The 1990s in 10 Albums: Automatic for the People (1992)
Maybe you’re crazy in the head.
R.E.M. had the kind of career trajectory which no band — or even solo act — receives these days. Having had more-or-less seven straight albums of increasing commercial success (with the excellent, but murky Fables of the Reconstruction being a possible exception), they then spent the whole of the early nineties a) going quadruple platinum on every album, and b) not touring. Afterwards, having nothing left to prove, they pretty much did whatever they liked for six albums and broke up.
In the middle of that commercial peak and studio period, the highest height of R.E.M. arrived, and in an odd occurrence even for the time, it was basically an album about death.
Sure, it’s about other things too. But when “Drive” begins, sounding like it’s designed to soundtrack some death scene in an AMC series, it’s pretty obvious that death enters the equation somewhere.
But in the end, R.E.M.’s most popular album got that way very simply: it’s also the most straightforward, and not just because it has “Everybody Hurts” on it. Both it and Out of Time (1991) demonstrated the old marketing principle of Most Advanced Yet Acceptable (MAYA): sure, there’s a slight oddity to both albums (your bog-standard alt-rock band of the 1990s doesn’t produce “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite” or “Shiny Happy People”) but these are the most straightforward R.E.M. albums across the entire discography.
Track backwards and you get the likes of Green and Document, albums which had their hits and their upbeat tracks, but also possessed a sour rage at the Reagan/Bush years which is compartmentalised to “Ignoreland” on AFTP. Track further back again and you’re heading, by varying degrees, towards the murk of Murmur (1983), where it’s unclear what, if anything, Michael Stipe is saying — and what, if anything, the others are playing (it’s a bass, for example, that opens “Radio Free Europe”).
Track forwards and you get the deeply odd Monster (1994), which seemed like a hop on the grunge bandwagon whilst clearly not being a grunge album at all. Up (1998) seemed like a similar jump onto the electronica craze of the late 1990s, but managed to be a bizarre way of going about it. Around the Sun (2004) got lost in the Adult Contemporary wilderness, and by the time the ‘classic’ sound (insofar as R.E.M. ever had one) returned for Accelerate (2008) and Collapse Into Now (2011), the moment had passed.
So the answer to ‘why Automatic for the People?’ is a simple one: it’s pretty much the only album from R.E.M. that could have gone toe-to-toe, commercially, with U2, despite R.E.M. being a very good band deserving of the sales. The moment was never going to come at any other time, because the combination of band ambition and public receptiveness didn’t ever otherwise line up.
Were the public (and critics) correct to alight on this album, out of the 15 possible? As someone who likes some of R.E.M.’s more esoteric stuff, it’s not my personal favourite. New Adventures in Hi-Fi (1996) is, in terms of lyrical theme, easier without being trite or needlessly upbeat. Reveal (2001) is an interesting sonic negative of Automatic. Document (1987) provides the politicised anger of “Ignoreland” for an entire album. I’m partial to the audio murk of Fables of the Reconstruction (1985), and if dialling it up to maximum, Murmur (1983).
As mentioned above, though, none of these have the same mainstream appeal; none of them have the potential to have an “Everybody Hurts” or “Try Not to Breathe” on them, relatively blunt, straightforward songs which spell out exactly what they’re about. I’d say that’s a good thing, though. Automatic for the People easily clears the bar it sets for itself, but it seems to set it too low — certainly when compared to these other albums.
Which is not to say that Automatic isn’t very good — it is. But it’s also a palatable album. It has the heft of profundity and the ease of radio hits, also very good things — but I’m not convinced that’s as good as, say, an artistic aim at something very specific, even if the aim misses slightly. Where’s the real oddity, the stuff too exact to be fake or imitated? It’s here, a little bit (“Drive”, “Monty Got a Raw Deal”, “Nightswimming”). But it’s also elsewhere, before and after this. Still, this — this was the album that did most to draw attention to the others.
