This is taken
from a piece a friend of mine, Harris King, wrote called, Beyond The
500 – The Southeast's 25 Best Songs of the 1980s. You can find it
here: Beyond The 500
He let me have
the R.E.M. pick and this is what I chose.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Let me preface my
choice by saying this was so ridiculously hard that it made me
question my commitment to sobriety. I am so very grateful to my sweet
friend, Harris, for gifting me the R.E.M. pick. (That’s true
friendship right there, gang)
After much
deliberation I am picking, “Begin the Begin” off of their
1986 album, Life’s Rich Pageant.
I was pretty sure
I would choose something off this album because it’s one of my
favorites, but deciding on a single track (as previously stated) was
extremely difficult. My initial choice was, “Fall on Me,”
just because, well, it’s so perfect, but after mulling it over a
bit I think, “Begin the Begin” is a better choice. I’m
going to contend that there are 3 distinct R.E.M periods in their
catalog. The first one is from their debut, Murmur, up
to Fables of the Reconstruction. The second period
begins with, Life’s Rich Pageant and stretches to
Automatic for the People and the third is everything
post-Monster.
Life’s
Rich Pageant is important because it’s the album that
transitioned them from what we now think of as their, “early
sound,” into the distinctive sound of their early-90’s work. Out
of Time wouldn’t exist if hadn’t been for Life’s
Rich Pageant. LRP saw them moving past the dense, murky
sounds that had been so prevalent up to this point. Stipe’s vocals
were often deliberately obscured by recording them at noticeably
lower levels than the guitars. His lyrics were sometimes
semi-unintelligible (by design) and cryptic, and at the very least
deliberately vague. Occasionally it even sounded like the four of
them were all playing a different song which, again, they pull off
amazingly.
LRP
was their most straightforward and direct rock album up to that date.
It’s like someone said, “Hey, you know what? Michael’s a pretty
good singer. Let’s turn his vocals up so people can hear them every
so often.” Stipe’s lyrics became centerpieces of the song instead
of merely complimenting the dense textures that made their sound so
atmospheric and layered. The jingly-jangly guitar sound they became
famous for was still there and it was clear that Mike Mills was still
listening to a lot of Gang of Four, but Peter Buck must have
suggested an occasional power chord or two.
It’s no
surprise then that “Begin the Begin”
is the album’s opening track because it’s one of their
most aggressive up to that point, especially in comparison to a lot
of their earlier work and it sets the tone for the entire album, or
perhaps in a larger sense, an indicator for the band’s overall
direction. It’s loud and it is in your face and it’s the perfect
beginning track. It’s been played over 350 times live and is their
11th most played song overall in concert.
The lyrics are
still delightfully vague in that special Michael Stipe sort of way.
For example, “A
philanderer's tie, a murderer's shoe.” I mean, what?
So, I love
this song, always have, but there are others tracks I probably like
more from their 1980’s catalog, but I picked this one because in
the great canon of R.E.M. it’s one of the most important. It was a
bridge from the sound of a young band still trying to define
themselves to the band they would eventually become. If Murmur
was an infant and New
Adventures in Hi-Fi
was the adult then Life’s
Rich Pageant
is the assertive teenage somewhere in the middle.
