The Biggest Wagon Is The Empty Wagon Is The Noisiest -or- Steve Is Wrong About Subjective Song Preferences
Posted on June 30, 2009 by andrew
Steve has posted a list of his favorite R.E.M. songs. Or, more accurately, the following:
I thought I’d share my personal R.E.M. “Best of” list. It consists of nothing more than a list of the songs that I thought I would enjoy listening to if they came up as I played through this list on random play or if they were thrown in a “Genius” playlist on my iPhone.
While Steve and I have often found agreement in our shared love for R.E.M., our specific preferences regarded the band’s discography have seldom matched perfectly. As such, I must, without using any hyperbole whatsoever, pronounce his list completely misguided. (I mean, he labels the song “Superman” as “I Am Superman”. You should know right off the bat that this guy has no idea what he’s talking about.) A lengthy exercise in futility follows below the jump.
Steve’s list is arranged in alphabetical order by album title. I would prefer to do this in chronological order by release date, but we shall stick with Steve’s formatting for the sake of easy comparison. He ended up with 66 songs on his list. Since a precise number of songs was never the goal, I won’t try to match that total exactly, but I will aim for a list of roughly 60-701 songs, again for the sake of easy comparison. Finally, I should note that I essentially created my list prior to reading Steve’s post, albeit unintentionally: I also find the storage space offered by my iPhone slightly limiting and therefore have my iTunes library sorted by the simple star ratings offered by the software, with only songs rated three stars or better being automatically transferred to my iPhone. It was a simple matter to copy the R.E.M. songs which I had previously marked with three or more stars and use it as the list here, although I did make minor changes (both additions and removals) based on the simple fact that I added the star ratings on a haphazard basis and over a relatively long period of time while working with my entire music library rather than all at once while looking only at R.E.M.’s music.
Here, then, is my list:
Accelerate
- Living Well Is the Best Revenge
- I’m Gonna DJ
Around the Sun:
_2
Automatic for the People:
- Drive
- Try Not to Breathe
- The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite
- Everybody Hurts
- Ignoreland
- Man on the Moon
- Nightswimming
- Find the River
Chronic Town3:
- Gardening at Night
Document:
- Finest Worksong
- Welcome to the Occupation
- Exhuming McCarthy
- Disturbance at the Heron House
- It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”
- The One I Love
Fables of the Reconstruction:
- Driver 8
- Can’t Get There from Here
Green:
- Pop Song 89
- Stand
- World Leader Pretend
- Orange Crush
- Turn You Inside-Out
Lifes Rich Pageant:
- Begin the Begin
- These Days
- Fall on Me
- I Believe
- Swan Swan H
- Superman
Monster:
- What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?
- Strange Currencies
- Bang and Blame
- Let Me In
Murmur:
- Radio Free Europe
- Pilgrimage
- Talk About the Passion
- Perfect Circle
- We Walk
New Adventures in Hi-Fi:
- How the West Was Won and Where It Got Us
- E-Bow the Letter
- Bittersweet Me
- Electrolite
Out of Time:
- Losing My Religion
- Shiny Happy People
- Country Feedback
Reckoning:
- So. Central Rain (I’m Sorry)
- Pretty Persuasion
- Time After Time (AnnElise)
- (Don’t Go Back To) Rockville
- Little America
Reveal:
- All the Way to Reno (You’re Gonna Be a Star)
- She Just Wants to Be
- Imitation of Life
- I’ll Take the Rain
Up:
- Lotus
- Hope
- At My Most Beautiful
- Walk Unafraid
The obvious difference between my list and Steve’s should be in our respective preferences for the band’s early and late work. While I may like more songs from Automatic for the People than from Out of Time and Steve may like more songs from Monster than from Document, our lists for those albums are pretty close to one another. However, whereas I listed five songs apiece from R.E.M.’s first two albums, Murmur and Reckoning, Steve listed a total of only four from those two works. Meanwhile, the two most recent albums have produced only two songs I felt were worth inclusion4, while Steve has listed six from Around the Sun and Accelerate.
You could chalk all of this up to aesthetic preference, but I prefer to state that I am unequivocally right and Steve is unequivocally wrong when it comes to the relative merit of R.E.M.’s early work, and especially of Murmur. Murmur is, quite simply, one of the best rock albums of the 1980’s (and I’m speaking as someone who loves both the post-punk of the early 80’s and the proto-alternative rock that grew out of it during that decade). Moreover, it’s probably one of the best debut albums ever released by a band that went on to a long and successful career. Steve, as an R.E.M. fan, owes it to himself to give the album another listen.
- I ended up with 59. ↩
- Intentionally left blank. ↩
- For whatever reason, I have the songs from Chronic Town labeled as such on my computer, even though I’m fairly sure I ripped them from my CD copy of Dead Letter Office, seeing as Chronic Town itself has never, to my knowledge, been released digitally. ↩
- One of those two was even questionable. I’m Gonna DJ isn’t a particularly great album track, but I included it based on the band’s wonderful high-energy performance of the song during last year’s concert at Merriweather, which makes me enjoy listening to even the less than stellar album version. ↩
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4 Responses to “The Biggest Wagon Is The Empty Wagon Is The Noisiest -or- Steve Is Wrong About Subjective Song Preferences”
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I know that I get no indie cred for this, but I find Murmur to be a pretty boring album. It’s funny, because every R.E.M. fan seems to have on album that is total white noise for them that others absolutely love. We know people who feel that way about Reveal, Monster, and New Adventures — and I really enjoy all of those albums. But Murmur for me, is, with the exception of RFE – flat.
As for Around the Sun and Accelerate – I think they have some fun, catchy tracks. I’d agree that they are ultimately unimportant tracks in the REM catalog, but I like having them come on when I’m in the car.
Steve’s clearly an R.E.M.: The Next Generation fan. I’m guessing it’s the combo of murky production and mumbling Michael Stipe 1.0 that causes the sharp divide in opinions between the two lists. After growing up primarily with the Warner Bros. era band, going back and listening to Murmur was like discovering a whole new band.
For the record, my list is much more like Andrew’s.
First, you’re both idiots for including Orange Crush. It’s an unbearably bad song. The fact that it’s on both lists and Wendell Gee is on neither is a travesty. And WG isn’t even that great of a song.
Second, I’ll unshockingly take the Sean theory approach and suggest that both ends of the spectrum are pretty boring/worthy of ignoring (Ignorelanding?). Murmur IS a pretty boring album by REM standards, especially when compared with the rest of the work they were doing at the time. Andrew is right, however, in that AT LEAST “Talk About the Passion” has to be included.
Finally, Dead Letter Office is criminally underlooked here, but it might just be the style and substance of the album. I’m a covers fan, and for my money, it’s hard to do consistently better (with REM music) than the “Pale Blue Eyes” cover. Some southern roots, some simplicity and lots and lots of morosity. Think it compares rather nicely with Lou Reed and VU while destroying the Counting Crows and Patti Smith versions.
This discussion made me smile. That’s all. Carry on, gentlemen. Even you, skates!