The REM album Michael Stipe said was full of “big, dumb pop songs”
There’s a certain circuitous route through the REM catalogue that is quite common to many elder millennials, in which you’re introduced to the band as a child during the height of their mainstream, major label fame in the 1990s, then backtrack in your teens and 20s into the spookier grooves of those earlier indie records from the ’80s.
A weird outpost along the way, marking the beginning of one chapter and the end of another, is the 1988 album Green. This was REM’s first album after leaving IRS Records for Warner Brothers, but it wasn’t the one with ‘Losing My Religion’ on it. It found the band still a couple years shy of supernova stardom, but growing rapidly in popularity and clearly feeling really weird about it.
“I have trouble figuring out why people like us,” guitarist Peter Buck told Gannett News in spring 1989, “I don’t know why we’ve gotten more successful. Perseverance probably. If you make decent records, eventually you get recognised.”
Most people seemed to think Green was a ‘decent’ record; there were certainly older fans who were none too pleased about REM’s drift toward mainstream pop, and some of them jumped off the bandwagon at this point, but despite being a rather bizarre and uneven collection of songs, Green had become the band’s biggest seller, powered by an unlikely hit single in ‘Stand’.
“I don’t want everyone to think we’re the greatest band in the world,” Buck added sarcastically, “Melody Maker called Green the ‘best record of the last ten years’, and I laughed. I’m sorry, it just isn’t!” The best compliment Buck was willing to give his band’s new album, while literally out promoting it, was to say that it was the first REM album on which “there’s not one song I hate”.
If you think that Michael Stipe saved the day by defending Green against its critics and proclaiming his personal pride in the album, you don’t know ’80s Michael Stipe very well. “Actually, a lot of the songs on the record are pretty dumb,” he said, agreeing with Buck’s assessment of the album being lacklustre, “They’re big, dumb pop songs”.
‘Stand’ is certainly in that category, featuring one of the more nonsensical lyrics and potentially annoying, repetitive, and childish choruses in the REM catalogue: “Stand in the place where you live / Now face north / Think about direction / Wonder why you haven’t before”. If you didn’t get the semi-joke of it all, it could grate on you, which is the same with the singles ‘Pop Song 89’ and ‘Get Up’. The anthemic ‘Orange Crush’ and high-brow ‘World Leader Pretend’, however, kept Green from getting too silly, and suggested there was still a brainy college rock band at work here, but what they were trying to say or achieve was, as ever, still hard to pinpoint.
“You can patently say across the board that anything hugely popular is loaded with simplistic ideas,” Stipe explained, “It’s a gross generalisation, but things that rise to the top are just bad.” Of course, part of what made REM the ‘band of the 1990s’, at least for a minute or two, was that ever-cool disinterest in success and lack of self-importance. Was Green going to go platinum? Would the next REM album be even bigger? The answer to both questions was ‘yes’, but Michael Stipe was bored at the thought.
“I’m not even in that horse race,” he said, “The typical temptations and trappings of huge success are unattractive to me. I would rather make music that’s respected”. So then why the emphasis on “big, dumb” songs, Michael? Young Stipe was nothing if not delightfully confusing.
