Lifetime of Listening #17: 1988 - R.E.M. "Green" - 52 Albums/Years/Weeks
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- Опубликовано: 12 сен 2024
- Episode 17, 1988, and an album that changed my life completely. A classic this time around, from what feels to me like a watershed year in indie/alt music. Exciting times!
THIS EPISODE...1988, R.E.M., and "Green"
Slightly delayed drop this week, but check back again midweek for new videos, every week this year.
Thanks for watching!
My older brother, who is also 52 (today's his birthday, in fact), turned me on to so many great bands, including R.E.M., and the albums he did so with were Green and Eponymous.
To this day, they are permanent fixtures of my listening library.
A fantastic video as always!
1988 was a great year to be sixteen! One of the best years of the decade. Thoroughly enjoyed your -dissertation- talk on this REM opus. A fine album indeed and I think you're absolutely right that music "hits harder" at a certain age, going thorough certain changes and finding your place in the world. But thankfully the memories remain. And to discover REM at sixteen would be a blessing still today... I think/hope! Well, Tastes Like Music is a review/ranking channel where the guys are in their mid/late 30s I'd guess and they generally ranked Green at the top or near it....FWIW.
Glad the '88 love-in isn't just in my head! Had some back-to-back listening of Document and Green for the '87 and '88 videos, and some of the spooky similarities had just never struck me before. Either way, I guess each generation gets to make their own minds up about stuff like this...I came across wildly different takes on Green doing some reading for this one. Some had it up a few spots off Murmur, and others had it below New Adventures and Accelerate (and boy oh boy, was that one a disappointment)....which pretty much illustrates why I refuse to do rankings! Cheers, D
I had moved on from REM following Automatic for the People…moved on to what I felt were cooler bands…but if I’m brutally honest…REM were the band that got me into the whole indie/ alt music thing! From seeing the video for Orange Crush played on TV..prob in early ‘89…I bought the 12”. By June of ‘89 I’d finished school…and hooked up with one of the guys from my school…he was a huge REM fan at that stage…and gave me a loan of Document…then Life’s Rich Pagent…then Murmer. this music was a revelation to me…changed me…at this time of change in my life. Bought my own copy of Document within a week or so….followed soon after by Green. Probably one of my favourite REM albums…because of the memories I suppose and the frame of mind their music put me in at that time. I remember California was always the track that affected me…for better or worse. Only regret was they played in Dublin that summer…same Green tour you saw them on….but I didn’t get to see them. My friend did. Turns out it was a missed opportunity to see not only REM but one of my other favourite bands…The Go-Between’s, who were supporting REM. Maybe you got to see the go between’s when you saw them?
The Newport show had The Blue Aeroplanes supporting. Knew nothing about them before the gig, but loved them on the night...enough that I went out and bought a few of their earlier LPs with some of my birthday money a week or so later. I do remember that the London Hammersmith show on that tour had The Wedding Present as support, and I was kind of sad that they weren't a full tour support (was really into them circa '88 through to "Seamonsters").
Man, seeing The Go-Betweens would have really been something though. Sorry, not helping much am I?!
Cheers, D
Green is the album that got me into REM and made me rush out and buy all their back catalog that same year. I absolutely adore that album. The first time I saw them live was the Green tour in a small hall, so glad I had that opportunity. I can't believe it would be considered mid level in their catalog nowadays but perhaps it holds a bigger place in my heart because it was the album that made me a fan of them.
Ditto, Mike, ditto! The trajectory REM took tends to lead modern listeners to either (a) elevate all the early stuff, or (b) "hot take" the hell out of the post-Berry stuff in an effort to re-evaluate it. This means prime mid-period stuff like Green is easy to write off as an "in-between" album, when it's a far more nuanced record than that, which catches the band at a really interesting time. As a whole album, it's not my favorite nowadays, but it's got some career-best tracks on it. Cheers, D
Great choice! 1988 was also the year I found the band that would change my life, when I bought The Replacements Let It Be album. They instantly became my favorite band, and are still to this day. I love R.E.M. also, they have played a huge part in my life.
My pick for 1988 would have to be Nothings Shocking by Jane's Addiction.
Yay we finally got a new entry! I'm glad you chose this album too. REM were a very important band to me and green feels like the end of an era for them before things became vastly different for them
There are probably "sexier", edgier retrospective choices I could have made this year, mostly because of the trajectory REM followed over the years following "Green"...but being true to the spirit of this series, this had to be the one for '88 for me. A huge, huge deal for me at the time. Cheers, D
Love this series. Another great episode. Such a good year for music. I’ve never 100% loved REM but have to respect some of the incredible songs they wrote. Orange Crush is an incredible song and it’s not their fault we’ve all heard it 500 times (even more true for their later hits).
To think of being able to buy albums from sonic youth, public enemy, and pixies at their absolute prime. That seems more than just nostalgia.
Also, I’m glad you didn’t turn this into a “best of” series. Who needs another top 50 list? More interesting that this is about the music that changed you.
You absolutely nailed it again. I went through the very same emotions with this album. You are the everything still hurts and still heals to this very day.
I saw them in Newcastle on that tour, and what a tour it was. Stipe was absolutely fascinating. Definitely one of the best gigs of my life. I was in love with him almost as much as I was with Natalie Merchant, and I was really in love with Natalie Merchant. 😂
Natalie Merchant +1
I couldn't have asked for a better introduction to live music than that Green tour date. Pretty sure the Newport gig was a Thursday, and by Saturday I'd hit the scary punk record store in Newport and bought copies of both Murmur and Fables. It was an absolute epiphany for me, and only a handful of other gigs have ever come remotely close. Cheers, D
Great choice.
Green was my “gateway”album to REM, and in a sense to the world of Indie too.
Not sure if it is my favourite album of theirs, but it certainly houses my favourite REM song. Turn you inside-out.
Honourable mentions to the House of Love and The Sugarcubes.
My album of 1988 goes to The Spirit of Eden.
Yeah, "gateway" pretty much nails it. For me, it was the perfect intro to the band at that particular moment in time...and digging back further just yielded even more gold.
I don't think the House Of Love ever quite topped that debut LP...same goes for the Sugarcubes, too, I guess. Cheers, D
I never saw REM live. Closest I came was a friend’s 50th party held at an REM tribute band gig in London. Great night. Of course the final encore was End of the World…
Another great selection! Green is excellent but for me Lifes Rich Pageant is excellenter.
My choices for 1988 are South of Heaven by Slayer where they slowed down slightly and got even heavier, Life's Too Good by The Sugarcubes (my favourite Bjork) and my personal favourite for this year, Nothing's Shocking by Jane's Addiction. Too rock for the alternative set, too alternative for the rockers, even having the Red Hot Chili Peppers playing brass doesn't diminish its greatness.
I guess it's helpful to think of that 80s run of REM albums as two trilogies...Murmur-Reckoning-Fables and Life's-Document-Green. They sit together nicely that way, and the stylistic changes/approaches of that period cluster together quite neatly. Very good shout on the 'Cubes debut BTW. It was on my long shortlist but not the short one, if you get my drift! Cheers, D
Dead Letter Office…although not a proper album…brings so many memories flooding back. Hearing their covers of the VU made me go seek out the VU…and that’s when my journey into music really took off! Stunning cover of Pylon’s Crazy too! And the fun of Voice of Harold! Only Stipe could read aloud the liner notes of an album cover and make it sound so good.
All of this chimes with my experiences - I bought NME two years later when I turned 16! Must be a rites of passage or something. The late '80s / early '90s for me were spent reading anything - magazines and papers like Sky, The Face, Q, NME, Melody Maker, Kerrang, Hip Hop Connection. Anything really. I just went from scene to scene, learning about different genres of music. A big album for me in '88 was Prince's Lovesexy. One lyric from it that still sticks in my mind after he died - "The reason why my voice is so clear is because there's no smack in my brain". Very unfortunate. He was the greatest musician that I ever saw play live and I'm not sure it will be bettered.
I'm going to have to disagree with you on Green though 😂 I own it on CD, but the Public Enemy album is one of the best hip-hop albums ever made and one of the best records of the '80s. There ain't no duff track on it. I can still listen to the album and recite almost every lyric. The production on it sounded so unbelievable in '88. I can remember it coming out of car stereos and thinking "What the hell is this?"...
Good times. Simpler times. Cheers!
S'weird. Generally, nothing dates like dance music or hip hop. They both age like milk! But..."It Takes A Nation" sounds just as amazing to me today as it did back then. That Shocklee/BombSquad production was absolutely game-changing at the time. Cheers, D
I would have gone with Surfer Rosa, such a pivotal record for me. Never much got into REM mainly because my mum cannot stand them lol
Had a hard time separating PE and REM...but behind that, Surfer Rosa and Daydream Nation were the two that I gave some serious, serious thought for '88. If I was allowing myself a "free hit" and letting retrospective me call the shots, it might well have been Surfer Rosa for this one. '88 was tough, but '89 is shaping up to be even tougher! Cheers, D
You were 16 and leaped into new life experiences with REM ,I am older than you and when I was 16 I had Big Star to lead me into adulthood. I never enjoyed REM. My choice for this year would have been Sonic Youth,it surprises me that you were hip enough at 16 to enjoy Sonic Youth or Public Enemy. You always enjoy my favorites but your top choices do not fit my taste.
I guess finding the NME helped clue me in to what was "hip", alongside what I was hearing on Peel's show. PE on the cover of the first issue I picked up, Daydream Nation released/reviewed in mid-October, Green in early November...not that surprising, that I'd pick up on them, surely? Plus, these videos are here to highlight my own unfiltered personal choices of that period, and some diversity of opinion should be expected. Cheers, D