jlh | Monday music: Maps and Legends (Reply)

This is the post I should have made last week, but I got a bit distracted. Monday I was on the train coming back from a trip to DC while many of you were having a snow day. I'd spent the weekend with a college friend, and I was feeling contemplative, a combination which brings me to REM, and thence to "Maps and Legends."

Like many other X'ers, I fell for REM in the mid-80s, around when Murmur was released and I heard "South Central Rain" on MTV. And when I was in college, though Green came out during sophomore year, I spent most of my time listening to the 5 IRS records (Murmur, Reckoning, Fables of the Reconstruction, Life's Rich Pageant, Document, and of course the EP Chronic Town that was packaged with the Dead Letter Office collection of b-sides. I almost picked "Carnival of Sorts (Box Cars)" for this slot, and I might have used "Moral Kiosk" to talk about life at college or "Driver 8" to talk about singing with my best friend, but I keep coming back to "Maps and Legends" as the best representation of what IRS-era REM was all about.

A high school friend of mine called it "jangly guitar music" and it's certainly that, and might have given me a bent toward that sound that I still carry with me. It's great for sing-alongs at the beach campfire or in the music room, since you only need one competent guitar player to bang out Peter Buck's riff. For once I'm not going to talk about the drummer—my lack of interest in post-Bill Berry REM is not really linked to his playing, though his presence does keep the whole enterprise from sliding into folk. I'm also not going to get into the lyrics too much, since famously no one ever knew what the hell Michael Stipe was saying, between the cryptic lyrics and his less-than-stellar enunciation. The actual words just weren't a huge part of the listening experience, at least for this song, except for the chorus:

Maybe these maps and legends
Have been misunderstood

And I find that when I'm listening to the song, what I'm actually paying attention to, other than the guitar, is Mike Mills' backup vocal. Certainly that's what I sing with, and to me, the blending—or really, the counterpoint—of Mike and Michael is a lot of what made the REM sound, and what made them compelling to listen to.

Definitely once they made the move to the big label everything got bigger and more mainstream, which wasn't a bad thing by a long shot. But I do have a nostalgia for the early, muddy, muddled REM, playing on a cassette tape in my walkman while I studied in the library.

If you've only heard early REM on Eponymous, but you liked them, I'd recommend this additional dozen:

From Chronic Town, Carnival of Sorts (Box Cars)
From Murmur, Moral Kiosk and Perfect Circle
From Reckoning, 7 Chinese Bros. and Little America
From Fables of the Reconstruction, Maps and Legends, Life and How to Live It and Green Grow the Rushes
From Life's Rich Pageant, These Days, Just a Touch, and Swan Swan H
From Document, Fireplace