The best R.E.M. song of the 1980's

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.

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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 11^th 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.