Thirty years ago, R.E.M. released their loud, glam rock masterpiece Monster. By 1994, they observed alternative music dominate popular culture, a movement they helped lift from the underground with groundbreaking albums like Automatic for the People, Out of Time, Green, and Document.
In fact, the slope of obscure college radio bands steepened with the Athens, Georgia, band’s early releases, beginning with Murmur in 1983.
On Monster, Peter Buck, known for his jangly Rickenbacker guitar sound, turned up the volume and increased the distortion. R.E.M. had been saying powerful things using folk-adjacent music since “Radio Free Europe,” but Monster is Buck, Michael Stipe, Mike Mills, and Bill Berry with a rock and roll bullhorn.
“Strange Currencies” echoes the waltz of “Everybody Hurts.” They both can be seen as hymns for the despairing. But “Strange Currencies” is also disorientation, unrequited love, here, but not seen.
New Sensation
“Strange Currencies” wouldn’t have happened without R.E.M.’s extraordinary commercial success and the spotlight it cast on frontman Michael Stipe. He said Michael Hutchence, the late singer of INXS, inspired the song.
I don’t know why you’re mean to me
When I call on the telephone
And I don’t know what you mean to me
But I want to turn you on, turn you up, figure you out
Sign you off, wanna make you mine
Stipe explained to The Guardian in 2018, “He raised the bar for both myself and Bono. The middle eight of that is completely taken from INXS and from Michael. He was such an amazing rock star.”
Now fool might be my middle name
But I’d be foolish not to say
I’m going to do whatever it takes
Bring you up, call you down, sign your name, secret love
Take you in and make you mine
In a way, R.E.M. was built on an anti-rock star premise. That made Stipe wince at the idea of becoming a rock star. He said, “I’m really a little embarrassed by the term ‘rock star.’ When I met Andy Warhol, he called me a pop star. I said, ‘No I’m the singer in a band.’ He said, ‘No, you’re a pop star.’ ‘No, I’m not.’ OK, well, he won. As it turned out, I’m a pretty good pop star. I’m not a very good rock star—I don’t have the voice for it. I think it’s an odd thing to reach for, to be a rock star.”
Who Are We Within All This?
Monster is the sound of one of America’s greatest rock bands reinvented. But after so much success, why did they feel the need to change?
“It was our version of rock music,” Stipe said. “U2 had come out with Achtung Baby, where they had allowed themselves to become theatrical; there was an element of that. Grunge had happened, and there was something very freeing in that as well. So we went for something completely different, something more circus-like and over the top. It was glam rock, basically. It was going back to T. Rex and Mott the Hoople and pulling it forward into where grunge was, post-Achtung Baby. Those are movements and records that really impacted me, and made me think: Who are we within all this? The landscape has shifted, and where do we stand?”
I tripped and fell
Did I fall?
What I want to feel
I want to feel it now
Like every R.E.M. song, “Strange Currencies” is a full-band composition. Buck, Mills, and Berry construct instrumentals, waiting for Stipe’s words. It’s a similar method to how Morrissey and Johnny Marr worked in The Smiths.
Scott Litt, the band’s producer since Document, helped facilitate the new sound. The sparkling guitars and mandolin familiar to the group’s fans had been replaced with power chords and saturation. The pastoral meditations of R.E.M. had transformed into dense and noisy punk jams.
What’s the Frequency, Michael?
Though Monster reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200, many rejected the abrasive sound. But the album endures not just as a touchstone moment in R.E.M.’s career, but for rock music generally.
The year was 1994. The year Kurt Cobain killed himself. Then Oasis and Weezer arrived. Alternative rock bands dominated culture and 1994 was the summit. Within a few years, OK Computer appeared with Thom Yorke warning of things to come.
Rock stars are the center of attention. Stars are the bodies we see in the sky. Both are visible. Rock bands haven’t completely faded but these days it’s a little like stargazing on a cloudy night.
Strange currencies indeed.
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Photo by Scott Gries/Getty Images
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