I went down a YouTube rabbit hole the other night when I was procrastinating.  The suggested videos down the right of the screen were kind of creepy, in that they were basically a list of some of my favourite bands and tracks.  And then there was this surprise, a song I hadn’t thought of in a long time.  ‘Country Feedback,’ by REM.  It’s the second-to-last song on 1991’s Out of Time, the album that took REM from a college rock staple, the gods of the American indie scene, to superstars, largely centred around the massive hit ‘Losing My Religion.’  Whenever they played this song live, Michael Stipe introduced it by saying it was his favourite REM song.  I think it’s mine, too.

This song has never failed to move me.  Out Of Time came out in the spring of 1991, my final year of high school.  It was a tumultuous time in my life, to say the least.  Things were coming to a head at home, where my Old Man and I were on the verge of an all out nuclear war and I couldn’t wait to get the fuck out of there and go to university and begin  my life.  So, in other words, I was a North American adolescent of my time and place. All of the spring and summer of 1991, I was transfixed by this song.  Stipe’s lyrics are, to me, the most brilliant of his career:

This flower is scorched
This film is on
On a maddening loop
These clothes
These clothes don’t fit us right
I’m to blame
It’s all the same
It’s all the same
You come to me with a bone in your hand
You come to me with your hair curled tight
You come to me with positions
You come to me with excuses
Ducked out in a row
You wear me out
You wear me out
We’ve been through fake-a-breakdown
Self hurt
Plastics, collections
Self help, self pain,
EST, psychics, fuck all
I was central
I had control
I lost my head
I need this
I need this
A paper weight, junk garage
Winter rain, a honey pot
Crazy, all the lovers have been tagged
A hotline, a wanted add
It’s crazy what you could’ve had
It’s crazy what you could’ve had
It’s crazy what you could’ve had
I need this
I need this
It’s crazy what you could’ve had
It’s crazy what you could’ve had
I need this
I need this
It’s crazy what you could’ve had
It’s crazy what you could’ve had
I need this
I, I need this
It’s crazy what you could’ve had
I need this, I need this
It’s crazy what you could’ve had
Crazy what you could’ve had
I need this
I need this
It’s crazy what you could’ve had
It’s crazy what you could’ve had
I don’t remember the last time I head this song.  REM broke up in 2011, but I had more or less given up on them after 1995’s Monster, though I did play the hell out of their penultimate album, Accelerate.  But it has been a long time.  So I clicked on the link to bring me to version of this song.  It remains as devastating to me in 2019 as it was in 1991.