8.0/10
So now we come to R.E.M.'s first major label album. I know a lot of hardcore fans of their early years tend to site this album as the point where things took a turn for the worse, but personally I don't see a major drop in quality here. The production has gotten a little slicker. Maybe it's a bit too slick, but this still features a fine batch of tunes. Orange Crush is still one of my favorites of their songs. I really dig the guitar line on that one. It always made me feel like I was flying or something, which I guess is perversely appropriate since the song is apparently about airplanes dropping agent orange on Vietnam. I know, I thought it was a jingle for the soda at first, too, but it turns out it's political. For a couple of albums now the lyrics have started to become more intelligible, and politics has crept in a bit as a subject matter, although not so overtly that they hit you over the head with it. Honestly I don't think a lot of the songs here are political at all really, although the title of the album makes it sound like this is going to be some sort of environmental protest bonanza.
Green has the distinction of featuring the first R.E.M. song I, personally, ever heard. That song would be Stand. I heard it on the radio when this album came out and I was just a tiny little kid of about eleven years old. My initial opinion was I couldn't "stand" it. Sorry for the bad joke, but I wasn't really impressed. It just seemed kind of weird to me. I also was a little kid with horrible taste, like all little kids. I spent my time jamming to Casey's Top 40 back then. Dark days indeed. Anyway I didn't know who R.E.M. was then, and I wouldn't even really get into them for another 3 years. But when I did start getting into them and I heard Stand again I was like "That's that song I heard on the radio 3 years ago and didn't like! I like it now!" I have to give a special shout out to the wah pedal sound in the guitar solo. It's just fun, damn it. Stand would also later go on to be featured as the theme song to the underrated sitcom Get a Life. It also boasts a supremely goofy music video in which the band members and other random people dance awkwardly and jump through the air and stuff. It's been awhile since I've seen it, but it's kind of funny as I recall.
Overall the name of the game here is poppy catchy songs. Pop Song 89 and Get Up make you bounce around like you're in one of those bouncy castle things. Then You Are the Everything comes along and is all slow and pretty and basically torpedoes that whole bouncy poppy thing. But it's a good song. When I was first getting into this I had a friend who hated The Wrong Child. He was actually the person who introduced me to R.E.M., but every time that song came on he would fast forward past it because he couldn't stand it. So for awhile I had it in my head that that song sucked, and I would skip it, too. But then one day I realized I hadn't really actually listened to it, so I let it play. I discovered it wasn't that bad. It's not the strongest song on the album, but it's perfectly fine. So after that I stopped skipping it.
Side 2 is maybe a little less poppy than side 1, but it maintains the quality pretty well I think. In addition to the aforementioned Orange Crush you get another pretty good rocker in Turn You Inside Out. Hairshirt kind of meanders around a bit, and I could understand if someone were to find it boring, but it works for me. I Remember California has an awesome atmospheric guitar line that's somewhat reminiscent of Oddfellows Local 151 off the last album. I know I wasn't as high on that song, but this song is better I think. And then the album closes off with another bouncy pop song that for some reason they decided not to give a title.
Green also features some odd packaging things, back in the days when you actually looked at the packaging of albums. In addition to not even listing the eleventh song on the track list on the back they also replace the number 4 with a letter R in front of Stand. And then, (this blew my 14 year old mind) if you held the front cover up to the light you could see little translucent 4's in the R's in the words R.E.M. and Green. Why the hell did they do this? I read somewhere it was because when Michael Stipe was originally typing out the track list he accidentally his the R key instead of the 4 key. So instead of correcting it they instead decided to do goofy stuff with the packaging that probably cost a lot more to make. Which might be why not every copy apparently had the little 4's in the R's. I remember I was visiting my older brother who also happened to own a copy of Green and I wanted to blow his mind so I went and grabbed his copy and held it up to the light and there were no 4's there. What the hell? I think he thought I was smoking drugs or something. I had originally owned Green on a cassette tape and when I replaced it with a CD I actually passed up buying copies that didn't have the 4's just to get a copy that did have it. I was serious about this, damn it.
One other oddity about the packaging is they decided to include the lyrics for one song only. They had never included any song lyrics before on their previous albums, possibly because they consisted of gibberish that Stipe made up on the spot. But this one has lyrics for World Leader Pretend. I can only guess it's because Stipe was particularly proud of them. They're pretty good lyrics actually. And looking at the packaging right now I just noticed something else I never noticed before. They randomly have the letters I, M, and C underlined in the lyric sheet under some words. IMC? Is this some sort of hidden message? How have I never seen this before? Mind blown again. Sort of. If I knew what IMC meant it would be really cool. Maybe Stipe had another typo while trying to write the name of the band.
So I've written a lot about Green, but it's one of the first albums I ever got really into. I'm always going to be kind of biased towards it. I think it often seems to get the short-shrift by critics and fans, but it's a pretty cool album really.
