Frequency Issues.

Not strictly music-related, but I just thought I’d draw your attention to this rather superb article that David Berman re-posted on his new weblog last week, dealing with the infamous 1986 incident that saw the American news anchorman Dan Rather menaced and beaten by two men who mystifyingly demanded to know “Kenneth, what’s the frequency?”

I was sorta distantly aware of these events already, but the article, by Paul Limbert Allman, is a beautiful piece of writing, and a great demonstration of the way that a few uncanny coincidences can so quickly build themselves into glorious webs of conspiratorial thinking. Well worth a read.

Of slightly more relevance to this blog, it has also served to remind me of the obvious R.E.M. song, which has subsequently been bouncing around my head all day, setting me off on a kind of unexpected nostalgia trip, back to the strange days of 1994.

I’m not a big R.E.M. fan, and rarely think about their stuff unless one of their hits happens to jump out of a passing radio at me. I don’t mind ‘em – they’ve done some good numbers, but.. y’know. Back when this tune came out though, the 12 year old me was sufficiently impressed that he went out and bought their album “Monster” (on tape, natch) on the day of release.

In retrospect, it seems like a pretty cheesy move for R.E.M. to suddenly adopt distorted guitars and big chord riffs in the post-Nirvana environment, and indeed I remember people saying as much at the time – god knows who, as I didn’t read any music press or newspapers, but I seem to have nonetheless got the impression from somewhere that the album was pretty widely panned – perhaps my first experience of actively liking something that was generally dismissed by others?

What is surprising though is how much I STILL like this song. Long after all the ‘90s mulch has faded away, it still sounds pretty good, full of rich, strange guitar sounds and borderline-indecipherable lyrics that work well to convey the song’s themes of (I guess?) garbled transmissions and mental illness and such.

Then as now, I can’t really make out much of what Stipe is going on about, beyond the title phrase, something about “violent friends”, and “you said that Arnie was the shackles of you”? Back then, I remember that the very idea of a song where you couldn’t hear what the singer was saying was an invitation to immediate ridicule from FM-rock addled teenage brains, but I liked the name of the song and found the whole mystery of it slightly fascinating.

By far the best thing about “What’s The Frequency, Kenneth?” though is the bizarrely dissonant guitar solo – a sort of morbidly slowed down (possible reversed?) anti-guitar solo really. There is nothing that can quite convey how strange and wrong that bit, and “Monster” as a whole, sounded to me at age 12. I loved the shiny, Butch Vig-tempered distortion on “Nevermind” to death, but this was something else entirely. In my ignorance, I assumed that this was why people didn’t like the album: because it sounded all shitty and fucked up and you couldn’t hear the words properly.

(Although it’s nearly 15 years since I listened to “Monster” in its entirety, after checking a few bits out online I’d hazard a guess that people probably didn’t like it because a lot of the songs on it are quite dull, and seem to lean on ‘weird’ guitar/production decisions to hide a certain lack of inspiration. You know that thing when you’re a kid and you hear a song that’s quite long and ponderous, but you don’t judge it as such, because you sorta think, well, this seems dull to me NOW, but these guys are grown-ups – presumably they know what they’re doing, maybe I’ll appreciate the true adult grandeur of this tune when I’m a bit older, etc. This is probably the same regrettable mind-set that lures so many youngsters into listening to latter-day Pink Floyd or Dire Straits or The Doors or whatever, incorrectly assuming that they’ll become a bit more sophisticated if they manage to fathom why the fuck this is supposed to be good…)

Anyway, after the weird guitar bit on “..Kenneth”, the extreme tremolo effect used on “Crush with Eyeliner” (track two on “Monster”) completely freaked me out. I remember hearing a radio interview with the band, where Peter Buck said something about how he’d used a broken old amplifier that he liked the sound of to record lots of stuff on the album. As someone who up until this point had had no gateway at all (besides “Nevermind”) into what iTunes insists is called “Alternative & punk”, this concept just plain blew my mind. To think that this guy who was in a huge rock band, who could presumably afford ALL THE HI-TECH EQUIPMENT IN THE WORLD, was dicking about with some busted old piece of crap that made weird noises, and putting them all over his new album… I just didn’t know what to make of it.

Then I saw the video for that song on Top of the Pops, which I remember had guys in bearsuits dancing in cages and bright flashing lights and all this weird, pseudo-transgressive ‘90s MTV stuff, and just thought “oh my god, this song is never going to be a hit, and this video just looks completely horrible – these people are crazy”.

Yeah, for a few minutes there, R.E.M. seemed really fucking far-out. Who’d have thought it?

Labels: 90s nostalgia outbursts, David Berman, R.E.M., weirdness