Crib Notes

HERE, YOU MONSTER!

It worked for Marvin Gaye — sorta.

After his marriage of 15 years to an older Anna Gordy ended in bitter divorce proceedings in 1977, Gaye dedicated to her the double-album with the double-edged title, Here, My Dear. In it, he took creative license to air the dirty laundry leftover from their failed marriage with such songs as “When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You,” “Anger,” and “You Can Leave, But It’s Going to Cost You.”

The punchline? According to the divorce decree, half the proceeds from sales of the album went toward alimony payment — hence the sardonic title.

So today, when a new song from Usher’s upcoming album, Monster, was released, titled “Papers,” the comparison was unavoidable. In the song, Usher sings:

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Title: Monster
Released on: Sept. 26, 1994
Favorite tracks: “King of Comedy,” “Star 69”

After the relatively low-key, mellow tones of Automatic for the People, REM clearly wanted to turn the amplifiers up to 11 and rock out again with Monster. In one interview, guitarist Peter Buck described Monster as “a ‘rock’ record, with the rock in quotation marks.” He explained, “That’s not what we started out to make, but that’s certainly how it turned out to be… Like, it’s a rock record, but is it really?” (Answer: Yes! It really is a rock record.)

Monster marks a different kind of directional change in REM’s refinement of its sound. You could say that REM had always gone forward in its musical development. The path would probably look more like a sine wave than a straight line, but the band always followed along a continuum in, for instance, increasing the clarity of Michael Stipe’s vocals and lyrical thrust. Monster strikes me as REM’s first serious attempt to reverse course, to retrace its steps and recapture some of the virtues they’d put aside over time. And, true to form, they want to backtrack while dabbling in musical idioms that hadn’t touched on much before.

Monster strikes me as an brash, exciting experiment with results that aren’t 100% successful – as compared to Automatic for the People, which is an extremely successful experiment whose parameters don’t really interest me in particular. Monster holds up better than I was expecting.

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