This is R.E.M. in a nutshell: a self-righteous dig at polluters, and a self-effacing dig at grandstanding rock stars, all filmed in jumbled montage just because it looks cooler that way. R.E.M. is the little Georgia band with the big global consciousness. Formed in the late days of punk, they’ve moved into the mainstream with their integrity and fastidiousness intact, pursing their lips alike at vulgarity within the rock world and evil without. They’ve succeeded, as guitarist Peter Buck told Rolling Stone, as “the acceptable edge of the unacceptable stuff.”
As nutshells go, this is a winner. It’s concise, obviously heartfelt and eminently marketable. And it has made the band– sleeves rolled in larger-than-life cuffs, natural-fiber shirts creased in larger-than-life wrinkles - big rock stars. Their new album, “Out of Time,” sold a million copies in its first 10 days of release. After a decade of acting out their commitment to values on stage and on camera, this earnestness has become one of pop music’s more bankable commodities; in 1988 Warner Bros. Records signed the band for a reported $10 million. R.E.M. is to sincere, politically correct regular guys what Paula Abdul is to dancing tarts.
It is also arguably the best rock band in America, now playing at the top of its game. “Out of Time,” the band’s seventh album (not counting compilations) is a knowing dissection of pop styles and artifices, a collection of asymmetric folk-rock songs that bend and twist just out of reach. The most straightforward of the bunch stops flat in the middle for a waltz movement in a different time signature. Fleshed out with strings and familiar pop devices, including a rap cameo, the album is the band’s most conventional to date, but only in that it tackles pop conventions head on.
Since forming in the college town of Athens, Ga., in 1980, R.E.M. has at times flirted with awkward, high-flown political sententiousness (“We are old despite the years/We are concern,” went one song, sort of a recycler’s rewrite of the old Monkees theme). But with success, according to Stipe, “Now I can hold a press conference to bring out the horrors of toxic waste. and it doesn’t necessarily have to go into the songs.” Instead, “Out of Time” is a collection of love songs. “With ‘Document’ and ‘Green’ [the band’s previous two albums], we were set up as a political band,” Stipe explained. “The challenge was to write love songs, which we’ve never done and I’ve always despised. I think they’re common.” These aren’t ordinary love songs. As bassist Mike Mills said, “Where a riff might usually dominate a song, we have it cut up, or go five times instead of four. Where a chorus is often the focal point, we don’t always present it as such.” R.E.M. never gets much more direct than when Stipe muses, over a strummed acoustic guitar and mandolin, “I think I thought I saw you try.” These guys hide more than they give away.
This eloquent ambivalence sets the band up as a bellwether for a generation unsure of how to express itself. R.E.M. approaches love as it has everything: haltingly, wary of their language reducing itself to ad copy, their songs to new-age jingles. In the era of perfectly formed pop singles, R.E.M.’s music has been willfully incomplete and circuitous, as if the finishing touch was the embalmer’s. “We knew from the very beginning,” Mills said, “not what we wanted to do, but what we didn’t want to do. And that’s how we’ve based our decisions, even up to this point.”
A knowing innocence: So far, it’s worked for them. One of the legacies punk left musicians was an awareness of how they play in the media, and how the media play them. This, more than the old oppressive specter of Dad, has been the obstacle creative pop acts of the last 10 years have to find their way around. While many of their literate peers have hid behind cynicism or heroic pomp, R.E.M. has just plain hid. They slurred lyrics that were opaque anyway. Even politically, the band has rarely gone out into the field of battle; their songs are about the homespun virtue of having values, not the grand theater of bringing the enemy down. They didn’t, until now, lip-sync in their videos.
They are the first major rock stars to succeed by being so openly distrustful of rock and roll. “Radio Song,” from “Out of Time,” begins, “The world is collapsing around our ears” and closes with the rapped warning “Our children grow up prisoners / All their lives radio listeners.” Buck harrumphs, “I look at 90 percent of the people that have that rock-and-roll attitude, and they just end up looking really stupid.” R.E.M. are moralists in part because life has more dignity that way. To an audience that feels cheated on pop integrity, this hits home.
In the R.E.M. office in Athens, life’s errors are fixed with OPTI fluid, a German correction liquid that’s nontoxic and not tested on animals. Here, away from the crowds, are the simple declaratives the band shies away from in its music: the quiet campaigns for the environment, for Greenpeace, for voter registration and local political candidates. All paper in the office is recycled; even the shellac is biodegradable. In an essay in the teen magazine Sassy, billed as “Michael Stipe reports on his compost heap,” he wrote, “We’re acting more as citizens than we are as pop stars. I’m not necessarily a political [song]writer. I’m not very deft at revolution.” Self-righteous and self-effacing to the end.
