Be Sure To Get Good REM

This remains one of my favorite music videos of all time. It’s a delightful combination of familiar and absurd and you can catch a lot of things over re-watch. The song itself doesn’t much lend itself to a narrative-based music video, so it’s the perfect opportunity for a theme-based one and it hits the mark. It on the one hand gives you a feel for pool parties you may have experienced in the past with a very familiar set of people that signal their identities in a matter of seconds (the woman who gets splashed deserves special attention as someone whose mannerisms so remarkably convey the lack of injustice there even as you know nothing about anything else about her). Some kids swimming just like the old days, then a dude just sitting there with a monkey. The guy on fire manages to be another thing going on as people dance a kind of dated dance.

Their video for Bad Day is also remarkably good.

You can tell that they watched a lot of local news reports in prep for this one. It strikes the right notes the same way the morning team does on The Onion News Network. Peter Buck is kind of stiff, but nothing is perfect. Just the sort of encapsulation of experiencing the sort of badness that makes you feel like a bleeds-leads news report. It was written in 2003 in response to George W Bush and Iraq, but it strikes a much wider vibes as the best songs often do. For a while it lived in my mind as an ode to some chaotic personal things that went on in 2003 in my own life, but as those memories and the feelings with them is distanced, the song pops in my head when I’m having one of those days where nothing seems to be going right and tomorrow seems even more bleak.

I was going through an REM phase when I was creating the Hit Coffee blog and trying to decide a name. Two finalists were “Best Imitation of Life” (pulling from the REM song and also Ben Folds Five’s “Best Imitation of Myself”), and Worst Joke Ever. That song was never made a single as far as I am aware and never got a proper music video of it, but here they are singing it.