Begin The Analysis
Posted on | July 3, 2008 at 10:55 pm | Comments Off
I’ve been making my way through Entertainment Weekly’s 1000th issue the last few weeks, which features “The New Classics: The 1000 Best Movies, TV Show, Albums, Books & More of the Last 25 Years”. EW does love their lists. On their list of the top 100 albums of the last 25 years, the R.E.M. album Lifes Rich Pageant comes in at #32. (Pet Peeve of the Day: The album is erroneously listed as “Life’s Rich Pageant”, even though R.E.M. intentionally left the grammatically correct apostrophe off the album title. I can believe that they just messed up in the print edition, but since they have yet to fix it online, it appears they are clueless.) It’s the only R.E.M. album on the list, even though all of them are eligible – their first album Murmur came out 25 years ago.
On a music mailing list that I’m on, there was a discussion recently about Lifes Rich Pageant where I thought I had to defend it. I thought I was one of the few R.E.M. fans who placed the album near the top of their catalog (if not the top). But then I was surprised when others defended it as well. And now I’m really surprised that EW has essentially declared it the best R.E.M. album. I always thought the conventional mainstream wisdom was more in favor of Automatic For The People, Out Of Time, Green, or even Document. And the fans were more into the first three albums. LRP just kind of seemed out there on its own between the two extremes, not really preferred by anyone.
Anyway, here’s what EW says:
Previously confined to the college-rock ghetto, the Athens, Ga., quartet produced an album of lean, mean straightforward rockers. The result: a killer collection, highlighted by the chiming “Fall on Me.”
The “college-rock ghetto”? Though “Fall on Me” was their biggest hit up to that point, I’m not sure it really catapulted them out of that alleged ghetto. It took Document and “The One I Love” to do that. But it’s not like they were that unknown before LRP.
Though there are definitely rockers on the album, and it’s probably the closest thing to a rocking album they’d come up with by that point, I would hesitate to classify it as “an album of straightforward rockers”. “Chiming” does not exactly equal “rocker”, although “Fall on Me” does manage to be both, I guess. Not to mention the fact that nothing R.E.M. does is ever “straightforward”, musically or lyrically. You can finally hear Stipe actually enunciating words on this album, but the meanings of those words are nearly as elusive as on the first three albums.
So, I just thought it was a strange, but oddly pleasant, thing for EW to declare. I guess I agree with their reckoning, if not their analysis. I know these lists are made by committee and don’t really reveal or mean much, but they’re fun to talk about and they generate some buzz. I just don’t understand how a list of the best music of the past 25 years can have a Justin Timberlake album and no Plants And Birds And Rocks And Things from the Loud Family, but that’s a discussion for another time. I’m still in some kind of indie-rock ghetto and out of touch with the listmakers.
Latre.
Jogged Today: Yes (@ 57°F)
Songs That Came Up On The iPod While Jogging:
- “A Strange Kind of Love (Version 1)” (Peter Murphy)
- “Twitch” (Bif Naked)
- “Butterball” (Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass)
- “Agent’s Got A Secret” (Dada)
- “NYC” (Interpol)
- “Weathervane” (Miles Dethmuffen)