Critical Readings of Two R.E.M. Texts
Part I: Introduction
This essay, which builds on the assumption that rock lyrics are a form of poetry and deserve being treated as quality literature, aims to test the validity of that assumption by attempting to apply the critical tools more commonly used on literary works to a small selection of lyrics from the albums of the rock group R.E.M. Examining the texts in the same way literary works are examined and demonstrating that they respond in the same way will show that these lyrics not only benefit a great deal from being treated seriously by critics - they actually demand serious treatment.
R.E.M. is a rock group, formed in Athens, Georgia in 1980 to play at a friend`s birthday party. Seventeen years later, they are still around, now as one of the most successful and influential bands in the world. The starting line-up was Bill Berry (drums, backup vocals), Mike Mills (bass guitar, piano, organ, backup vocals), Peter Buck (rhythm and lead guitar) and Michael Stipe (lead vocals), but Berry left the group in October, 1997, and no permanent replacement has been appointed. By releasing quality records nearly every year and supporting them with intense touring, R.E.M. built a steady fan base during the eighties, until they made their major breakthrough with `Losing My Religion` from the album Out Of Time in 1991. From then on, with the financial and artistic freedom that comes with fame and success, their pace has been considerably relaxed, the touring less intense and the album releases less frequent. There is some debate regarding how fame and good sales have influenced the group`s artistic ambitions and integrity, but the group members seem to ignore the entire issue and instead concentrate on doing everything their own way, in their own time. Their most recent album release is a definite indication in this direction, at least; not being supported by a tour, containing no obvious singles, and choosing the inevitable singles with apparently no regard to their commercial potential, New Adventures In Hi-Fi has sold considerably less than the preceding albums Monster, Automatic For The People and Out Of Time. The only one frustrated with the low sales is, presumably, their record company who recently signed the most expensive record contract in the history of music with the eccentric quartet.
The group's, and especially Michael Stipe's, attitude towards the media has always been peculiar, to say the least, and it is hard to ascertain when they actually mean what they tell journalists and when they are pulling the collective leg of everyone listening to their interviews; thus, R.E.M. are surrounded with an aura of mysticism, reinforced by the vague yet powerful nature of their lyrics and their music. The words are often mumbled rather than sung and the music seldom does anything to help the listener discern the words clearly, but instead buries the vocals in deep layers of instrumental mixes, producing a beautiful sound but very obscure lyrics. This is especially true of their first three albums. [1] Openly political lyrics are not uncommon in their repertoire either, and the albums Lifes Rich Pageant (sic), Document and Green, released in sequence, consist almost entirely of such songs. This essay will pay close attention to the lyrics, primarily written by Stipe, such as they are and can be determined.
My basic presumption that song lyrics can be treated as poetry - that they can be successfully read without any consideration of the music, and that something is to be gained by doing this - is vital to the validity of the entire essay. Accordingly, its own validity deserves to be asserted. Generally, it can be said that the lyrics carry meaning and emotion, whereas the music carries emotion only. However, this division is by no means clear cut, and the music can have its own meaning. This is, for example, how Michael Matessino describes Luke Skywalker`s theme in the booklet to the Star Wars: A New Hope Special Edition Soundtrack:
'This now-classic Star Wars theme perfectly conveys the heroism at the heart of the saga with the economy of its opening fifth (reaching upward), descending triplet (gathering strength for another try), and triumphant lift to an octave above the opening note (attainment of the goal). The note is savored and then the last four notes are repeated (reassurance of achievement). The phrase then rounds out simply and effectively (the task completed).' [2]Music can also be used to associate one part of the text with another part. When a theme is played along with a particularly pregnant piece of lyrics, and later repeated together with a different set of words, the two pieces of text become linked, transferring some of their meaning to each other. For a host of skilful examples of this, look to Pink Floyd`s musical epos The Wall from 1979. What qualifies my earlier statement about the words generally carrying the meaning of the song is the fact that to notice these kinds of meaning hidden in the musical elements of a song requires a very attentive listener, and possibly also a conscious effort to analyse the music; the words of a song require no such effort in order to yield surface meaning, at least. In addition, the interlacing effect relies on the lyrics to be effective, and would not work at all without them.Then how important is the music to the song - is it possible to remove it and still find what is left of the song to be meaningful? Naturally, if the work is of a purely instrumental art to begin with, this is impossible; you would end up with silence of a certain length, which is not normally considered meaningful if bereft of a context. Otherwise, what you get when removing the music from a song at least looks very much like a poem, or in cases like R.E.M.'s `It`s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)`, a prose poem.
It has been argued by several people in the Usenet newsgroup rec.music.rem that the lyrics of R.E.M. are so tightly tied up with their musical context that to sever the link between them is to destroy the unity of the work; the impact of the whole exceeds the sum of its parts. While this is true enough, it does not imply that such a parting cannot be done; nor does it preclude the possibility that by doing so, new insights can be made into the text of any song, and by extension, into the work as a whole. The whole argument runs parallel to what is often done to drama: interpretations of, say, Macbeth usually do not concern themselves with actual performances (which are subjective in any case, different with each new performance), but rather with the actual text Shakespeare provided us with. Why should analysts of drama be permitted to remove a vital part of the work - the actors - while music analysts are disallowed a similar kind of stripping to highlight certain elements, textual elements in my case? There is no reason for such a dissimilar and unfair treatment of the two related disciplines, and consequently I will not honour any attempt to impose such limitations on my work.
The next part of the anti-separation argument is that the lyrics were written with the intent of going with a specific piece of music. Chris [Steve] Piuma is the chief advocate of the Usenet newsgroup of the importance of the music in this respect, arguing that vital layers of assonance and rhythm are lost in the transposition from music to poetry. His stance is that authorial intention is essential. If a given text was written as poetry, it should not be set to music, because that is not its supposed task, and similarly, lyrics are meant for singing, so there is no point in just reading them. This is, in my view, a very unimaginative outlook, not allowing for new approaches to old material, and more restrictive than it is fruitful. Even assuming that nothing good comes from treating lyrics as poetry, at least nothing evil can happen either. At worst, a certain amount of time will be wasted, but at best, which is what I am aiming for, new light is shed on the lyrics when no one thought there would be anything more to be found in them. Ideally, the method used to interpret songs should be first to detach the lyrics from the music, analyse each separately according to literary theory and music theory, respectively, in addition to a holistic interpretation of the song as a unified whole. Then the results of all three analyses can be fused into a much fuller interpretation than any of the three constituent parts could hope to produce alone. Unfortunately, this is seldom, if ever, done; it would be necessary to have adequate skills in both literary and musical theory, quite aside from the fact that an approach of this kind would be very time consuming.
Whether or not the author intended to make the lyrics readable as poems is not important; what matters is whether or not they can actually be treated in this way. As the purpose of this paper is to determine if it works like a poem, I cannot engage in complex studies of elements like metre, assonance and rhythm, since such studies mainly clarify whether or not a text looks and sounds like a poem. Neither can I worry about authorial intention, because even if the authorial intention behind a text could be determined, pointing out which of the manifold interpretations is the one the author was consciously aware of at the time of writing is rather pointless even if it was possible. Michael Stipe confessed in 1985 that `"Pilgrimage" still baffles me. At one point right after we recorded it I heard it and it made perfect sense. I was so exhilarated. I thought I had accomplished what I set out to do. And then I forgot! As the person singing the song, I have no idea what people are looking at.' [3] Hence, I must instead ask if the lyrics respond to the kind of critical study that literary works such as poems normally are subjected to. To do so, I need to remove the music from my sample songs and place the words in readable form.
It is not unproblematic to represent lyrics, and especially R.E.M. lyrics, on paper. The first obstacle on the road to making a poem out of a song is to hear what the singer is actually singing - not an easy task in some cases. Michael Stipe is notorious for mumbling rather than singing, and it is a fact, however frustrating, that several of the early R.E.M. songs do not have words as such; Stipe often produced sounds rather than words when it suited him to do so. At the start of their career, playing in local pubs and at parties, Stipe says that `[w]e decided that the words don`t matter anyway, `cause nobody cared what you were saying. It was a good sound they wanted. I just got up and howled and hollered a lot.` [4] While this attitude became less common over the years, and could be considered as extinct nowadays, no one can be totally sure when this is the case in the earlier songs, although educated guessing is always an option. Interviews with the singer or the band may sometimes reveal information of this kind, but as all four members are prone to exaggerations, melodrama and irony during even the most serious of interviews, such statements should be taken lightly in most cases. In the words of R.E.M.'s guitarist Peter Buck, `R.E.M. is part lies, part heart, part truth and part garbage.` [5] Thus we have two problems here: to know what sounds are inherently meaningless, and to know what the actual words are, in the cases where such words exist. The only solution is to listen hard, or to rely on what other people have agreed on hearing in the muddled passages. There is an R.E.M. lyrics archive available on the Internet, which represents the efforts of several hundred R.E.M. fans to decipher Stipe`s words. Their methods include intensive listening, stereophonic separators, and comparing different recorded versions of the same song, among others. It is fair to say that while this archive can probably never hope to be totally accurate, it is the closest approximation currently available, and in this essay, I have relied quite heavily on the archive version of `Harborcoat`, one of my two sample songs. To determine my working version of `Harborcoat`, I examined the lyrics archive while listening to the actual song, and modified the archived version to better fit what I hear. On the other hand, where there is a better version available, as is the case with `World Leader Pretend`, I have naturally chosen that one instead.
The strongest argument against translating the words of a song into written form is that any phonemic ambiguities, a common device in Stipean wordsmithing, are inevitably lost. A written version must choose only one of several equally valid interpretations of his suggestive mumblings and lose the others. This presents an obvious problem, limiting the original richness of the work. The obvious solutions consist of indicating the ambiguities in footnotes or the like, or to write the problematic words, or maybe the whole poem, in phonetic notation. There is also a third, much more attractive, option: to choose an interpretation and stick with it, with the possibility of dealing with the alternative versions in another, different, analysis. This is what I have chosen to do in this essay. Thus, my object of study is the set of versions of the selected songs that can be found in the appendices to this essay; the difference between this and the Internet lyrics archive is slight but noticeable.
One final complication in translating a song into a readable version is the frequent occurrence of ad lib improvisation and other deviations from what should be considered the original text. `Country Feedback` is an excellent example of this problem, as the final two minutes of the song consist of Michael Stipe repeating the lines `It`s crazy what you could`ve had/Crazy what you could`ve had/I need this/I need this` over and over. This sounds wonderful; however, not only does it look extremely boring on the page, but upon even the most cursory of surveys it is plain to hear that it is never performed the same way twice. I base this on the album version, the live version in their tour film Roadmovie, and other unofficially released live recordings. The exact order and number of occurrences of the four lines in question do not appear to matter, and from this I draw the conclusion that they are not part of the original, basic text. Instead, I would suggest that the lines should be represented once at the end, or twice at most, and the repetitions should be ignored when putting the words to this song on the page. This removes some of the redundancy from the lyrics, focuses the ending more, and simply looks better, without significantly upsetting the structure of the text. The same procedure should be applicable to other songs as well, and I have consequently performed this procedure in one form or another where I have deemed it necessary and suitable. However, the songs in which it was necessary to do so were not included for examination in this essay because of space restrictions; `Harborcoat` and `World Leader Pretend` needed no such treatment. `World Leader Pretend` is already prepared in this way by Michael Stipe himself.
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