Category: Out of Time

Endgame

Chris BickleyLeave a comment

Release date: 08/03/1991 | Length: 3:48 | Release: Out of Time | SuE: #166

This wasn’t the first R.E.M. instrumental, but Endgame was the first to make it to a studio album. Underneath the Bunker from Lifes Rich Pageant was a quasi-instrumental, but being an album of surprises and curveballs, it makes sense that Out of Time witnessed this swansong.

As track five on Out of Time, it feels a little early to get an interlude like this, but it’s nestled between the perkiest songs on the record: Near Wild Heaven and Shiny Happy People. It’s a pedestrian palate cleanser before the sugary delights of what is to come. I call this an interlude, but it’s longer than its neighbours and has the structure of a proper song.

Demoed under the moniker Slow Sad Rocker, it is a little bit droopy. The flugelhorn that drives the second passage adds to this slight feeling of maudlin, but I wouldn’t say Endgame is sad in feeling, just in stature. The chorus is awash with strings and Stipe’s melodica, sounding like the dawning of a sun on the horizon, and then we’re back to the dainty, inquisitive plod of before, like a poignant closing credits sequence.

The horns and strings are provided by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, but it doesn’t sound grand or resplendent like some orchestral additions do. It’s humble, pootling along at its own pace, unmoved by its surroundings.

Radio Song

Chris BickleyLeave a comment

Release date: 4/11/1991 | Length: 4:15 | Release: Out of Time | SuE: #73 | UK: #28

The world is collapsing around our ears

R.E.M.’s mid-career music wasn’t without its divisive songs, though Radio Song tends to avoid the backlash that Stand and Shiny Happy People attracts. I’m going to pin my colours to the mast right now, and say that I like Radio Song. It wants to be a stupid, goofy song, and it succeeds in being a stupid, goofy song. It’s incredibly melodic and only fails when taken seriously.

The opening guitar chord chimes like a quintessential R.E.M. tune; it sparkles and shines. And then comes the funk. Radio Song is two worlds combining. The shimmer and sheen of Peter Buck’s riffs meets the bagginess of the organ-pounding funk and it’s…fun? It is fun, but it’s horrifically dated. I was not around in 1991, so I can’t say whether it sounded dated at the time, but this was perhaps the first occasion that the year of release was so imprinted into the DNA of an R.E.M. song. 

When writing the song, R.E.M. would not have known that they were about to become the biggest band in the world, which is odd when you consider that Radio Song sounds like the kind of song written by a band who had already become globetrotters, their mindset slightly warped by the fame. This fact then gives Radio Song some credibility, that it prefaced their radio dominance rather than observed it. Obviously R.E.M. were well-known in 1991, but they still had further to climb.

At the time, the crossover of a white rock band and a black hip-hop artist was novel, and further adds to this song’s cache of credit. KRS-One delivers the coda, a mostly improvised scat concluding in the faux-ominous line: “Now our children grow up prisoners, All their lives radio listeners”. Throughout the song he complements Michael Stipe as he sing-raps through the verses, with just enough self-awareness for the song to avoid becoming a lame pastiche.

I think the reasons for disliking Radio Song are valid, though if you can see through the irony then it’s a rewarding, pretty song. It suffers in that it’s tied to 1991, but perhaps it should then just be seen as a relic. They couldn’t have released a song like this before or after their fame, so R.E.M. escape with their reputation intact.