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The Guardian
17 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The ones we love: all 16 of REM's albums – ranked!
The REM album that REM appeared to hate: guitarist Peter Buck called it unlistenable, 'a bunch of people so bored with the material that they can't stand it any more'. In truth, the songs aren't bad, but there's something lifeless about Around the Sun: its best tracks sound infinitely better on the 2007 REM Live album. 'I guess a three-legged dog is still a dog,' mused frontman Michael Stipe after drummer Bill Berry's 1997 departure from REM. 'It just has to learn to run differently.' Thus Up was heavy on synths and drum machines, muted, crepuscular – and a relative commercial failure. It's too long and understated to a fault, but the best songs – Suspicion, Hope, Airportman – are worth trawling for. They had nearly split during the making of Up, and were now steadying the ship. Closer to the sound of 'classic' REM (though there's still a lot of electronics), Reveal is sunny but wistful. It may not be quite a return to peak songwriting form, but the single Imitation of Life is insanely catchy. REM ended their career with an album that feels weirdly career-spanning. Oh My Heart – recently given a boost thanks to TV series The Bear – recalls their early 90s; Überlin and Discoverer evoke their college-rock years. It wasn't the triumphant finale they might have hoped for – sales were indifferent – but no disaster either. Both Stipe and Buck threatened to end REM if Around the Sun's successor wasn't an improvement; hence this Jacknife Lee-assisted attempt to harness the power of their acclaimed live shows in the studio. There's plenty of grit and punch, with Buck's Rickenbacker ringing out, and the songs are strong without providing a classic. Stand and Pop Song 89 were REM at their most commercial, but Green was a darker, more introspective major-label debut than those singles suggested, as shown on World Leader Pretend, I Remember California, Hairshirt, and the oddly eerie love song You Are the Everything. The production makes it the most dated-sounding REM album, but there's still a lot to love here. Their debut mini-album offers REM at their rawest: despite the experimentation that apparently took place – producer Mitch Easter deployed tape loops and recorded Stipe's vocals outdoors – it sounded like a band playing live. In Wolves, Lower, Carnival of Sorts (Boxcars) and Gardening at Night, it featured songs so great they needed no adornment. Widescreen and confident where Green was slightly scattered and tentative, Out of Time turned REM into superstars. Not everything here still works (although full marks for effort with the KRS-One collab Radio Song), but when Out of Time hits – Losing My Religion, Country Feedback, Me in Honey – it's hugely impressive. Made by a band in turmoil – they temporarily broke up during its recording – Monster is effectively old-fashioned REM (guitars far louder than vocals) put through a distorted glam-rock filter. Its lyrics are preoccupied with sexuality: Stipe came out after its release. Not what a mainstream audience wanted in 1994, it sounds pretty magnificent now. You would never know that Reckoning was written and recorded in a hurry by a band exhausted by touring. Crisper and more straightforward than their debut, it feels awesomely confident, although Stipe's vocals, plaintive but hard to understand, retained an enigmatic air, particularly on standout So. Central Rain (I'm Sorry). Partly recorded during the seemingly cursed Monster tour, this is perhaps REM's last unequivocal triumph. New Adventures in Hi-Fi is filled with weary disillusion – 'The fame thing, I don't get it,' sings Stipe, who had just signed one of the biggest record deals in history – but also with raggedly wonderful songs: the closing Electrolite is a career high. The REM album that most betrays their geographical roots – or perhaps the tense recording sessions. A southern gothic darkness hangs over even the upbeat tracks: Life and How to Live It deals with mental illness, and there's something ominous about Driver 8. Less ecstatically received than its predecessors on release, it sounds incredible 40 years on. Their biggest album at that point was also REM's bleakest, filled with intimations of environmental collapse and horror at Reagan-era America: even the joyous It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) has obvious apocalyptic overtones. Here they sound arena-ready, without compromising their vision or quality. A joy from start (the distorted folk-rock guitar figure that introduces Begin the Begin) to finish (the fantastic cover of the Clique's late 60s obscurity Superman), Lifes Rich Pageant was forceful where its predecessors had been oblique. It features an embarrassment of songwriting riches: Cuyahoga, Fall On Me, These Days. The genius of REM's debut album proper lies not just in the magnificent songwriting but the sense of mystery it conveyed. Everything – title, cover, lyrics, an atmospheric production that buries the vocals and pushes the drums – was inscrutable. Here is music rooted in various traditions, from folk-rock to post-punk, that at the time seemed utterly fresh. Not everyone was delighted by REM's huge mainstream success: naysaying former fans were winningly invited to 'kiss my ass' by Buck, and, listening to their biggest album, it's hard to see what their problem was. It's packed with fantastic songs, dark in tone (The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite and Man on the Moon offer rare glimpses of light) and unexpected in its influences: opener Drive was inspired by David Essex's Rock On. Everybody Hurts is probably too overplayed to pack the emotional punch it once did, but Nightswimming is still incredibly moving, and if you're sick of the hits, the deeper cuts sound glorious.
Yahoo
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
In 1988, R.E.M. were so disgusted with the state of the US that guitarist Peter Buck admitted to wanting to shoot President Bush
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. "I recommend anyone reading this who's a psycho and can buy a gun to shoot George Bush. I'm serious. l would consider it myself. I live in a country that I hate! I live in a country where I wanna shoot politicians, where the only way you can make a real dent is not voting, it's murder." It's October 1988, and speaking to Melody Maker writer Steve Sutherland ahead of the forthcoming US presidential election, R.E.M.'s Peter Buck is delivering a somewhat provocative state-of-the-nation address. The guitarist is in a Athens, Georgia drinking den named the GA Bar, and, by his own admission, he's "a little tipsy", drinking Bloody Marys in an attempt to battle the jetlag he's feeling having flown home from London the previous day. The 1988 US presidential election would see Ronald Reagan's Vice President George Bush representing the Republican Party versus the Democratic Party candidate Michael Dukakis, Governor of Massachusetts. Given that Reagan had been elected by a landslide majority in 1980 and 1984, Buck was adamant that "that asshole Bush" was going to become the 41st President of the United States, and he wasn't happy about it."I'm so fucking furious, I feel like shooting people," he declared, "George Bush first and then the people who vote for him." "I hate this country, I really hate America," he continued. "We've turned into such selfish bastards. If Adolf Hitler came back and said, 'I won't raise taxes', he'd win in a landslide. I'm washing my hands of it. I don't give a shit. We're essentially a nation of fat-assed used-car salesmen that wanna protect our pile. That's all we are, and that disgusts me." "D'you know the weirdest thing?," Buck continued. "Everything that Reagan's done that I hate and despise benefits me. I mean, you wouldn't believe how much less tax I pay - it went down from 44 per cent to 28 per cent. I don't wanna put money into Cruise missiles, but I want money to go to people who are hungry, I want money to go to people who need houses... and he cuts the tax and what's left goes to make bombs. That's obscene!" At the time, R.E.M. were about to release their sixth studio album, Green, which would be released by Warners on November 8, 1988, that date explicitly chosen to coincide with the date of the presidential election. The album would go on to sell over two million copies in the US, peaking at number 12 on the Billboard 200, the indie-rock band's highest chart placing at the time. The group once said that the record was full of "big dumb bubble-gum pop songs", but songs such as Orange Crush (about the Vietnam War) and World Leader Pretend carried on some of the political musings heard on the previous year's Document album. Frontman Michael Stipe would insist that he wasn't the man to look to for answers, however."I have no answers to anything, I'm just kind of questioning with everyone else," he told Melody Maker in a previous interview. "I don't really like being misperceived as being shamanistic or some man of wisdom or something like that, because I don't think I am." His buddy Buck, however, wasn't shy about airing his personal political views at the time. "Really, anyone who wants to be a politician is not qualified," he suggested. "Hell, I don't even like Dukakis - he's a politician. They should all be shot." As far as we're aware, Buck's comments did not lead to any demands for R.E.M.'s cancellation, removal from festival bills, or life imprisonment by band managers, opportunistic politicians or professionally outraged newspaper columnists. Simpler times.
NZ Herald
28-04-2025
- General
- NZ Herald
Navigating cultural prayer: Respect and inclusion in diverse settings
On one day last week I was part of five karakia all in the Māori language. The first, a hui was opened with a Pai Marire karakia (a religion that combines traditional Māori and Christian elements). The second was a traditional tauparapara, calling people together in a speech of welcome. The third was a thanks to the Māori gods for the food we were about to eat. The fourth was to open a lecture on the Treaty of Waitangi that was to no deity at all, but was an affirmation of positive words, and the final was the Christian benediction to finish that same lecture. Te Rangi Hiroa (Sir Peter Buck) explained that traditionally karakia were composed 'to meet every conceivable contingency in human life and they cover a range which exceeds the bounds of religion'. Their purposes were to 'obtain benefit or avert trouble'. They were part of Māori religious practice but were not always religious in nature. I have tried to give my social work students a practical approach to dealing with karakia. In the papers that I teach on the Treaty of Waitangi and on competency to work with Māori, I have always opened and closed the class with karakia, (or inoi depending on your persuasion). The justification has been that it is standard practice in the Māori community to open and close gatherings with karakia and that social workers need to learn how to behave appropriately in these situations. In fact, as social workers, they may be occasionally expected to perform this ritual, especially if they have called the meeting. I tell them that the expectation is that they remain respectful, they don't have to participate with an 'amen', or a 'tāiki e', 'ae' or 'pai marire'. There have been many times when even I have heard prayers that I might not be comfortable with. The essential part for those who don't believe in the god that someone else is praying to is instead to acknowledge the kaikarakia, the person doing the praying, usually with a friendly 'kia ora'. At a marae, you will often hear people acknowledge the kaikarakia as part of their mihi. For some this is not because someone has rendered a token act of service, it is because they have become an intermediary between the physical and spiritual world and in doing so may have made themselves vulnerable in the process. In traditional thought, the kaikarakia were the ones who stood between the people and the gods and so presumably could suffer the consequences if the karakia was not done correctly. One of the biggest transgressions is to whati, to break the rhythm or worse, forget the words. It can be humiliating, and I remember once getting it wrong and the disapproving looks were measurable; presumably because it didn't make them feel that they could trust me to keep them safe. Essentially, many Māori feel safer when they know that an event is marked by karakia at the beginning and end of an event. It implies that process will be done properly and not be tokenistic and they can let some of their defences down and have greater freedom to engage. As to why the University of Otago has instituted karakia in some of its meetings, I believe it was first requested by some Māori staff to both create that sense of safety but also I think to ensure that Māori issues weren't swept under the carpet and so was a political, as well as spiritual, practice. Many staff use the karakia to practise their Māori language pronunciation, and others see the opportunity as creating a more accepting environment to Māori involvement within the university. Some object to various forms of karakia because of the deities that are invoked or the sentiments that are expressed. However, my concern is that they can become formulaic and tokenistic – where organisations will point to specific acts that give the impression of including Māori but, in actual fact, the decision-making processes and outcomes of those decisions remain unaffected.
