"Country Feedback" is not an attractive song. Indeed, it is probably the blackest song of REM's entire not-insubstantial body of work. Tucked inconspicuously away towards the end of "Out of Time", it is obscured by such immediately appealing hits as "Losing My Religion" and "Shiny Happy People". Yet although it would seem destined to fade away into obscurity, among the many fans who are closely familiar with REM's work it remains a firm favourite.
The song illustrates many of the recurring themes found on "Out of Time". Of love, memory and time, the three ideas identified by Michael Stipe as key to the album, love would seem to be the strongest in "Country Feedback". However, the song is not concerned with the idealised romantic love seen in many sickly songs, but rather with the imperfection of a genuine, and therefore flawed, relationship. This explains why Michael Stipe professed himself "not sure that of the 11 songs on this record I've written an outright love song". It may also explain the song's enduring popularity, since its gritty realism is far easier for listeners to identify with.
We have already noted the preoccupation with relationships which makes "Country Feedback" typical of "Out of Time" (just observe the number of songs which feature the pronouns "you" or "we"). Desolate and despairing, the song contrasts sharply with the bouncy "Shiny Happy People", but is otherwise wholly consistent with other bleak songs, such as "Low" and "Half a World Away". This idea is introduced from the very start of the album, for the superficially-buoyant "Radio Song" could well be referring to "Country Feedback" with the feeling that "the world is collapsing" and the lamentation that the song "makes me sad". "Texarkana", directly preceding "Country Feedback", sets the scene further with the particularly appropriate plea to "catch me if I fall" (a connection could clearly be drawn between this and the "Losing My Religion" video). The persona of "Country Feedback" is in painfully-visible need of such a safety net.
The song begins with a mournful string of depressing imagery, which, although obscure, is carefully chosen to identify the situation. After a scene-setting dull groan, the first four words, "This flower is scorched", immediately establish the mood, and indeed summarise the whole song. Here the flower is being used as a standard metaphor for love, since some degree of cliche is necessary here in order to set the tone so quickly, and this typical image helps to give the song a universal quality. Whether it stands for the singer's lover or, more probably, the whole relationship is unclear, but either way the familiar metaphor is appropriate because so many of the properties of a flower - natural, slow-growing from a tiny seed and dirty earth to eventual blossoming, beauty, final and inevitable decay - match aspects of the song's theme. The idea of a "scorched" flower adds a new element to this typical idea, however. Scorching comes about as a result of excessive heat, excessive passion. A scorched flower retains its basic appearance, but is essentially fatally-damaged or dead. Students of their songs will realise that REM have already drawn close parallels between fire and love, as seen in "The One I Love" and the whole album it came from, "Document", which listeners were enigmatically advised to "File Under Fire". The dull and conventional image of a flower is coupled with an original image which is itself nevertheless typical of REM.
"This film is on/On a maddening loop" (note both the uncertain hesitancy and the enactment of the words' meaning by the repetition of the word "on") similarly needs some explanation. While superficially it appears to be another piece of random mournful-sounding but meaningless imagery, it introduces the idea of repetition which recurs throughout the song, illustrating the singer's weariness. A film is also distant, impersonal, much like the relationship which forms the song's subject (as in "the distance in your eyes"). The viewer, here the singer, is left passive and powerless, only wanting to "leave the screen" ("Bang and Blame") and escape. More specifically, it could be that the film represents the singer's memories as he dwells on the past, much like "the photograph on the dashboard, taken years ago," in the later "Nightswimming". "Half a World Away" also complements many aspects of this phrase, such as the singer's frantic thoughts ("my mind is racing") and dull exhaustion ("my hand is tired my heart aches"), and may be worth a fuller comparison by the interested student.
Third in the disjointed list of obscure images is the clothes that "don't fit us right". The repetition of "these clothes" achieves much the same effect as the repetition of the word "on" (see above). The suggestion here is that while things may basically appear fine, there is a vague, hard-to-define feeling of unease and discomfort, much like ill-fitting clothes. Clothes are deeply personal and individual, and may also be sexually suggestive (but it would be reading too much into the song to suggest that the singer wants them to remove their ill-fitting attire in a sexual sense). The clothes may be representative of different roles, just as we dress differently for different occasions and jobs, and the singer is therefore essentially saying that the two protagonists need to change their relationship. Note the important use of the seemingly-insignificant word "these" (rather than the more personal "our"), for it suggests that there are other clothes, and hence that change is possible.
"I'm to blame." After some obscure but precise scene-setting imagery, this sudden, brief statement introduces us to the singer for the first time. While what came before may seem strange but carry important meaning, this bizarre statement at first seems merely out of place. To blame for what? For wearing the wrong clothes? The sentence shows the singer's preoccupation with blame, and so suggests a depressed and paranoid state of mind. It occurs to us that perhaps he is repeating (and accepting) the much-repeated accusations of his lover: "you're laying blame", as the noisier "Bang and Blame" describes it. Yet this apparent weary admission of guilt is immediately countered and discarded by the repeated sigh that "it's all the same". The singer, past caring, dismisses blame as irrelevant: "You know that's not my thing." Repetition is used as above.
With renewed energy, the singer's rambling mind turns from the relationship in general through the issue of blame (a theme also used in "I Took Your Name": "If there is some confusion/Who's to blame?") to address the woman herself. Repetition begins to be used more fully in the parallel structure of the four lines all beginning, "You come to me with," again indicating the weariness of the "maddening loop". "You come to me with a bone in your hand," uses a bone to give a primitive feel: a bone is raw, bare, exposed, stripped of flesh. Its slight danger is increased by the fact that it could be used as a weapon. The "hair curled tight" is a strange combination of the tension of "tight" and the femininity and intimacy normally associated with hair in REM songs (as in the instruction "put your hair back" in "Perfect Circle", although the sparseness and simple humility of "Hairshirt" could be used as a counterexample to stimulate further discussion). The "positions" of the next line are less clear: they could refer to sexual positions (unlikely given the state of the relationship), to positions taken in discussions or arguments, or to the new positions they find themselves in as their relationship changes. Finally, the "excuses" in the fourth line bring us back to the important theme of blame, already discussed above. In all of these lines, the singer hovers between factual accounts of real events ("You come to me...") and obscure imagery ("with a bone in your hand"), and this deliberately confuses the meaning.
The description of this woman as "ducked out in a row" is difficult and obscure, and must demand further consideration and research before it can be fully understood. The duck may be a symbol of conflict or helplessness, as in the phrase "sitting duck". The phrasal verb used creates problems because the expression is normally "to duck out of", meaning to avoid or to shirk, maybe to chicken out of. The suggestion could be that he is accusing her of chickening out in the course of (in) an argument (a row). More important is the weariness of the repeated sigh, "You wear me out," which is itself worn in its tired simplicity, and which needs no further explanation.
As the singer becomes slower and more mournful, a sudden injection of bitter energy is needed during the song to keep it moving at all, and this is the case next as the singer launches into a long list of failed attempts at recovery. The first four words, "We've been through", imply a long-standing, mature and resilient relationship, but this impression would be ironically misguided in view of the song's overall tone and the subject matter which follows. There is a painfully-long list of attempts at therapy, confirming that the relationship has become dull hard work. "Fake-a-breakdown" and "self hurt" imply pain; mouldable and artificial, impersonal "plastics" may have connotations of (plastic) surgery, emphasising the superficial cosmetic nature of things and the pain of things' being cut up; "collections" suggest the pathetic need for charity; "self help" may give the impression of abandonment by others and a weak self; "EST" could be electric shock treatment or "Erhard Sensitivity Training" (see the REM FAQs); "psychics" indicate ridiculous desperation. The individual treatments are less important, however, than the overall impression of endless futile labour, of painful work and cruelly-dashed expectation, and the singer's ultimate frustration as shown by the final dismissal, "fuck all".
The song moves from "you" to "we" to finally "I" as the singer is forced to examine his own role in the break-up of the relationship, again using repetition and a parallel structure. This is shown by short, melancholy, heavily-emphasised statements which simplify the complicated mess into basic mistakes. The singer independently acknowledges his own blame, although ironically blame is no longer an issue: "I was central/ I had control/ I lost my head". His own role in his downfall and subsequent helpless regret is perhaps the most touching aspect of the song. "I need this", he admits and repeats, and the simple language shows how fundamental this need is, how the conflict can obscure very simple but important feelings. This calls to mind "the difference between/ What you want and what you need, there's the key" ("I Believe"), and there is no doubt which applies to the singer.
Such simple but profound honesty and self-knowledge is followed by another rambling descent into obscure imagery. "A paper weight" is first drawn to mind, since it represents solidity and firmness, like the "rock" which is used in Christian tradition. Yet a paperweight supports what is flimsy and weak and easily torn: the relationship may be like paper (of course, paper may be all that is left, in the form of a formal marriage contract). A paperweight defends against the wandering wind, representing the easily-stirred passions which can easily lead a lover astray. Wind is also sad and mournful, as in "Wendell Gee". The paperweight, representing the earlier relationship, is broken, like the scorched flower.
This is indicated by the "junk garage", an image of what was once new and valuable, but which is now broken and unwanted. "Winter rain" uses traditional poetic symbolism, like the flower at the beginning, accompanied by the device of mental landscape, to convey a bleak image of what is bare, dismal and desolate. Rain is depressing but is followed by sun, but winter rain is followed only by biting cold, by frost and snow and sleet, and so offers no such respite. The honeypot, more an image of summer, may refer to the initial sweet seductive charms of the woman herself, charms whose stickiness have perhaps trapped the unwary singer. It is interesting that the very next song on the album "Out of Time" is "Me in Honey", which sheds further light on this metaphor.
The exclamation "Crazy" reminds us of the "maddening" loop of the beginning of the song, thus giving coherence and continuity. It shows the singer's confusion at the complicated and troubling position in which he finds himself. "All the lovers have been tagged", a peculiar line, suggests distrust, surveillance and a lack of freedom, things which have come to characterise the relationship. "A hotline, a wanted ad" both suggest a kind of appeal, a lonely search for something elusive which is out there. They seem to convey the singer's despair.
From there the song descends into mournful repetition, the "maddening loop" which we identified earlier, indicating the simplicity of the singer's feelings, the singer's struggling to come to terms with his position, and his preoccupation to the point of obsession with his theme. "It's crazy what you could've had" seems to be addressed to the singer himself, a lament about the chances enjoyed when "I was central" but squandered when "I lost my head". "I need this" is a pathetic statement of basic need, as we have seen.
In conclusion, "Country Feedback" is a mournful, heart-wrenching song about missed chances and the painful decline of a modern relationship. It achieves its effects through a characteristically strange but exceeding powerful combination of obscure intriguing symbolism and poignant statements of basic need. Its deep force and universal simplicity must account for much of its popularity.
