Saturday playlist: R.E.M. through the years

R.E.M. issued a remastered version of its 1988 album, Green this week, which got me thinking a bit about who the band was and what it meant to me when it was still recording and touring and what it means to me now.

Green is not my favorite R.E.M. album — hell, it’s not in my top 8 (see below). But it is still a great album in many ways, which proves just how significant the Athens, Ga., quartet was.

First, consider the timing. Green was released just five years after Murmur, making it the culmination of a frenetic period of creativity — six albums in six years. And it was a commercial breakthrough that turned R.E.M. into an arena band without sacrificing any of its indy cred.

Pitchfork offers a great overview and review, so I won’t belabor it, but what’s shocking to me is that Green’s weakness can only be viewed as a weakness within the context of what the band managed to do on its first nine albums. Green, to me, is the weakest of them, which says far more about the perfection of Document and Automatic for the People than it says about Green.

I first heard R.E.M. on WRSU, Rutgers’ student radio station, when this odd, jangly pop song that took its name from the American-funded station broadcasting into the then-Eastern bloc. The sound was different — nothing like the radio pop of the time, but also not punk or new wave. There was a freshness and a DIY quality — the vocals were a bit muffled and buried in the mix. So I bought Murmur — and continued buying their records until they announced last year that they were splitting up.

The impact of those early records is hard to explain, as I said; the lo-fi sound was different than what was dominating the radio. There was a simplicity to the sound and a complexity to the lyrics, which were literate and muffled and mysterious. This was not Haircut 100 or the Flock of Seaguls. It was not Duran Duran, a pretty band with a pretty sound singing about pretty things in a superficial manner. This was serious stuff and, in its odd way, it helped keep alive the emotional and artistic rebellion launched by punk at a time when that rebellion’s fire was dying out.

I saw the band in 1987, on the Document tour on my 25th birthday at the Rutgers Athletic Center. In a couple of years they would be playing arenas while still putting out music that stood in stark contrast to the pompous nonsense that characterized arena rock. By the time Out of Time was released in 1990, Stipe had moved from mumbling to singing, his lyrics growing and shifting with this change.

The band’s artistic growth peaked with Automatic for the People, one of rock music’s most perfect recordings. It was quieter, mournful, but just as forceful and focused as anything they had done. It also represented a bit of an endpoint — everything that comes after Automatic is essentially a search for direction. Monster is the best of what follows, R.E.M.’s answer to Kurt Cobain and its last great disc.

This is not to denigrate what follows, because even Reveal, by far the weakest album in the R.E.M. canon, is a solid bit of pop and far better than what most bands produce at their best. I can say this without hyperbole, having spent the better part of the week listening to the full catalog, 15 studio albums, plus assorted Best of collections and live discs that taken together stand as a testament to the band’s greatness and lasting legacy.

My ranking:

1. Document
2. Automatic for the People
3. Reckoning
4. Chronic Town (EP)
4. Murmur
5. Life’s Rich Pageant
6. Out of Time
7. Fables of the Reconstruction
8. Monster
9. Green
10. Accelerate
11. Around the Sun
12. New Adventures in Hi-Fi
13. Up
14. Collapse into Now
15. Reveal