R.E.M.’s Out of Time was one of the first CDs I ever bought, dropped onto the Electronics counter at Hills Department store along with Bryan Adams’ Waking Up the Neighbours and Genesis’ I Can’t Dance. Two of them were quickly relegated to the “Things I Wish I’d Never Paid For” pile, along with a number of abstract-patterned silk shirts, a spiral perm and the answers to an English quiz about Lord Byron.1
The four boys from Athens, though, stayed in my Discman for the rest of the summer and eventually I added to the “R” stack on my CD shelf by signing up for enough Columbia House accounts to get their previous releases for a penny, plus shipping and handling, plus several strongly worded letters that suggested my twelve-year old self was well on her way to learning about collection agencies.
For the next two years (Summer ‘91-Summer ‘93) R.E.M. was my world. I alternated between Out of Time and a friend’s cassette copy of Murmur the night my first for-real boyfriend2 dumped me for a girl who had purchased an advance ticket to Puberty. None of the songs were particularly about breakups, but they beat the shit out of Phil Collins singing about dead railroad workers. I was given a week of detention for calling the morning bus driver stupid when he changed the radio station halfway through “Shiny Happy People”.3 I bought Automatic for the People the day I got my first period. Everybody hurts indeed, especially everybody’s intermittently spasming uterus.
When I rolled onto my college campus, I continued to blow my meal money on their music, but they never grabbed me by the head or the heart like the early stuff. When I bought Accelerate last spring, I gave it a listen or two before scrolling past it on the way to my favorites, realizing that I’d been scoring R.E.M. albums out of a sense of obligation, for the same reason I’ve attended the same Christmas party for the past five years even though the conversations always end with stifled yawns and insincere promises and the poorly-crafted cheese ball gives me diarrhea.
Skip a few chapters until Saturday when I was speeding up I-77 to my parents’ house. I thumbed the clickwheel of my iPod, trying to find the right soundtrack for an afternoon spent alternately passing people on the right and counting the cars that claimed to have Jesus in the passenger seat. I accidentally selected Accelerate and decided to give it a chance, if only because I immediately dropped my iPod under the seat and thought a sub-par R.E.M. album was still better than plowing through the front window of a BP station.
Not only were the tracks better than I remembered, they were almost…good. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not Murmur—it’s not even Monster—but it’s a thousand times better than the suckfest that was Around the Sun, an album that even Peter Buck says “just wasn’t really listenable”. Accelerate is short (34:34) and noticeably uneven with the best tracks stacked in the first twenty minutes but it sounds like they were actually trying, which is something that I haven’t said since I was buying their records in the campus bookstore.
I listened to it all the way through while I blew through Virginia. And then I queued it up again, blasting “Supernatural Superserious” as I pulled into my parents’ driveway. After hearing it a couple of times, I’m dumping a lot of the credit for the sound onto the black-clad shoulders of drummer Bill Rieflin, formerly of Ministry. He sat behind the kit for Around the Suck Sun too, but the percussion is a thousand times more muscular on Accelerate, sometimes pulling the rest of the arrangements behind it like a World’s Strongest Man competitor dragging a dumptruck through a sand pit.
Anyway. That was a thousand word introduction to this, the title track from Accelerate, which I like for a number of reasons including the repeated chorus:
Where is the ripcord, the trapdoor, the key?
Where is the cartoon escape-hatch for me?
No time to question the choices I make
I’ve got to follow another direction
1 I dropped $5 so a kid named Morgan could slip me some cursive-written bullshit, including the fun fact that Lord Byron’s first name was, in fact, “Lord”.
2 Defined as such after we kissed ON THE MOUTH behind the Shinobi machine at the Pizza Hut.
3 In retrospect, I owe him an apology for that.
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