"I steal a lot, basically,"1 said vocalist, songwriter and literary enigma, Michael Stipe. Like Quentin Tarantino's "I steal from every single movie ever made"2, there could not be a more blatant admission to R.E.M.'s postmodern tendencies.
With much emphasis on subversion of narrative, Stipe and R.E.M. are not only re-users of the stories with which they come into contact, but also a band which creatively bends the structure of story into something new and different.
To provoke a misnomer, R.E.M. have been one of the most popular 'alternative' bands of the 1980's and 90's, equally compared and contrasted with Allen Ginsberg as with U2. They are, therefore, important in cultural terms. And though they have been looked on by the global village through the eyes of popular culture, they have remained on just the right side of the 'alternative/popular' divide to allow experimentation with their narratives.
This essay treats the styles and themes of R.E.M. as a cultural object. It will explore the ways in which they have defied established linear thinking and narrative, how they have stolen and re-cycled existing texts to create new ones, and the ways in which their degree of postmodernity or modernity shapes our understanding of their work.
As this object, R.E.M. functions as both entertainment and art. As artists, they seek to tell us their feelings and opinions in new and creative ways. As entertainers, they exist to edify the public on the other side of the postmodern melange of messages. In 'King Of Comedy,' Stipe pleads, "I'm not your magazine, I'm not your television, I'm not your movie screen" and, more importantly, "I'm not commodity." He understands the role he plays in popular culture amounts to the commodification of his life, yet uses this as the canvas for his work.
Stipe's narrative can certainly be regarded as non-linear, at the least. "Even in conversation, Stipe's words come out sounding like the lyrics he writes: a hyper-active free-association rush of nonsense and nothingness, intelligence and humour, but always grasping and questioning."3
One of guitarist Peter Buck's early defences for Stipe's writing style seems to paraphrase the theory of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin that language is a virus from outer space: "You have to shortcircuit the whole idea that literal language is what things are, because literal language is just codes for what happens."4
Indeed, literal language is exactly that, and signifies exactly what it does not represent - that is, according to Michel de Certeau, "the other;" 5 that which describes an object or text by its very absence from the definition. Roland Barthes said of the Eiffel Tower: "This pure, virtually empty, sign is ineluctable, because it means everything" 6. So, just as the tower itself is simple in structure, yet carries with it a tremendous amount of meaning, has Stipe, by his very avoidance of formal narrative, found the other? It may be that he finds a more effective communication in his non-description of the obvious, forcing us to 'de-learn' our appreciation of modern Western narrative structures in order to comprehend the actual feeling which is so often encoded in language and rhetoric. It is perhaps the case that Stipe's reluctance to encode the signs of emotions in an accepted framework gives greater meaning to the signified, however complex the meaning may appear.
This would not be the view shared by Hayden White: "The absence of narrative capacity or a refusal of narrative indicates an absence or refusal of meaning itself." 7
In contrast, the absence of - or, more accurately, the subversion and twisting of - narrative by Stipe may ultimately apply greater meaning to the words, particularly when combined with music. This is what allows him to sing "all has been tried, follow reason and buy, cannot shuffle in this heat, it's all wrong" and actually get away with conveying meaning.
Narrative is a manner of speaking characterised "by a certain number of exclusions and restrictive conditions."8 And neither exclusions nor restrictions are conducive to prosperous creativity of expression for such a non-linear mind as the 'hyper-active' Stipe.
"He leaves out essential parts of speech," noted drummer Bill Berry. "People try to guess the next word before he says it, then when it's not there, they completely lose it."9
The importance, therefore, of context to the content cannot be under-estimated. Although the content may be elusively-placed words of little apparent meaning, the wider context of a song - that is, the subtle structure of music and topic - re-connects the listener to the meaning.
So, the mixing up of even the track listing on the 'Lifes Rich Pageant' album bypasses and disturbs linearity in order to convey deliberate confusion and activity in the underlying themes of the record itself, whilst the song, 'It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)' hauls forth a litany of seemingly unrelated catchprases, rhymes and famous names to tell us holistically about an 80's party scene, set against the backdrop of a tongue-in-cheek end-of-world scenario.
But R.E.M.'s art is not a medium for morality.
Buckingham's utopia embraced the physical object as art under the centralised roof of the museum. R.E.M.'s product (music and words) is information. It cannot be touched or placed in a glass case. Their medium is the information itself, and it is disseminated in the global village, transmitted throughout popular culture. It is for this reason the band has become a commodity in itself. And as such, serves little agenda of moral reform, but rather display their own emotions for consumption.
Like the spirit of Jenny Holtzer's 'Survival' line, "Use what is dominant in a culture to change it quickly," and like the job description of The Simpsons, "use the media to criticise the media" the songs 'Pop Song 89' and 'The Wake-Up Bomb' are particularly well-cited for making fun of sections of the medium with which they convey their own message.
The latter piece uses the language of other, glam rock bands to highlight the follies and staged pretensions of young artists. It has been widely claimed in the media that the song allures to the adolescent antics of Oasis, using slants on that band's own lyrics - "I'd like to teach the world to sing" becomes "I had to teach the world to sing by the age of 21;" the song title, 'Supersonic' becomes "Yeah, atomic, supersonic - what a joke, I'm dumb."
'Pop Song 89' heightened the mimicry. Throw-away pop music came under the microscope, as the protagonist appears as dazed and confused as a vacant star who can only mutter "should we talk about the weather? hi, hi, hi."
In the promotional video, Stipe appears as topless as the three girls surrounding him, everyone dancing and jiggling to highlight the silliness of the video bimbos who don't go quite that far. He uses the language, and the commercial style of this section of pop culture to poke fun at it.
In 'Feeling Gravity's Pull,' the protagonist writes "it's a Man Ray kind of sky - let me show you what I can do with it," fully intending to take the artist's 'Observatory Time: The Lovers' painting, and re-paint over it, as a now-established metaphor, with a new emotional twist, yet preserving the context of Ray's original mood. The band takes an existing text, and recontextualises it - postmodern recycling at its most prolific.
The extent to which R.E.M. fall into either of the modernity or postmodernity categories is a split issue. As artists, and as people, they have consistently sought to create new pieces of work - songs with new content, but developed themes to which long-term fans may be accustomed. The central motivation for the band has never been to parody those which have gone before them, but rather to present their own feelings in ways which may, or may not, live up to the notion of parody.
R.E.M. are, perhaps, proof that modernity and postmodernity can co-exist within the same timeframe and the same coordinates. The band's 'non-narratives' subvert modernity's obsession with structure, yet these literary emotions go hand in hand, having to reconcile themselves with music - a form which has its basis in structure - to create a unified piece.
If postmodernity is characterised by parody and non-linearity, to what extent can R.E.M. be considered postmodern artists?
In 1849, English social reformer, James Silk Buckingham, published a plan for a model town, "with ready access to libraries, lectures, galleries of art, with many objects of architectural beauty, fountains and statues around him." An inevitably-contended citizen of this town "would at least be more likely to be accessible to moral sentiments."10
R.E.M. cannot be said to be wholly 'postmodern artists' - it has never been the purpose of their work specifically to mock what has gone before them, and they always exhibit a desire to create something original, to make it new. But there have been rare moments of expert parody.
1. Stipe, Michael; cited in 'It Crawled From The South' - Gray, Marcus (Fourth Estate, London, 1996) p109
2. Tarantino, Quentin, cited in 'Empire,' November 1994: p93
3. Nathan, Jean, 'The Sunday Times Magazine,' 1994
4. Buck, Peter, cited in 'It Crawled From The South' - Gray, Marcus (Fourth Estate, London, 1996) p109
5. de Certeau, Michel; 'The Writing of History,' trans. Tom Conley (Columbia University Press, New York, 1988)
p2
6. Barthes, Roland; 'The Eiffel Tower,' (Farrah, Straus and Giroux Inc. New York, 1977) p4
7. White, Hayden; 'The Value of Narrativity In The Representation Of Reality,' from 'The Content of Form,' (John
Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1987) p2
8. Genette, Gerard; 'Boundaries of Narrative,' (New Literary History 8, no1, 1978)
9. Berry, Bill, cited in 'It Crawled From The South' - Gray, Marcus (Fourth Estate, London, 1996) p109
10. Buckingham, James Silk; 'Unknown,' (1849), pp 224 - 225
ENDNOTES / BIBLIOGRAPHY
8th JANUARY 1997. NOT FOR REPRODUCTION WITHOUT THE EXPLICIT CONSENT OF THE AUTHOR