Orange Crush (1988)
The Age
Friday January 16, 2009
Orange Crush (1988)
REMTHE great and, by now, near-forgotten American rock band REM did many wonderful things and one of their finest tricks was to wrap up the most obtuse, abstract lyrics - which may have had great meaning or may have had none - in the most delectable of melodies. Their brilliant 1987 album Document was pretty much that the whole way through; King of Birds, Disturbance At The Heron House. This was the beginning of the riddles, the arcane references, the enigma of Michael Stipe (the singer) and his literate, lyrical ways writing bizarre, beautiful things and then having the band pull them apart and put them together again. But where Document, to an outsider, might still have sounded strange or odd or, oh my god, "alternative", the next album, Green, did not. It was the band's first for a big label and it had a commercial sound. In fact this was the blueprint for the lessons learned by Nirvana (a band Stipe strongly identified with) during grunge: that big-label money and slick producers doesn't need to add up to a sell-out. By this time, six albums in, the band had learned each others' instruments to avoid getting stale and Stipe was just writing as opposed to writing for specific music. But somehow it all worked: the single Orange Crush, one of the great American alternative landmarks, is everything: instantly memorable and as fizzy as any silly pop song but also deep with complex meaning. In concert, Stipe first picked up his famous megaphone for Orange Crush, maybe to accentuate what most people reckoned it was about: Vietnam and the immorality of war, specifically the chemical Agent Orange, which was used to strip leaves off trees so the Americans could find the hidden enemy. But what it really did was injure the nervous systems of the American soldiers it was supposed to protect, in horrible ways. Which was always going to be a good subject matter for riddles and rhymes.
© 2009 The Age
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