songwriting make it so that no two songs seem the same.
