Keith Pille's Weekly Shuffle
12.19.05

Every week, I will fire up the Shuffle Songs option on my iPod; the first song to come up, no matter what it is, will get an instant, unvarnished review. We're at the mercy of random chance and the limits of my digital music collection. Let's see where this takes us.

You Are the Everything
R.E.M., Green

Ah, the late 80s. Li'l Keith was, by dubbing copies of Green and INXS' Kick from friends, just beginning to formulate a musical taste system that went deeper than "whatever comes on Z-92 next." And, at the same time, starting into a weirdly ambiguous sometimes-it-is-and-sometimes-it-isn't relationship with a girl. Who was also a big R.E.M. fan.

So, yeah. Li'l Keith spent lots and lots of hours lying on his back on his waterbed (Li'l Keith's parents were oddly insistent that everyone in the family had to have a waterbed; Aged, Graying Keith thanks them for this every time he has to go to the physical therapist for back pain), looking up at the ceiling and mooning, listening to Michael Stipe wail about someone being the Everything. Li'l Keith also liked to make mix tapes for Ambiguous Girl; in an ongoing masterwork of subtlety, the opening track of side 2 of these tapes would pretty much always be "You Are the Everything."

Since it was a basic operating assumption of Li'l Keith's (it's amazing, by the way, how tough it is to break out of this 3rd-person rut once you get into it) that R.E.M. was the world's greatest rock band, it was an easy jump that "You Are the Everything," was the most magnifecentest song ever since it did such a perfect job of encapsulating feelings and had opaque-but-heavy lines like "you're drifting off to sleep with your teeth in your mouth." Any lines you didn't understand were just proof that R.E.M. were out-of-this-world smart.

Where does Aged, Graying Keith stand on the song? It's a little cringe-inducing, actually, but it's unclear whether the cringe is coming from Stipe's overly precious lyrics or from the memories of late 80s geek puppy-love that the song brings back. It's pretty good, I guess. The atmospherics are great, and even if Stipe was guilty of trying way too hard to sound profound, the man had a beautiful voice back in the day. And you have to hand it to R.E.M., it was awesome of them to put a mandolin-and-accordion downer like this on an album that was pretty clearly meant to have some pop crossover appeal (and, in the cold light of day, I'd say that Green marked the beginning of the end for R.E.M.; still pretty good, as was Out of Time, but really everything after Document was further and further away from the high-water mark).

In the end, I suppose this is one of those songs that's so wrapped up with a phase of my life that it's not really possible to make much of an aesthetic judgment. And if that's frustrating from a music-should-be-categorized-and-evaluated point of view, it's also one of the best fringe benefits of listening to music.

Weekly Shuffle Scoreboard (Best to Worst):

1. "Rock N Roll Radio V2," Derailleur
2. "Back from Somewhere (live)," Husker Du
3. "Powderfinger," Neil Young
4. "Sliver (live)," Nirvana
5. "Whiskey Bottle," Uncle Tupelo
6. "Don't Be Afraid of the Robot," Electric Six
7. "Gassed & Stoked," Lou Reed
8. "You Are the Everything," R.E.M.
9. "Nicotine & Gravy," Beck
10. "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart (live)," Wilco
11. "The Calming Sea," Beachwood Sparks
12. "John, I'm Only Dancing," David Bowie
13. "Take It or Leave it," The Strokes
14. "Monkey Dot," Money Mark
15. "I Wanted to Tell You," Matthew Sweet
16. "Soldier's Joy," Mark O'Connor
17. "Masoko Tanga," The Police
18. "Scenery," Neil Young and Pearl Jam
19. "We Got The," The Beastie Boys
20. "The Big Foist," The Minutemen
21. "Climbing up the Walls," Radiohead
22. "That's When I Reach for My Revolver," Mission of Burma