I have heard people say that R.E.M. sold out long before they obviously sold out in the late nineties/early this decade. People claim that when they hit it big (i.e. when they starting racking up Grammy nominations by the dozens), they did it with songs that any other band could have written. I somewhat disagree, and I consider the early 90s work that “broke them” wide open to be some fine music. Automatic for the People is an outstanding portion of their overall oeuvre, and a classic album upon classic albums. Why hasn’t there been a VH1 special on this yet? I mean, they’ve covered Def Leppard’s Hysteria but not Automatic for the People? Total crap. Additionally, when I first saw R.E.M. on MTV at the age of about 9 or 10, I had no context of their prior work to put it in, except that I also knew “Stand” as the theme song from that Chris Elliot sitcom on Fox at the time. And I was terrified of Kurt Cobain at that age, as well.

Anyway. Currently, I am incredibly excited to see R.E.M. for the first time in my life next week at South Florida’s very own Langerado festival. And to mark off that excitement, I decided to subject Automatic for the People to our very own Record on Random spin. It yielded some very interesting results. Take it away, iTunes!

Be it known that I also started listening to the album at 7:30am on a Saturday morning.

01. “Nightswimming”: Whoa. What a strange choice for first thing in the a.m., iTunes. Don’t you have an internal clock? Regardless of how much I love this song, it comes off as an incredibly cheesy opening track. It needs to be preceded by more somber songs so that it might be taken more seriously. The gushing strings don’t help much here. And by the time the English horn makes its entrance, this sounds like the opening credits to an assuredly lame late teen/early college aged romance. Blech.

02. “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight”: An early track on the album, it works very well here. This could totally be used at a track two on a mixtape. But then, wait, did I speak too soon?! More strings! What are we in for here, Garden State: The Sequel?

03. “Everybody Hurts”: My imagined bad film comparison seems to be going along excellently. Maybe the real brilliance in this album is that in includes tracks that are both potentially heart-wrenching and possibly sappy as all get out. If this were the actual album order, I’d have stopped listening by now. And again with the strings! Too much too soon! Now I have nothing against the tasteful use of bowed instruments in rock’n’roll music. I adore Joanna Newsome and I even really like “Eleanor Rigby”. But this current tracklisting is turning me off in a way that would make 17-year-old me cry for the sorrows of the world and is currently making 25-year-old me want to get up and get a bowl of cereal.

BRB.

04. “Drive”: Sigh. More of the chamber orchestra in the background. As an opener to the album, it obviously works. But as a fourth track, especially following “Everybody Hurts”, it’s intensely overdramatic. I guess at this point in the emo tragic-comedy, we really get to know our cast of characters – all somewhat along the lines of young people imagined by Noah Baumbach, Richard Kelly, Zack Braff, and Amy Sherman-Palladino. Only a little tinge more obnoxious. At the beginning of the film, they are looking back on their good times skinny-dipping in a lake. They’ve seen their memories fade away on the summer’s wind, laughed about things, but now the protagonist (we’ll call him Jonah, give him longish-shaggy hair and some chin scruff to boot) is about to head feet-first into an existential crisis that will probably result in a West Side Story-like showdown. There is violence within him, and he cannot live with himself as he is. This is an awful film, so far.

05. “Monty Got a Raw Deal”: Further supporting my point. Jonah’s existential crisis reaches a critcal mass. Upon first listening to it, I thought that track would describe another plot point where he’s sitting and calculating his upcoming bad stuff. Looking back on the tracklist as a whole, I think at this point he is about to act upon his violent impulses. And while song lyrics are generally inconsequential to a movie score, or at least they generally should be in my opinion, the lyrics here work. “Don’t you waste your breath” – trouble’s gonna find you, Jonah.

06. “Star Me Kitten”: Finally, a small break in the drama. At this point, some of the film’s secondary characters who we probably saw running away from the lake holding their remaining clothes in front of their private areas in the opening credits (to “Nightswimming”) are falling in love and about to get it on. A sex scene to break up the drama. Good idea.

07. “New Orleans Instrumental no. 1”: What works on the album serves the same purpose in our bad film score – intermission. Maybe it’s actually incidental music for a bad play. At least in the theatre world, you can get away with being a little more melodramatic.

08. “Sweetness Follows”: Our screenwriters have done something very manipulative here. If you returned from the bathroom after intermission and the first words you heard were “Ready to bury your father and your mother,” what would you think happened? I think that during the secondary character sex scene, Jonah actually killed his parents. But because of the subdued natured of the songs, this again is actually a tragedy for Jonah, because he’s been hopped up on psychiatric drugs his whole life and doesn’t know how to love. How tragic, and how right I was in my earliest assessment.

09. “Find the River”: Totally obvious. Jonah must now find himself at some other point in the country. This song covers a long montage of hitchhiking, bus stations, and looking out into the distance.

10. “Try Not to Breathe”: At this point, I got sort of stuck. Either we’re running out of plot points, or Act Two is far, far lamer than Act One (not uncommon in this type of movie). But then again, it could very well be that Jonah has found a small, very likely southern town to start over in again, and is trying to fit in, although a cute, quirky, and impossibly cultured girl (played by a brunette who is in real life incredibly smart). He of course answers her by staring blankly, with the words “I have seen things that you will never see,” playing over and over again in this scene. The love interest’s name is Allison (because I’m thinking of Allison Fanelli, who played Ellen in the series The Adventures of Pete and Pete many years ago, on which Michael Stipe guest starred for one episode). He is trying to lay low (as described in “Monty”) and start over again, all the while realizing he finally is learning how to love. Aww.

11. “Ignoreland”: Could throw us for a curve, but I think this song fits into a scene where there is a big town to-do, lots of hipsters, lots of music, and Jonah attends with said impossibly cultured girl as he is falling for her, finally learning how to love. The audience has long-forgotten about his friends who got it on before intermission and even what he did to end up in this town. But he’s also afraid his old life will catch up with him, now that he’s breathing out loud. “Someone’s got to take the blame.” Man, is this a bad movie. Anyway, we’re at the climax – hold on tight for the surely melodramatic conclusion.

12. “Man on the Moon”: First of all, how did I forget this song was on the album? I don’t know. Secondly, I think this brings us to our tragic-comic ending, where Jonah has been nabbed by the police, and dies on his way to an asylum because he would rather die in love than be held captive. Allison as well as his old friends from the lake and the sex scene and stuff line up and cry as he passes. Or some shit like that. I guess I sort of wrote myself into a corner there.

If said movie ever gets made, you heard it here first. Also note that the string quintet quit after intermission. The bassist stuck around for “Sweetness Follows”, but the other four booked it long before then. You know it’s a bad film when your studio musicians quit.

Boy, am I looking forward to Langerado this weekend!