Phthursday Musings: Murmur, Part One
Up the stairs, to the landing
This past Sunday night, my buddy Carlito and I were at The Metro in Chicago for a very unusual show. This was an all-star band led by Jason Narducy (bassist for among others Bob Mould, Superchunk, and Mountain Goats), including Jon Wurster (same three bands), fronted by the actor Michael Shannon. Yeah, this guy. And they were assembled to play, in its entirety, the first R.E.M. album, Murmur.
Last June I wrote about R.E.M. on the occasion of having procured the Monster box set. At that time I mentioned how Murmur was the source for my online handle.
Well, the band did indeed rip through the entirety of Murmur. And 10 songs in to the 12 song set, during the middle of “Shaking Through”, a white haired man suddenly appeared on the stage. We anticipated the presence of a very special guest, but this very special guest was none other than R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills!
I found the whole thing to be some mixture of bizarre and wonderful. The idea of a 40th anniversary tribute to Murmur fronted by a famously stone-faced actor to help commemorate a year-long 40th anniversary for a club about which I’ve heard so many stories, there are just a whole lot of adverbs to throw around for all that.
Then the band came back out and did an even longer second set. You can see the entire set list here (as an aside, did you realize setlist.fm exists? oh the rabbit holes you can go down there…)
Murmur has always been a strange album to me, and not just because I stole its name for my own. Over the week leading up to the concert I listened to it multiple times, and I listened to other R.E.M. albums, and this was all during the course of another difficult work week where I was often lacking for down time. And then at the show itself I got to thinking about what the album represented, and what it still represents, and even got to wondering about some deep subconscious understanding about identity and presence and our place in the cosmos and yeah there are a lot of strange directions I thought about taking these Musings.
I thought about trying to write one of those intricate things where I maintain multiple threads and keep overlapping them and then try and tie them together at the end. But I realized that was a lot of writing and that as alluring as it is from a writing perspective, it would wind up being way too long for one sitting.
So some topics will be mused upon in upcoming weeks. I’ve decided to try and focus a little more on the music itself this week, especially given that I’ve managed to see two other extremely different concerts in just the four days since seeing Murmur.
We live in challenging times. I was in a Lyft recently and the driver had 93.9 LITE FM on, which Wikipedia describes as having a “soft adult contemporary format”, and this “lite” radio station played Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger”. I almost wrote an entire Musings on the spot about that, but I had taken Dramamine to handle riding in the back seat of a car and that doesn’t make for good writing. Suffice to say that my notion of “soft” seems to be a little different from IHeartRadio’s.
My notion of what can or should pass for “soft” was honed a little bit by listening to every episode of the podcast Beyond Yacht Rock. I’m actually going to write about Yacht Rock next week so I won’t dwell here, but Hollywood Steve Huey gave me a framework to understand how “soft rock” isn’t necessarily an oxymoron. To get to that place you kind of have to understand “rock music” less as an archery target with the Rolling Stones somewhere in the middle and more as kind of a framework. I’m not saying this is the most correct way to think about such a thing, or strongly advising you to adopt it, but it opened a little door in my mind for rethinking about some things.
I actually think that “soft” and “lite” are not truly interchangeable terms. “Eye of the Tiger” isn’t a “soft” song. But maybe it is a “lite” song, where the distinction is that so long as the song is below a certain threshold of heaviness / rockingness, it can qualify as “lite” based less on its sonic texture generally and more on its simplicity, its formulaicness, its lack of challenge. By the standards of its time, it couldn’t qualify as “lite” because it was too loud. By the standards of 2023, well, sure, fine, whatever.
Talking about Murmur last week, my buddy Marquis commented that the important thing about the album isn’t really the songcraft, it’s the vibe. I kind of wish he hadn’t said that because he’s right, but I find it very difficult to describe what that vibe is, and look what I’ve done, I’ve written a really bizarre multi-paragraph preface about it all. Here goes:
Murmur is, in its own way, kind of a “soft” album, but it’s not a “lite” album. It’s deceptive, it’s quirky, it’s challenging. But even if it’s “soft” though it’s still a rock album, and at that, it’s not a very “middle of the road” kind of rock album. It’s an album that is not especially quiet, and not especially loud, but with no particular seeming aspiration to be somewhere in the middle. They just go where they go. Sonically, it’s a rock band that is experimenting but not exactly experimental.
Lyrically? Who knows what some of this was supposed to mean! Michael Stipe’s vocal delivery is arguably more important than the overall lyrical content at expressing what needed to be expressed, which I would describe as a great searching.
It's so much more attractive
Inside the moral kiosk
I’ve never looked up what Stipe was trying to get at here and I’m not about to look it up now. If he wanted to be clearly understood he would have sung something like
It's the eye of the tiger
It's the thrill of the fight
Rising up to the challenge of our rival
And look: that’s fine. I’m not ridiculing Survivor here. They wrote a simple, catchy song which has made them rich and more power to them. I just don’t need to, you know, think about what they were getting at. It’s right there.
The pilgrimage has gained momentum
You can’t play a song with a lyric like that on LITE FM, now can you?
“Pilgrimage” is a really good example of a song which is, well, it’s a rock song, and it kind of has a chorus, sort of, and you can learn to sing along, at least a little, but sonically it sets you up immediately for something… that, I don’t know, you’re in discourse with? That’s the vibe. It’s a combination of intimacy and immediacy, but without either of those things being especially heavy (by any definition of the word) or at all “lite”.
Now, sure, I was alive in April 1983, and I saw MTV and I listened to radio and I grew up in a house with a lot of Talking Heads being played and so forth. I have context for what pop and rock sounded like then and before and since. And I have to say, before Murmur, I can’t think of anything that was especially like it. Sure, these guys clearly listened to the Velvet Underground some, but this was a rock band, in the South, fronted by a gay man (though that wasn’t common knowledge at the time), and overall I’d say that the vibe of the album is: We’re not entirely sure what we’re about, but we know it’s something a little different, and we’ve got a lot of ideas to share about that.
And that’s the genius of the album and that’s why it’s so important, because We’re not entirely sure what we’re about, but we know it’s something a little different, and we’ve got a lot of ideas to share about that is a message which speaks volumes to people because everybody out there is trying to figure out exactly what it is that they’re about, and everybody out there is at least a little different, and maybe they just need to be able to share some of those ideas with others. But R.E.M. was getting at a “something a little different” which a whole lot of other people were feeling. And although I wouldn’t say they were overt about it - how can you be overt and cryptic all at once? - I will say that there was something, well, meta about it all.
I’m not sure that Murmur was their best album per se, but seeing the concert and thinking about it all gave me clarity into how and why it was their most important. It changed the framework for rock music. It so happens that it may may have taken several more R.E.M. albums for people to truly pick up on that, but in my mind, there’s a through line to Murmur that you can rarely find to any other album or for that matter any other kind of artistic statement at all.
Part of why I focus on the notion of Murmur as a rock album is because going into the concert, I couldn’t help but wonder how what could no doubt be a loud rock band would handle an album that wasn’t quite a loud rock album.
And I think the surprising answer was right in front of me all along: Murmur is a loud rock album… it just isn’t loud.
Last week I found listening to Murmur and Monster back to back that there was a tremendous continuity I hadn’t quite picked up before. The main difference isn’t that Murmur is sort of quiet and Monster isn’t very quiet, the main difference in the alums is Michael Stipe having blossomed over the course of a decade from an intriguing but seemingly reserved guy into someone a lot more comfortable being a front man.
And so even in the relative quiet moments - the inclusion in the encore of “Nightswimming” perhaps excepted - this was just a full on rock show, and as it all went on, it just kind of sunk in how very much R.E.M. really does mean to rock music generally, and most especially to so much of the music which I so thoroughly embraced in my late teens and early twenties.
Over the years I’ve tended to think of my tastes as being broad but maybe not eclectic per se. My wife still likes to joke that I primarily listen to “screamo” (by which she doesn’t actually mean the subgenre screamo). But the reality is that in a given week I might listen to Hank Williams, Kiwi pop, Sibelius, free jazz, Iron Maiden… and I think I am my best self when I hit a pocket where things are all over the map.
Two nights after seeing the Murmur show I was at The Hideout. The opener was Helen Money, aka Alison Chesley, who just so happened to be the cellist sitting in with the Murmur band two nights earlier, and she played a set of solo cello with effects pedals accompanied by a sampler, and there was something about her set which just screamed punk rock to me, even though it had nothing at all to do with punk rock. Her set would not have been for everyone, but I found it really impressive.
But I was there for the headliner: Xylouris White. And friends, it is not hyperbole for me to say, this may have been the best band I’ve seen in ten years or more.
Xylouris White is Giorgos Xylouris, master of the Cretan laouto, a double-string instrument in the lute family similar to an oud. Jim White is best known as the drummer for the Dirty Three, the Australian instrumental trio also including Mick Turner and Warren Ellis. And that’s it: a lute player and a drummer. And they were mesmerizing. From this picture you wouldn’t think hmm, that looks mesmerizing but the musical conversation they were having was truly extraordinary:
Xylouris also played a much smaller instrument which I can’t even name but which looks kind of like a toy dulcimer to me, which you can see here in a video shot at Drag City Records earlier in the day, whilst for some reason it was deemed appropriate that White got a haircut:
Xylouris is a storyteller with the laouto, and some of the stories are epics, and White is truly remarkable in how he offers a sympathetic accompaniment to the story. The only other drummer I have ever seen up close with such a combination of speed and command was Damon Che of Don Caballero. Sometimes you can know what to expect, get it, and still be blown away, and that’s what it was like standing within ten feet of Jim White.
They are only playing two additional U.S. shows, one each in Atlanta and New York, and if you’re anywhere close, please, please go.
Two evenings later - which means earlier tonight! - I took the family to Piotrowski Park in the South Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago to see Rosalba Valdez. I was tipped off by looking at show listings earlier this year at nearby Fitzgerald’s, but having not been able to make it that night, I kept my eye out for another opportunity, and a free show in a Chicago park 20 minutes away seemed like a good idea.
Valdez is backed by a versatile band which can range from jazzier fare to salsa, and with her ruby red hair, she is quite the presence:
Her music leans very strongly into being pro-Mexican, pro-family, pro-immigrant, very upbeat. Even if Spanish isn’t your language, you get the message from the video for “Lucha de Familias”:
I can’t claim too broad a knowledge of Mexican pop music, but I did recognize “Nunca Es Suficiente”, a song from Natalia LaFourcade’s Hasta la Raíz, an album I like a whole lot. And it was nice, at 7:00 on a warm August evening, to be sitting in a park, guys playing soccer way over to the left, a playground teeming with kids over to the right, just being out with live music.
Is it weird that I might sooner go to Ruido Fest than Riot Fest?
At some point as a kid I started reading Archie comics. A lot of them. I had a whole lot of Double Digests and more.
My dad at some point explained how at some point I would move on from comic books to music. I don’t remember the details, how old I was, where this was, what the exact words, but I remember him talking about it, and it stuck with me, and that’s pretty much what happened.
In high school I went through a classical phase, I went through an oldies phase, I stepped into a classic rock phase, and that eventually turned into an indie-rock phase, and I don’t know what the current phase is but the indie-rock phase was the big one because it started when I was 17.
But before that phase kicked in I already had Automatic for the People and I think very early on while the classic rock phase was still ongoing I got my hands on at least Document and throughout the next decade R.E.M. was always there. And then, for a long time, they kind of weren’t… something about the band still being together but me being out of touch with what they were doing, maybe.
R.E.M. broke up about ten years ago. Over that time I’ve found my way back in largely through Reckoning, and more recently through a renewed appreciation for Monster, but after the last week, everything is Murmur to me.
Did you even realize there was a video for “Talk About the Passion”?
When I started my current job years ago and was working from home for the first time, it afforded the opportunity to have music playing while I was working. I think it was a really positive thing for me in a lot of ways. Today, even though I still work from home… there’s almost no space for music. It’s just a seemingly endless series of Teams meetings. It’s a real drag. And I’ve thought about this more over the last week as I’ve been musing over Murmur and… I just don’t function as well when music is crowded out of my day. This may even better explain how weirdly disciplined I’ve been about going to the gym every day, because it’s often the only time of day I feel like I have the space for music. Yeah, I’ve probably written some variation on this paragraph a half dozen times since I’ve started META-SPIEL. But I think I’m reentering one of those phases where I’m just not going to let the music get crowded out.
Believe it or not, I have more to say about Murmur. But even more so about Murmur, as in, me, as in what it meant to kind of have a second identity, and what I think might be caught up in choosing a word like that. That’ll have to be for a later time though.
