12 Months Of Murmur: September
R.E.M. released Murmur, their fizzy, aching full-length debut, in 1983. It became Rolling Stone’s top album of the year and helped propel the band in a steady climb to become one of the biggest in the world. Murmur has 12 songs — at least two are serious contenders for best in their catalog — and as you’ll recall, years have 12 months. This project, 12 Months of Murmur, is my attempt to match the songs on the album (via mood or sound or narrative, etc.) with how I lived the months of 2017. Each entry is posted on the last day of the given month. Next up: September.
“9–9”
My only real rule of this series, laid down at its inception, was to not plan ahead. The song choices should come naturally, based on a memory or a strange hotel experience or whatever organic synergy occurs in my daily life. This is wonderful in theory, except of course that God laughs at plans — even plans that are purposely constructed to be loose.
This is all to say that from the onset, I knew September would be the month of “9–9,” thereby breaking my one rule immediately. The numeric parallel was too good to pass up, and as we collapse into autumn, it seemed the perfect transition track. On Murmur, “9–9” (perhaps the most outright post-punk song in the band’s entire catalog) is wedged between “Sitting Still” and “Shaking Through,” two beautiful pop songs with mesmerizing choruses. The sharpness of “9–9,” then, is almost funny: the band saying, yeah, we know, but here’s a rough one to break up the sweetness. Some of the only discernible lyrics on the track are Michael Stipe shouting “right on target!” a few times, and Peter Buck’s guitar has hardly ever gotten such a workout (though Mike Mills’ bass lines are curious as ever). Bill Berry, ever the powerhouse, does here what he does best, infusing the tune with different rhythms at different emphasis points.
So, does that really make “9–9” a transition song at all? Not on Murmur, no, though it does anticipate a bit of the overcast energy on closer “West of the Fields.” U2’s War dropped the same year as Murmur, and “9–9” has more in common with it sonically than with, say, “Perfect Circle” or “Talk About the Passion.” It also foreshadows the ostensible folk band R.E.M. would become in the late 1980s and into the ’90s with its cloudy minor-key chorus. It’s autumnal in that way. It’s no rainy train ride like “Driver 8” or November windgust-kicking-up-a-leafpile like “The Wrong Child,” but it’s a few steps removed from it.
In 1987, Jon Pareles called R.E.M.’s song “asymmetrical, often obscure” in the New York Times. That might actually be an understatement for how dense, misshapen, and purposely cryptic some of their tracks are, especially on Murmur. But that doesn’t make it any less appropriate for a day like today, the last day of September 2017 — windy but not cold, sunny and yet about to rain at any moment, and, above all, beautiful. Right on target for fall.
