Yeah, yeah, I know – most important American band of the last twenty years, bla bla bla.

Save it.

REM – Michael Stipe, Pete Buck, Mike Mills and the long-departed Bill Berry – have been critical darlings and, for the most part, commercial powerhouses for a generation now (it used to really bug my stepson that after a jag of feeling hip that he’d gotten the new REM record, I pulled out my copy of Murmur from my sophomore year of college. Psych).

Well, good for them.

Here’s the maddening thing about REM; I can scarcely listen to a single one of their albums all the way through.  Pete Buck once described the band’s is-it-a-stereotype-or-is-it-a-cliche style:”Minor key, mid-tempo, enigmatic, semi-folk-rock-balladish things. That’s what everyone thinks and to a certain degree, that’s true.”  REM’s music is all oblique this and badly-enunciated enigmatic reference that and sophomore poetry-class the other thing, and always, always Michael Stipe prancing around going “hreydee-yo hree murrup” and “and nuh freyn konnukter fez, ryever ape, pake a mape”…

Mind you, I don’t mind oblique, enigmatic and sophomoric per se. And I can’t knock the band itself; Mills and Berry were an excellent Watts ‘n Wyman-style rhythm section; Mills has a distinctive yet perfect backing vocal style; Pete Buck is…well, perfectly functional given his chosen limits. And Michael Stipe is a good singer with an excellent (albeit not Bono-like) and distinctive voice.

But most of REM’s music invariably bores me stiff…

…except that every album (that I bothered listening to, which hasn’t happened since 1998’s Up, includes one, and only one, song that I just absolutely love, love love – which always comes out after  the dreary, minor-key mid-tempo southern-mythology-sodden ballad.

Album by album:

• Murmur – was entirely dispensable – except that life without “Radio Free Europe” would be a lot poorer.  But it’s more a visceral thing – the rhythm section’s tight snap, the cool (if inscrutable) hook line, the zing of the thing.  Certainly not the lyrics, as delivered by Michael Stipe  “Sigh this elf if radio munna slay/Reason it muld paw ish utta pray/poodat poodata poodta up your wah/Mrs. Islecumfray ah haul.  Raving station, be fly…”
• Reckoning led off with the “South Central Rain (I’m Sorry)”, or as Stipe pronounced it, “Um Hawry”, which makes me nod off a bit 25 years later – but followed up with “Don’t Go Back To Rockville”, which was a really good song.
• Fables of the Reconstruction – Produced by Joe Boyd, who produced Richard Thompson’s classic “Shoot Out The Lights”, Fables breaks the pattern only slightly: lead-off single “Driver 8” didn’t suck, and follow-up “Can’t Get There From Here” is actually IPod-worthy.
• Lifes Rich Pageant – Not even Don Gehman – who’d just produced John Mellencamp’s classic Scarecrow, could make most of this album less tedious – except for the gorgeous “Fall On Me”.
• Document – “The One I Love” almost made me pound my ears out with a potato masher.  And “Exuming McCarthy” may have been the dumbest anti-Reagan song in a decade full of standouts.  But “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It” jumps in at last minute and staves off self-mutilation.
• Green – What if the Brill Building was in Athens, Georgia in 1988, instead of Philadelphia in 1962?  You’d have gotten “Stand”, and most of the album.  Except “Orange Crush”, which, dude.
• Out of Time – I used to wonder if “Losing My Religion” was a self-parody; if I were going to write a spoof of REM, it’d sound just like LMR, and have just about the same lyrics.  But I still love “Shiny Happy People”, although having Kate Pearson on board helps.
• Automatic for the People – Small breach of protocol: “Everybody Hurts” and “Man In The Moon” don’t suck.
• Monster – Bla bla bla “What’s the Frequency KennetH” bla bla bla.
• New Adventures in Hi-Fi – Broke the pattern again – all of it sucked.
• Up, Reveal, Around the Sun, Accelerate – never heard any of ’em.

But as with most of these “things I should love but don’t” pieces, it’s not so much the artist as the artist’s fans. And it’s not just that REM fans are just this side of Grateful Dead fans in terms of worshipping.  No, it’s the damage they did.

An alt-rock radio program director I once knew summed up alt-rock in the late eighties: “There are two types of music”, said the learned sage; “Noisy rock, and Jangly rock”.  The poles of his universe were Dinosaur Junior on the one hand, and REM on the other.  And this program director was hardly alone.

So for a couple of years in the late eighties and early nineties, alt-rock diverged into two miserable paths: sludgy, mopey glop that eventually morphed into grunge, and jangly, folky music in a zillion nearly-identical permutations (The Connells, Wednesday Week, Aztec Camera, Let’s Active!) that eventually morphed into…

…well, landfill.  Nobody remembers any of it.  Not even – be honest! – most of what REM did.

Well, some of it, we do.  Only we can’t make out the damn words.

Ask a random sample of people who were thirteen or older during the eighties “what is the decade’s most tiresome icon”, and you’ll get a lot of answers, depending on where one was at the time; Boy George, “We Are The World”, “Choose Life” T-shirts, Don Johnson, the “Flock of Seagulls'” dude’s haircut, the training scene from Flashdance…

…but as they go through their own personal lists, eventually most of them will get to “Walking On Sunshine“, the too-big-to-measure one-hit-wonder by Katrina and the Waves.

And it’s true; “Walking…” was very overplayed.

But the reason tragedy wasn’t that the song overstayed its welcome; it’s that it became synonymous with the group that played it.

And that’s a shame – because Katrina and the Waves were a really, really good band.

Even people who are sick to death of “Walking on Sunshine” admit that Katrina Leskanich, the band’s statuesque lead singer, had a voice and a half.  Of course, you have listen harder to hear that guitarist Kim Rew, in his first big gig after leaving the Soft Boys, had a way with bending and strangling chords into ad-hoc passages may not have been “Solos” in the Steve Vai sense of the term, but were really, really good.

But here’s the real cool thing about The Waves; they did something that very, very few bands had done since John Fogerty left Creedence Clearwater Revival, and that had become an almost lost art in the meantime; they wrote small, perfectly-crafted, three -minute pop songs that were shimmering little gems of pop perfection.  Perhaps your world was falling apart at 10AM; perhaps it’d still be falling apart at 10:04; but from 10 to 10:03, you could smile and go “dang, that’s cool”…

So yeah.  Forget the “Sunshine”.  Dig the wave.

My whole musical life, from the mid-seventies on, whenever someone has wanted to portray themselves as the kind of hip that transcends mere temporal hipness, they’ll claim to be Joni Mitchell fans.

Joni Mitchell fandom has gone through a couple of phases; its original stretch in the late sixties through the mid-seventies, when Mitchell was putting out albums that got all sorts of attention, of course.  And then in the late eighties, when Prince confessed to being a huge Mitchell fan.

And today, in an era where quirky art-school girls with guitars is a booming genre, I’m hearing more would-be hypstrz claiming to be huge Joni Mitchell fans.

She always bugged me.

No, no – I know she’s an iconic songwriter, an amazing singer, and had been for almost forty years the leading voice of her particular genre.  She’s a spectacular talent with four decades of great material.

It  just happens to be a genre, and material, that leave me utterly cold.

Part of it is the whole “folk-jazz” thing.  Folk music is a form that I go hot and cold on, depending on the singer and the subject material.

And jazz?  Well, to paraphrase the Supreme Court wag, “I don’t know how to define what jazz I like, but I know it when I hear it”.

And while I know deep down inside that it’s wrong, and that I probably need to reset my internal musical CPU, I also have to cop to it; whenever Mitchell starts singing, I shut down a little inside.  “Oh, goodie; another overly ornamented pseudo-jazz reflection on romantic ambiguity, delivered via lovely-yet-grating high-alto warble that just grates the desire to sit still and analyze the deadeningly-oblique lyrics right out of me”.

I know.  It’s wrong.  Maybe I’ll work on it when time permits.

To the musical hipster, Gordon Lightfoot has for almost thirty years been synonymous with getting a kiss from your great-aunt.

Let’s do try to set the record straight, here.

Lightfoot is one of the last, longest-living (commercially, anyway) survivors of the folk music boom of the early sixties. But I always took to Lightfoot because, while most of the “folk” music I heard was either screechingly, mawkishly self-righteous (Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez) or self-consciously archaic (all of Pete Seger and Woody Guthrie’s many, many imitators) or groaningly over-literate (Bob Dylan’s many, many, many imitators), Lightfoot was just a guy who wanted to entertain a crowd.  He was just a hard-drinking Canadian guy who looked and drank like the guy who refinished your driveway and sang songs about being hungover and unreliable.

Which isn’t to say that he didn’t follow some of the trends of the times – but even those shots were more interesting than their contemporaries.  Amid the suffocating masses of “protest” folk songs, songs like “Don Quixote” and “Circle of Steel” were deft, oblique yet engaging.

Unlike most of his folk contemporaries, his shots at pop stardom, “Sundown” and “Carefree Highway” and “Summer Side of Life” and many others, were refreshingly un-suffocated by the conventions of folk that weighed down so much of the rest of the genre.

Lightfoot comes in for particular abuse for his biggest, best-known hit, “Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald”.  Some call it “boring”.  Well, people are entitled to their own opinion; “Fitz” is an example of one of the most-abused folk forms, the “Really really long historical ballad” (which Lightfoot has done before, albeit without quite the same sales). But I always loved the song, partly because being from North Dakota, maritime lore is in my bones, and partly because the notion that, in 1976, when disco and dreary singer-songwriter treacle and Bachman Turner Overdrive ruled the airwaves, the notion that a five minute song about a shipwreck would sell a zillion songs should have been a plot for one of those “a couple of underdog guys hatch an improbable plot to make a zillion bucks in a scheme that everyone says has got to be a flop” movies.

So yeah.  I’m supposed to hate Gordon Lightfoot.  But I don’t.