I was all ready to fire off something like, “In high school, girls weren’t paying attention to me, and it felt like the End of The World as I Knew It. Nowadays, a non-stop trickle of young men die in a senseless war, Elliott Smith stabs himself in the chest, and it merely feels like a Bad Day.” And that might have been clever and all, but it’s not really saying anything. Instead, I’ll start this way:
1988. If you played it at a party (or if, God forbid, it came on the radio) there was always someone who claimed to know all the words. Usually, then, they’d sit there and actually Do It, reproducing every syllable of Stipe’s rapid patter, momentarily ruining the song by turning it into a party trick. The chagrin of us “old school” R.E.M. fans was palpable. Probably didn’t even know who Lester Bangs was. Okay, I didn’t either. But anyway. In a sense, R.E.M.’s “It’s the End” invited you to take it as a joke, much like “Stand” and “Shiny Happy People” did on the albums to follow. But it was and is so much more than that. And I feel comfortable asserting that partly because R.E.M. have resurrected a Document-era chestnut for their second greatest hits collection. Hearing “Bad Day” a couple weeks ago really messed with my head; it generated far more goosebumps than hearing “You Know You’re Right” on the radio last summer (or whenever that was.) A New Old R.E.M. song! It was like seeing a ghost, the shade of someone I’d greatly missed.
And hey: Under what other conditions could you test whether your love of some old band was hopelessly tangled up in nostalgia? Exactly. So yeah, I love “Bad Day.” Perhaps not enough to get suckered into buying that greatest hits package, but quite a lot–almost as much as “It’s the End.” Why? Because they each bombard you in the verses with a blur of words that obscures how beautiful the chords are. It’s not until the choruses, when the proper singing starts, that the kernels of sadness reveal themselves. You see, before R.E.M. started chanelling melancholy more directly, they used to sneak it into pop songs, radio songs, even “joke” songs. (“Time I had some time alone,” goes the plaintive background vocals in “It’s the End.”) And that’s freaking brilliant no matter how young I am, or how old I get.
