4 RADIO SONG
From the 1991 album Out Of Time. Released: November 1991.
Chart position: UK No 28

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGXVyDsOV2w

Featuring a contribution from hip hopper KRS-One, the significance and unprecedented nature of this rap/rock crossover, the fourth single and opener from Out Of Time, was overlooked at the time, especially in Britain, where a great many rock groups were rather hastily discovering a ‘dance element’ to their music. But this was no wholesale effort from REM to transform their image to keep pace with changing fashion, rather a one-off, demonstrating an untapped capacity to chop out funky riffs with the best of them. KRS-One’s guest rap underscores the theme of the song as explored by Stipe, a more measured variation on Morrissey’s “hang the DJ” rant.

PETER BUCK: It’s funny, when we came to the UK to do press, everyone said, “Oh, it’s totally baggy.” And I had no clue what baggy meant. I thought it was an insult, you know, the way an old man’s baggy, or something.

MICHAEL STIPE: I like that song. A couple of years ago, I did a hip hop track, which has yet to be released – I come in on the background vocals. The guy who produced it is a great friend of mine. And he told me something which had never occurred to me, which was that we were the first white band to bring someone from hip hop into our music. And I was like, “Hang on a second – what about Run-DMC and Aerosmith?” and he said, “No, that was Run-DMC covering ‘Walk This Way’ and bringing Aerosmith in. And not only that, but you went to the Godfather, you went to KRS-One, the guy who wrote the book.”

PETER BUCK: I don’t think people noticed what we’d done in getting KRS-One in. That’s partly because radio stations wouldn’t play it because it had rapping on it. And, first of all, it’s not actually rapping, it’s toasting. Second, it’s not that big a part of the song, it’s just the cool part. I thought it was a cool thing to do, a way of saying, hey, we’re all in this together.

MIKE MILLS: Could we do a follow-up to that? It could happen. But it would have to be natural and feel right. You don’t want it to look forced or like you’re trying to be trendy. But the fact that we’ve done it 12 years ago kind of makes it OK. We couldn’t be accused of jumping on a bandwagon, since we did it so long ago.

MICHAEL STIPE: You go back to about 1968 – there was a wild moment when the radio was completely run by squares and straights who were so out of touch they had no idea what was going on, so they just hired people to tell them, say, Jim Morrison was a good singer. But that changed at the end of the ’60s and radio has completely sucked ever since in America. Even in Britain it’s limited, but tastes are much broader and people are not afraid to mix it up.

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3 EVERYBODY HURTS
From the 1992 album Automatic For The People. Released: April 1993.
Chart positions: UK No 7, US No 29

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijZRCIrTgQc

Deservedly, REM’s most widely known song, and one which has enjoyed a long afterlife. Its message, as encapsulated in the title, is uncharacteristically plain, direct and unadorned by allusiveness or stream of consciousness. Its transparency is its virtue, borne along respectfully by a musical arrangement that is stadium-rock-friendly yet free of bombast, histrionics or cheap crescendos. It took on a wider significance in the mid-’90s, as Kurt Cobain’s suicide and the disappearance of Manic Street Preachers’ Richey Edwards raised awareness of a mood of implacable nihilism and despair among many young people, even during the political fair weather and relative prosperity of those times. Briefly, the ‘cult of despair’ was all over the media, but even after it supposedly abated, “Everybody Hurts” went on to become a universal anthem of consolation in what sometimes seems like a happy, hedonistic and heartless world. Stipe, who in person often strikes people as shy, eccentric, remote, disconnected, is here responsible for one of rock’s great moments of empathy and connection with a mass audience.

MIKE MILLS: Michael certainly has a good feel for what has to be written, but I don’t buy into that too much – looking back, there was an element of coincidence – it’s not as if we could have foretold what was going to happen to, say, Kurt Cobain. Retrospectively, it did chime in with the times, but I don’t necessarily feel that reflects any great credit on our behalf.

MICHAEL STIPE: “Everybody Hurts” was a nod to “Love Hurts ” [written by the country composer Boudleaux Bryant and covered by The Everly Brothers]. We didn’t really know what we had done. I love that song and I can’t even claim it as my own. I do feel it belongs to the world at this point. It’s a hard song to sing, especially on the bridge – but we’ve been doing it live and I think I’ve found a way of singing it where the audience can sing the high part and I can sing the low part.

PETER BUCK: It is the one that charity appeals always request to use. So people who never listen to rock music will always hear the song, generally in conjunction with – and not to make fun of these things – ferry disasters or earthquake appeals. So it pops up in very un-rock’n’roll places. And we don’t accept payments for that sort of usage. So when I bump into older people on airplanes, when they quiz me, they always know that song and they always know it in the context of some terrible disaster.

MICHAEL STIPE: It took me a long time to figure out that if I’m feeling something, there’s a good chance that I’m not the only person in the world who’s feeling it. And if I’m fearless enough to let that work its way into the songs, my contribution to what we do, then usually I’m dead on. Yeah, they wave mobile phones to it these days. That’s cute. I’ve been on the receiving end of those calls several times!

PETER BUCK: In the mid-’90s, I remember cocaine coming back, totally strong. And that’s certainly the stuff that drives a whole lot of people to despair. And I’m not just talking about fucked-up musicians, I’m talking about it reaching right out into society, into places like Wall Street where they were all doing coke and stuff. I really think it had a big social impact. You do a lot of that stuff and your natural pleasure centres, your endorphins, after a while they shut down. You can never get a ‘real’ happy high any more, you know, from walking in the park or whatever.