Lifes Rich Pageant

 If social media has any use at all and, increasingly, I would argue it's just a succession of stultifying blows to the head, it's as an ongoing memento mori. Every day it shuffles its deck of mass cards, as everyone you ever loved off the telly takes turns at dying. This week it was Bill Oddie, and people were posting their hot takes on what our birder of hearts meant to them. I did it myself. People's childhoods were ruined all day, even as the usual edgelords picked the day of his death as the moment to try and link him to Operation Yewtree, without success, so far as I can see. Bill was prickly and contrarian and suffered terrible depression, but there was no stain on his character, even if there were a great many on his utility vest.  

Social media also excels at the "Wanna feel old?" meme. The answer to that is, no, of course not, but here we are anyway. It says: "Hey, remember that thing you love from your childhood? Well it happened a really long time ago." and you have to say, yes. I do feel old. You got me. Ow!

R.E.M.'s album, Lifes Rich Pageant, was released forty years ago today. Finding that out made me feel old, as it was supposed to. Forty years is a long time, more than half a human lifetime. I've spent more than half my life listening to Michael Stipe sing about "Johnny Reb", "Coyotes, and time as an abstract." Time doesn't feel like an abstract today. It feels very real. It has weight and presence. Time has taken over from gravity, and is squashing me into the earth, my dry, kindling bones snapping under its unanswerable pressure. 

None of this is the record's fault, though time has even twisted its title's meaning: Lifes Rich Pageant has become a danse macabre. 

I don't think I heard this record when it first came out. And I don't remember how I heard it. I certainly wouldn't have bought it, as I didn't buy records then. Most likely someone taped all, or part of it, for me. I often enjoyed classic records in piecemeal form in the 80's, song orders changed, unloved songs excised or cut in half, truncated by the confines of a standard C60. Lifes Rich Pageant was the first R.E.M. album I ever heard, and I fell in love with the murky, mysteriousness of the band. They had it all. They wrote good songs with lyrics I felt I could understand if I just tried a bit harder. They demanded application. This was how music was experienced in the distant past: crumbs falling from the demi-gods table. What was a Cuyahoga? Was Underneath the Bunker supposed to be funny? Everything else on the record seemed so serious and important but this sounded like a spoof of a 60's film. Why was this dusty, arty band, crawling from the American south, singing about Hyaenas? Maybe if I could crack the code I could join them at the grown up's table. I wanted to be a rock star, after all, and the rock star I wanted to be was Michael Stipe (also Ian McCullough, to an extent). Stipe had it all. He looked great: a jaw like a shovel, lips like a sofa, cobalt eyes with cow lashes, airbrushed skin. He dressed like a 20's hobo. There seemed to be a patina of dust on him, as though he'd fallen from a box car full of chicken feed. His lyrics were baffling but never felt like nonsense. They were cryptic crosswords, impossible to solve in the pre-internet world. Where would you find reference for Swan Swan H? What did the title mean? Why bone chains and toothpicks? Why did he strike that picture 90 times? It was this teasing pool of impenetrable stuff. Even 40 years on the best I can manage is its about the American Civil War. 

And crucially, Stipe didn't play an instrument. He was the front man, and that was key, because I didn't play anything and I didn't want to have to learn. Learning an instrument was a time eating hassle. I wanted to be a rock star now*. 

I like all the songs on this record because they're all good. I really like Begin the Begin, Swan Swan H, I Believe and Fall On Me and I expect they're everyone else's favourites too. I'm listening to These Days while I'm writing this and that's great as well. I liked the band's artiness and their silliness. The album is named after something Inspector Clouseau says after falling in a fountain, and the apostrophe is deliberately not present in the title. The cover is a picture of drummer Bill Berry's impressive monobrow and some bison. Buffalo Bill, then. Sort of. But not really. Silly. 

I went backwards and listened to all their previous albums up to, and including, Chronic Town, and I loved the following album, Document. And that was it. After Document I went off R.E.M. I saw them on the Green tour, because they played Portsmouth, and they were thrillingly brilliant, but I never cared much for Green. I had it on cassette, and I bought Out of Time and after that I never listened to another R.E.M. album again. They weren't for me anymore. 

But I still listen to those first five (six, really) albums all the time. Forty years on. The 15 year old me would have found that odd. But fuck him, he was an idiot. You'd do better to study for your O levels instead of sassing me, you lazy little prick. 

Hate that guy. 

*This failed to occur. **

**So far.