Tough Choice

For the past few month, some friends and I have been participating in a cd exchange. Nine people have each created a cd built around a particular theme or idea, burned multiple copies, traded the cds, listened to them, and then gathered to discuss them. It’s like a book club, only with cds.

In making newest version of the cd, I, like always, have been torn about what to include and what to jettison. The choice gets more difficult the more I think about it, and the theme this time—high school mix tape-- only made things more complicated. In addition to haggling over which artists to keep, I’ve been debating over two songs by the same artist. The two finalists are both REM songs, “Man on the Moon” and “You Are the Everything.” Both songs are terrific and both are meaningful, for different reasons.

REM was one of the first bands I obsessed over in which the passion was not directly rooted in the relative attractiveness of one of the band members. Disclaimer: I have been known to wax poetic over Michael Stipe’s hotness, and still will on occasion, but his physical charms were not the reason I liked REM so much. I liked REM for their lyrics and their music and I am willing to bet I would have liked them any way, even if I had never seen what they looked like. They seemed vaguely Southern, their music vaguely danceable, but they were completely cool. That coolness was exponentially connected with the obscurity of their lyrics.

That lyrical opacity was due to two things: the mumble-ly, scattered way Stipe has of singing and the utter inscrutability of some of those sets of words. Stipe’s voice can hardly be called melodious and he doesn’t have that large of a range. The percussive, staccato delivery often makes some of the words he sings hard to hear. When I first fell in love with REM, I spent many a pre-Google night in my room, with one hand poised above the pause button of my stereo and the other furiously scribbling what I thought Stipe was saying. There were frequent rewindings and frequent mishearings, providing some of the best mondogreens I’ve collected. For instance, “Country Feedback’s” line “this film is on/on a maddening loop” became “this film is on/on a man named Lou.” My friends and I heard “Oh no!/Kevin Crock/look at that” in “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.” Still, almost 15 years later, these silly slips leave me in stitches. Maybe we thought Stipe was name-dropping every person he ever met, but the point is, his words are hard to hear. They’re hard to understand too.

When our collective tape-listening sessions were actually successful, we still didn’t know what to do with the right words. What exactly was Stipe getting at when he said “these clothes don’t fit us right”? What does bergamot have to do with finding rivers? What is bergamot? Why should I care if Stipe believes his throat hurts (because it does, right? So why “believe” instead of “my throat hurts”?)? I’m not sure, and frankly, I wouldn’t believe Stipe if he told us what they meant. They didn’t necessarily have to mean anything. That’s what engaged me. I could spend hours thinking about what he was saying, crafting my own meaning, instead of figuring geometry proofs or learning to use a graphing calculator. Those lyrics sounded like jumbled Beat poetry to my untrained, unlearned self, and I loved them.

I also loved that I could muse with my best friends about them while we sat in someone’s living room. Or when we pretended to be the band itself. It’s true. On more than one occasion, several friends and I would crank the music and hop around, strumming badminton rackets, golf clubs and baseball bats, singing into invisible microphones. Yes, I was a little old to be pretending to be in a band, and yes, it’s a little weird I wasn’t pretending to be Courtney Love or Lisa Loeb. But REM connected me to what I was—someone who loved words—and pointed me toward what I would become---someone who would channel that affection into so many things, including her future career. Someone who would never be embarrassed to break it down on a dance floor, and who frequently was the first in an audience on her feet. (Besides, who doesn’t pretend, almost daily, to be someone they’re not?)

So, why these two songs? Truth be told, the song should be “Nightswimming” that exquisitely beautiful thing on the second side of Automatic For the People that so eloquently speaks of the awkwardness and thrill of being young and so pointedly reminds me of my friends that sometimes, it hurts to hear. (I remember one cold night during Christmas break after my first year of college. We had gone to the Waffle House and Lee, Ginnie, Gail and I drove back to my parents’. We took the long way around so we could finish listening to “Nightswimming.” The windows of my 626 were fogged from so much talk and so many tales). But, a fellow cd-club participant had already used it on a previous disc, and no one wants to be a copycat.

“Man on the Moon” seems an obvious choice. I actually listened to it in high school and it connects with the fun bouncy-ness of my senior year, when the whole world seemed wide-open and shiny. It felt like that move Stipe makes in the video for the song where he swings himself onto the cab of an 18 wheeler; he’s wearing a straw cowboy hat and grinning big. But, this is REM, after all, and the buoyancy of the song is tinged with a kind of hesitation.

It pits belief against empiricism, replacing St. Peter’s Basilica with a truck stop; pairing Moses with Newton and his scientific harnessing of nature’s laws; mentioning (gasp!) Charles Darwin. Belief wins out in this song, but Stipe continually questions. He subjunctifies-- asking “if” instead of saying out right “Andy Kaufman’s crazy life is proof there is more than what you see and touch. There is something bigger and beyond your perception.”

Something of that attitude is what I seized when I graduated high school. I thought “I’m not sure how this will turn out, but I have a pretty good idea this will be fun.” I didn’t know it, but I believed it. And I was right. Plus, “Man on the Moon” was a number our pretend band could really rock out on. Lots of opportunities for hopping around.

“You Are the Everything,” then, is a little different. It’s a song I didn’t begin to like until college, though I was aware of it. It’s not the REM that hooked me either: its music is quiet, its lyrics straightforward. At the time, I thought it overly sentimental, not “very deep,” which meant I could hear and understand all the words. So I thought.

When I listen to it now, it seems like a more accurate description of who I was—and who many high school students probably were too. In fact, the centrality and the flexibility of the “you” in the title make it a perfect variable for any one. “You” can actually be you, and what high school student doesn’t think that her problems are the only ones, that she and her world are, in fact, everything?

I was no exception. I was “scared for this world,” worried about true global calamities like starvation and poverty and natural disasters. I was also worried about personal failures, mainly the possibility that no one would ever love me back as fervently as I loved him. However, what I thought was sentimental-- the insistence on simply being in a kitchen with some other person, with the comfortable familiarity of listening to known voices reverberate through a home—that is what the song is about. I couldn’t quite understand that then. I couldn’t understand the importance of home, because I had never left it.

The song itself is retrospective. Stipe entreats “eviscerate your memory”—to violently slash away at whatever fear prevents you from looking backward. Looking back is painful because of what you might see (like your high school self pretending to be in a band) or because you can’t see. Your cynicism, your defense, clouds your vision. Or perhaps what you looked back for was never there in the first place or it isn’t there any more, it’s evaporated, faded, gone. We don’t want to look back, but this song insists we do.

What do I see when I look back? I see a girl sitting at a table made of old wood fastened together by handmade nails. The wallpaper is a riot of color and pattern: all sorts of fruits and vegetables spilling out of baskets onto tables and cutting boards, dizzying in its variety and faithfulness to late 70s chic. She is usually surrounded by her parents and her brother, often by her best friends. They talk all the time, sometimes so they won’t have to say their scared, but mostly because their talk is like music, and because it fills the room with a kind of light. That girl didn’t know that then, that this place, these people would continually help direct her steps, to help make her what she was to become and is still becoming. She didn’t know it then, but, now, she believes it.