The Laptop Sessions Cover Songs & Original Music Video Blog » R.E.M. Songs

“What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” (REM Acoustic Cover Song) – The Laptop Sessions

Jeff Copperthite — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 13:58:45 +0000

Originally posted 2008-09-02 22:55:20.

By Jeff Copperthite:

Good evening to you! I just had a wonderful run of Dynamis, then realized “Oh yeah, I am fresh out of videos for today!” Thankfully, I had one ready to play and record, and you are in the right place to listen to it!

The song I have selected for today is by one of my favorite bands from my entire life, REM. This song “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?” was a single from their album “Monster”, which is home to some of my favorite REM songs. The album itself has a wide range of sound, but a common element is the “fuzz” guitar sound that seems constant in nearly every track. This song is not an exception to that trend, but naturally here at laptopsessions.com, we give you acoustic guitar and an in-tune voice to go along with it!

There’s been some debate to the last line of the song. Most places i’ve read lyrics to the song say the last line is “I’ve never understood, don’t f*** with me, uh-huh”. However, the radio play version I have heard countless times does not alter this last line that is in the CD version. It leads me to believe the last line does not include the f word. However, I still can’t figure out what it is. So you will notice a change in the last line which does not change the meaning of the line at all.

This is also unique because the song has no acoustic guitar track, so hearing this played back is quite unique to me as well.

I hope you enjoy this latest installment, and I know you’ll be back tomorrow for our favorite day of the week, as Jim dips into his library of original goodies for a great session installment. I’ll be here to watch it, and I know you will be as well!

R.E.M.’s “Collapse Into Now” (2011) – AN LS SPECIAL REVIEW

Chris Moore — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 16:13:29 +0000

Originally posted 2011-03-15 05:37:18.

By Ben Neal:

R.E.M.’s latest album Collapse Into Now hit last week amid two months of buzz that it was the group’s strongest outing in more than a decade. This buzz was predictable as most rock bands that have been removed from their zeitgeist for a decade or more get “return to glory” buzz for their next album quite often, but this time the buzz was not wrong.

Let’s back up for a moment and clear some things up: R.E.M.’s recent work was still quite good. Even the much maligned Around the Sun perceptively captured the mood of 2004 America in songs like “Final Straw” and “Leaving New York.” Frankly a band at the point of their career that R.E.M. is at (well past their zeitgeist moment, but still an extremely popular live act) will always face criticism of repeating themselves; well as someone once said “every time I try something new, all they want is 1993.” Yes, many of the same songs had similar lyrical and harmonic themes, but freshness was still there (no one complained about Hitchcock repeating himself by continuing to make thrillers). One valid criticism, specifically, is that the band became a bit too monolithic and too Michael Stipe-driven, and well those critics will be elated to see the increased presence of Peter Buck on this album.

Collapse Into Now starts off with the rocking tune “Discoverer” that is a bit of an announcement (that’s not dissimilar to U2’s “Vertigo”) that the band is back with an upbeat rock tune, but with classic R.E.M. lyricism. Following up the debut track is a series of tracks that make up the strongest parts of the album, including “All the Best,” “Überlin,” and “It Happened Today.” Within these tracks one can see similiarities with other R.E.M. songs both thematically and musically, but they stay fresh and exciting. “All the Best” serves a great rocker and shows that Stipe and company are not afraid to face their career mortality or to be self aware with lines like “It’s just like me to overstay my welcome,” whereas “Überlin” takes a slightly more somber tone, but is classic R.E.M. (and feels reminiscent of their “Losing my Religion”) combining serious themes of loss and change, with surreal lyrics and great harmonies. With “Oh, My Heart” and the remorseful, yet beautiful “It Happened Today,” the band explores the heartache of a Katrina-type tragedy.

While not reaching the heights of the previous songs, later tracks in the album like “Mine Smell Like Honey” and “Me and Marlon Brando, Marlon Brando and I” are excellent tracks and make the album a cohesive unit and runs the full gamut of the R.E.M. universe. Themes of loss, failure, and coming back rejuvenated from those failures are consistent and well-explored throughout the album: the band has never shied from being referential to its influences (often outside of the musical realm) or to itself, and has a healthy sense of humor and humility about their self, which serves them well.

Another healthy change is having an album that has consistent themes, but has musical variance; this is especially important since their last few releases have had an all or nothing approach with either all hard rocking tracks or melancholic tracks dominated by Stipe’s crooning voice. From the hard rocking sound of “Discoverer” or “All the Best” to the slow paced somber sounds of “Walk it Back,” Collapse Into Now provides everything an R.E.M. fan (or any music fan in general) can ask for. It may not be a great album, but it certainly reaches greatness at times and is a treat for the listener, and really at this point in their career, that is no small feat.

P.S. Fans of Patti Smith or Eddie Vedder should be sure to check out their “cameos” on the album.

“Living Well is the Best Revenge” (R.E.M. Acoustic Rock Cover Song) – The Laptop Sessions

Chris Moore — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 14:00:31 +0000

Originally posted 2008-06-27 11:36:13.

By Chris Moore:

Hello and welcome to an all-new weekend edition of the Laptop Sessions acoustic cover song video blog! We’ve been doing a lot of work on the site recently, in terms of adding new features and new material to the Laptop Sessions site as well as promoting it so that we will bring in new fans to this great venture. For instance, by this weekend, we will be adding category descriptions for each of the artists we have covered — these will provide interesting background information on their songwriting, information on both original and cover songs that the artists have produced, and share some information about what material has been used for the Laptop Sessions thus far.

And now, without further ado, on to the Laptop Session of the day! I am pleased to bring you the album starter from this year’s R.E.M. release, Accelerate, “Living Well is the Best Revenge.” When the album first came out, I was interested in it, but I had my doubts. I do own both volumes of R.E.M.’s greatest hits, but I really only love about half of the tracks — I would have personally preferred a one disc greatest hits, but that’s just me. Suffice it to say that I wasn’t sure how I would feel about an entire album, especially when their last few albums have received mediocre music reviews. Still, I was interested, so I took a shot…

And I’m so glad that I did! The album is one of my favorites from this year. The music is upbeat and rocking, the vocals are strong and the lyrics interesting, and there is really only one song on the album that I’m not crazy about. The packaging of the deluxe edition (which, yes, I bought — I’m a sucker for attractive CD packaging…) is impressive. There is a booklet tied together loosely with string and a subtitle on the front cover that reads “This will fall apart.” And I don’t doubt that it would if I pulled on the pages too hard…

This song, “Living Well is the Best Revenge” is a great album starter. The verse is really only one chord, so I hope I’ve done it justice. Without the fullness of the other instruments, it just doesn’t sound the same, but you need to watch one other YouTube video after mine — the official R.E.M. music video for the song. They recorded it while driving in a car — the drummer, who is driving, is literally using the steering wheel for the percussion in the song. It’s a great idea that I wish my band MoU had thought of before, as we have been known to rehearse for gigs in the back of our bassist’s van!

That’s all from me for now; make sure to check back tomorrow for an all-new, amazing video blog entry from Jeff…

See you next session!

Download a FREE mp3 of this song at the Fusco-Moore Store by
Clicking HERE! It’s on “The Laptop Sessions, Vol. 8″:

Chords/Lyrics: “King of Comedy” by REM

Jeff Copperthite — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 03:45:43 +0000

Originally posted 2009-03-19 22:34:18.

All Verses: D, Dsus4, A, C, G, A, Asus4

Chorus: Gm, C, G

Bridge: G, slide down (x8)

Lyrics

Make your money with a suit and tie
Make your money with shrewd denial
Make your money expert advice,
If you can wing it
Make your money with a power ply
Make your money with a buyout bribe
Make it lie as long as you mean it

I’m not king of comedy,
Grease the pig, give a squeeze (squeeze me)

Make your money with exploitation
Make it holy illumination
Say a prayer at every station
Don’t forget to ask for mercy
Make your money with a pretty face
Make it easy with product placement
Make it charged with controversy
I’m straight, I’m queer, I’m bi

I’m not king of comedy,
I’m not your magazine,
I’m not your television

Make your money, make it rich
Make it young and make it quick
Make your money on the jukebox, baby,
It’s pick up sticks,
Make your enemies, make your moves
Make your critics fumble through
Make it smart and make it schmooze
Make it look easy

I’m not king of comedy,
I’m not your magazine,
I’m not your television,
I’m not your movie screen
I’m not commodity (all together now)
I’m not commodity
I’m not commodity

One of a Kind: An R.E.M. Retrospective

Chris Moore — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 03:48:48 +0000

By Ben Neal:

(Written 9/30/2011)

When R.E.M. announced that they would be calling it a day as a band last Wednesday, it produced a plethora of reactions from hard-core fans of the band, from casual, now-disaffected fans, and really anyone with a pulse who lived in the 80s or 90s. For many it was a visceral reaction to a band they have cared about forever was disbanding, but for many the reaction has been less about the band itself, but for what they represented to so many people: an undying institution that defined so much of the last three decades and brought music to a brave new world.

R.E.M. was an odd success story. Most legendary rock bands have a sex symbol lead singer, a generous amount of tabloid fodder, accessible power ballads, and embrace the height of their success; R.E.M. had very little of any of that. During their early 1990s vast popular successes of Out of Time and Automatic for the People, they weren’t interested in touring, their music was always obscure and abstract, and discounting the time Peter Buck mixed sleeping pills and wine aboard a trans-Atlantic flight, R.E.M. never really made headlines for the typical rock-band reasons.

Starting in the early 1980s, the band became a mainstay of college radio and hipsters around the world with singles like “Radio Free Europe” and “Gardening at Night” which ultimately culminated in the band’s first two albums Murmur and Reckoning. The albums initially garnered better reviews than commercial success, but the band quickly developed a cult following in college towns and on the East Coast. The music, already quite abstract, was made the moreso by lead singer Michael Stipe’s trademark mumbling (in the pre-internet era, fans of the band were fond of debating with one another what the lyrics to early songs actually were). A mere two years after Murmur, the band released the surreal, gothic Fables of the Reconstruction, which thematically was an exploration of the mythology of the American South and mostly featured songs on local eccentric figures of Athens, GA.

By this time, Stipe had thankfully been convinced to sing more clearly, but the band was by this point unable to break out of their college radio niche. With Life’s Rich Pageant the band really found its footing, with clearer lyrics, a decidedly and increasingly political agenda, and a sound like we hadn’t really heard before. A continuation of the post-punk movement that combines strong elements of the New York-based New Wave with a healthy dose of Americiana, they were The Byrds crossed with The Velvet Underground crossed with Springsteen.

A couple more indie records (and finally, some mainstream radio play with the often misinterpreted songs “Fall on Me” and “The One I Love”), and noticeably less mumbling from Stipe provided the band a launching point and after 1987’s Document, R.E.M. left their indie roots for a lucrative contract with Warner Bros.

By the time their WB debut, Green, was released in 1989; it marked their sixth album in a mere seven years and being an album that was heavily hyped, and initially was underwhelming to some listeners, but still packs quite the punch. “Orange Crush,” in particular, with Bill Berry’s recognizable drums at the on-set was an innovative song and still holds up well today. This record, also known for the impressive “World Leader Pretend” and R.E.M.’s first foray in touching GLBT issues with “The Wrong Child” in some ways represents, along with their final album Collapse Into Now, the best “sampling” of the variety of music R.E.M. produced. However, their next album really sent them into a stratosphere by themselves: Out of Time a fairly non-commercial folk-country album that produced two of their biggest hits, the disowned by the band “Shiny Happy People” and the surreal “Losing My Religion,” but the real heart of the record were songs like “Near Wild Heaven” and “Texarkana.” To date, this record represents their largest commercial success, and is, the two hits aside, one of their most non-commercial records.

Their next album Automatic for the People is generally considered their best album and continued their popular and critical successes. While some would have expected the band to follow up Out of Time with a faster, more upbeat album; R.E.M. went the other direction with a slow, somber album that largely dealt with issues of death, mortality, and tackled the AIDS crisis head-on. The album produced “Everyone Hurts,” an anthem for the chronically depressed, and glorified long forgotten and tragic entertainers like Andy Kaufman (“Man on the Moon”) and Montgomery Clift (“Monty Got a Raw Deal”). To date, no album makes me feel more at home on a rainy day.

In 1994, they released their follow-up, Monster and the critical and commercial success that had come so easy to them their entire career was suddenly hard to come by. Maybe it’s because they had reached such high peaks that they were doomed to be “repeating themselves” or being “not as good as they once were” in many people’s eyes. Monster was a significant success, but left many people disappointed and cold, and in some ways that was the band’s fault. The album was a glammed up mock-rock record (many people didn’t get the joke) with singles like “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” and “Crush with Eyeliner” that lampooned celebrity, sex, and love. During the Monster tour, drummer Bill Berry suffered an aneurysm on-stage in Europe and later left the band in 1996 for a simple life on a farm near Athens. For many casual fans, it gave them permission to move on from the band; for critics it gave them an easy narrative to dismiss the band and say they should have followed Berry’s lead. Indeed, had they called it a day in 1996, their legacy would be something of mythological proportions (like The Clash), but they did the right thing and kept on making high quality music.

Berry’s final album is the woefully under-rated New Adventures in Hi-Fi, an album composed of songs recorded on the ill-fated Monster tour. The album also proved to be quite controversial and alienated some of their middle America following with songs like “New Test Leper” where Michael Stipe declared that he couldn’t say that “I love Jesus” and begged those who judged his lifestyle to “call me a leper.” Still, it’s a fascinating album that produced a great number of back catalog tracks like the aforementioned “Leper,” “The Wake-Up Bomb,” and “Bittersweet Me.”

After Berry left, the band, innovators always, increasingly gravitated towards technology. With 1998’s Up, the band relied on a synthesizer that made the album sound more like Radiohead than R.E.M., but still produced extraordinary songs such as “At My Most Beautiful” and “Hope.” The somber Up, gave way to the sunny Beach Boys-esque Reveal, which features “Imitation of Life” (stealing the title from the long-forgotten Douglas Sirk 1950s film), perhaps the band’s best single and the optimistic tracks “I’ll Take the Rain” and “I’ve Been High.” Their contemporary [U2’s] Bono declared the album to be some of their best work and to this date I’ve yet to find a better album to listen to on a sunny July day by the pool.

Next came their much maligned 2004 effort Around the Sun—an album that certainly has its flaws, but from the haunting lead single “Leaving New York” to the Carvaggio-inspired “Boy in the Well,” I’ve always found the album to be a perceptive, yet somber assessment of the immediate post 9/11 period. Where Around the Sun tried to find hope in dark times, their 2008 effort Accelerate was an angry indictment of the Bush administration with biting songs like Mr. Richards and Houston, but also beautiful tracks like “Hollow Man” and “Supernatural Superserious”, which 15 years earlier would have surely ruled the top of the charts. Accelerate was a true return to form for the band, with an aggressive sound not heard from the band for nearly 20 years and generated solid reviews.

This spring their final album, Collapse Into Now was a mix of the slow, somber songs that populated Around the Sun and the hard-rockers of Accelerate and generated the band’s best reviews since Berry left the band in ’96. Highlights included the beautiful New Orleans-ode “Oh My Heart” and “Discoverer.” As I re-listened to Collapse a few days ago, it’s truly a very poignant and very R.E.M. record. The closing track “Blue”, a stream-of-consciousness track with a cameo by Patti Smith, makes a perfect end to a great career. Stipe sings (or speaks) “This is my time and I am thrilled to be alive….20^th Century collapse into now.”

R.E.M. had contemporaries to be sure—U2 chief among them – but few other bands were as successful for as long, nor did many bands have the impact that four—and later, just three guys who call Athens, GA home – did on our musical world. But R.E.M. was just different from any other rock band. The guys were, well, weird; Stipe increasingly embraced his role as a prominent “queer artist,” and they did things on their own terms. Unlike other rock bands of similar stature, R.E.M. never really strived to be the biggest band in the world; they became so successful oftentimes in spite of themselves. They wanted to be successful, sure, but where U2 or the Stones might take pride in playing the biggest venues—R.E.M. didn’t. Similarly, many bands (oftentimes sincerely) think of themselves as bands with a global conscience, but so many of these bands’ (many of which I love) songs with a global consciousness are songs like “Peace on Earth” or other vague songs with obvious themes. R.E.M. always went a step farther. There were no songs with a generalized “war is bad” message, but rather a litany of songs about Latin American politics, acid rain, pollution, AIDS, corporate downsizing, and so on; and they did so in non-obvious and abstract ways that treated their audience like adults who could read between the lines. Whereas many bands’ bread-and-butter songs were about love and relationships, not many R.E.M. songs were—rather they made songs about a town on the Arkansas-Texas border, on forgotten tragic entertainers, and eccentric senior citizens.

More than anything, what made R.E.M. tick and what made their fans love them is doing things on their own terms. They, inexplicably, refused to tour the two biggest albums—not because of contract disputes, but because they simply didn’t feel like touring. Immediately after signing the biggest contract in music history, they went out and made an inaccessible album like Up. R.E.M. were trailblazers, and showed the music world, and aspiring musicians throughout the world, that an indie sensation and making music for a major label were not incompatible. Before R.E.M., bands had to choose between the two, but R.E.M.’s breakthrough cleared the way for acts like Nirvana, The Decemberists, and Arcade Fire to reach mainstream success while still making the music they wanted to make—all while inventing the genre of alternative rock as we know it.

Their break-up announcement (the decision was made earlier in the summer, yet their label was not informed until just hours before the announcement) was likewise classic R.E.M. A quiet statement on their webpage that stated it rather matter-of-factly: there would be no farewell tour, or a tearful talk show interview; they were just done as a band. For fans, it came as both a shock and resigned expectation. Their lyrics recently had made it clear they were afraid that they would “overstay my welcome” (“All the Best”) and of always being “on repeat…and incomplete” (“Hollow Man”). Ultimately, the band members lived thousands of miles apart and the band had become a side project for the members who all had their own pet projects. This coupled with label politics (the end of their WB contract and new management at the label they had called home for over 20 years), made it seem like a natural end for the band.

R.E.M. was a truly one of a kind band. Every album was singular: from the 80s jangly rock of Life’s Rich Pageant to the folk-alt-country of Out of Time to the glam mock-rock of Monster to the Radiohead-esque Up; each R.E.M. album was an event and a singular work of art. As a recent tribute said no band was as good for as long as R.E.M., and few made the impact they did, both musically and commercially. Few bands come along that have had their impact and done so many things on their own terms. Yes, their production slowed down (10 albums in their first 13 years, compared to 5 in their last 15) and admittedly the product suffered some in later years, but they remained innovators and perpetually fascinating musicians till the end. As Stipe sings in the beautiful “Oh My Heart” off their final album: “It’s sweet and it’s sad, and it’s true.” That’s R.E.M. in a nutshell.

R.E.M. announces breakup… a primer on the reactionary articles

Chris Moore — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 10:28:10 +0000

By Chris Moore:

R.E.M. is a band that I feel like I have always known about, a group that has somehow worked its way into the cultural fabric of the past several decades. Watching a post-apocalyptic thriller, the chances are better than not that you’ll hear “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” The number of classic, epic, and usually beautifully simple ballads that they’ve released is staggering: “Losing My Religion,” “Everybody Hurts,” and “The One I Love” to name only a few.

Now, after over thirty years as a band, they have, according to the official announcement on their website, “decided to call it a day as a band… [and] walk away with a great sense of gratitude, of finality, and of astonishment at all we have accomplished.”

So, before you take the time to scour the internet, looking for articles, yearning for some sign that this might all somehow be a mistake, allow me to save you some time. First: as of this writing, my best advice would be:

Skip the articles and go directly to the R.E.M. H.Q. official home page.

That’s where you’ll find the band’s official announcement, direct messages from each of the band members, and the Warner Brothers press release. All the other articles I’ve read have simply copied and pasted from these sources, and added little or nothing to the conversation. The only other vital piece of information has come from owner of the R.E.M. fan community Murmurs and former Senior Vice President of Emerging Technology at Warner Bros. Records Ethan Kaplan, who has suggested that internal pressures at the label may have been the catalyst for this breakup. For that, you should cruise on over to Wikipedia and prepare to hate all things corporate even more than you might have before.

I suppose there isn’t much to say right now. There isn’t much to do, except cue up some R.E.M. on your iPod, reminisce about their hits and misses, and prepare for the slew of retrospective articles and “essential songs” playlists that are certain to saturate the world wide web in the coming weeks. While I wait, perhaps I’ll add my own brief story to those even now being written around the world:

My knowledge of R.E.M. in a vague sense finally passed away the day I stood, as a college student between classes, in the aisle of Best Buy, interested in their greatest hits. Of course, there wasn’t one definitive collection, so I stood pondering between the best of the I.R.S. years and the best of the Warner Bros. years. Eventually, I chose the pricier third option of buying them both!

What I heard didn’t thrill me at first. And, even to this day, I understand the opinion I’ve heard from others that “all their songs sound the same.” That being said, discovering the music of R.E.M. has been like an adventure for me, one that began not with the greatest hits, but with 2008′s Accelerate. The grungy, subversive rock and roll vitality of this album turned me on to the band in a way that none of their other music did or has since. Since then, I have been picking up their back catalog one used CD and one remastered Deluxe Edition at a time.

While it has been a very rewarding experience and I’ve developed a serious appreciation, and even a love, for R.E.M., nothing I’ve heard has equaled the force of Accelerate (and I realize I’m about the only person on the planet who feels this way). This year’s Collapse Into Now is a marvelous record, if only for the manner in which they merged the energy of Accelerate with the classic sound they created in their youth and developed over a long career.

I will end with a plea to all those paid writers out there now, preparing their pieces for the major magazines and websites they work for: Please avoid the mundane reductions of this band’s massive career. And please — pretty please — don’t add to the “R.E.M. had declined recently” rhetoric that is still out there. The late nineties and early 2000s was a period of decline to be certain, but they had recently undergone an infusion of energy and vitality that I, for one, have been excited about — it has been the one force, of all their various talents expressed throughout the years, that has interested me in their music — and it will be sorely missed.