BEYOND THE CLIQUE: I KNOW WHAT’S HAPPENING
1987: The year I started choosing music for myself, not just passively listening to the radio or my parents’ music. An early choice: R.E.M., who, at this point, distinguished themselves as college radio darlings. When I decided that I, too, liked their sound—mumbly lyrics that, to my teenaged self, felt deep, with post-punk ethos tempered by easy guitar hooks. Sort of nervous, sort of arty, a bit angsty, bordering but not slipping into true pop. As alternative careened towards the mainstream, I still bought in. With R.E.M. I cut my teeth on Document, Life’s Rich Pageant, and Dead Letter Office. Original if not a bit ornery, they acted out my teen rebellion because I was too hamstrung by anxiety and a desire to have a dancing career to be overtly rebellious myself. If not giving the rebel yell, I could listen to music that provided a break from the expected. As long as it was smart.
I still love R.E.M., cuing my playlists to hours of songs: “(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville,” “Diver 8,” “Fall on Me,” or “The One I Love” piped through the speakers of my car as I tool around the sleepy streets of Morgantown and beyond. In my current definitively un-teenage years, I learn what feels to me a scandalous truth about a song that I always thought was quintessentially R.E.M.-y. It had to be an original. But it’s not.
“Superman” is a cover.
The late-60’s band, The Clique, débuted the song as a B-side to “Sugar on Sunday,” a song that R.E.M. probably would never think to cover, and rightly so. It’s not at all R.E.M.-y. I had never heard of The Clique until the scandalous truth of “Superman” revealed itself to me. I’d let people know I was collecting covers to listen to, and someone said, “You know about ‘Superman,’ right?”
That rat bastard.
The whole thing felt like a betrayal. This sounds histrionic, but it was the music of my teen self, and teenage girls tend towards melodrama. But I don’t know why, really, because betrayal feels too strong a response. Already, the song is an anomaly, with Mike Mills and not Michael Stipe as lead vocals. Mills, the band’s bassist, often performed backup vocals to Stipe’s unique if pedestrian lead.
I think Stipe once said something to the effect of “if you can walk you can sing.”
My memory might have made that up.
The R.E.M version of “Superman” starts with a weird scratchy sound that I’ve heard attributed to the Japanese version of Godzilla. Probably something a boy told me back in the day to try to impress me. Boys were always trying to impress me with their vast knowledge of music and musical ephemera. Can you imagine the awkward line? “You know, Renée, that weird scratchy noise on ‘Superman’ is from the Japanese version of Godzilla, right?” Equal parts arrogant and wink-wink.
Re-listening, what strikes me now is how Mills and Stipe harmonize. I suppose I’d always heard this, but somehow now it sounds novel. An album like Life’s Rich Pageant might have needed to end on the happy-go-lucky cover like “Superman.” Other tracks— “These Days” or “Cuyahoga” or “Underneath the Bunker” ring with a serious, freighted, 80’s anxiety—that same anxiety made them all the more appealing to my teenage ears. Surrounded by consumerism that set the tone for our culture—Madonna’s “Material Girl” decade, informing my pre-teen radio, small, plastic and very pink—the notion that there could be an “alternative” not just in music but in general delighted the me-in-progress. I’d adopt a quirky style (some might argue it never left), not just in dress or music but in outlook, ushered in by my music loves, like R.E.M. Did “Superman” in particular inform these choices? Perhaps more in aggregate than any one song. By 1991 and the release of Out of Time with the hit “Losing My Religion” the outsider R.E.M attended by the fledgling alterna-girls like me morphed into an uneasy mainstream too.
“Superman” like other semi-danceable R.E.M songs (meaning you could bounce rhythmically to them in a crowd of other people) like “It’s the End of the World as We Know it (And I Feel Fine)” became mainstays of college parties I attended, where the boys didn’t reference Japanese Godzilla, opting to murmur until they yelled, “Leonard Bernstein,” over the party din to impress girls. Suckled on the punk-flecked poppiness, the point was less about the music itself and more about the backdrop it provided to our sad excuses for social lives. Or maybe just mine. Point is, in this context, cover or not, it didn’t really matter. We were living out our best impressions of Reality Bites—affectedly disaffected, consumers who poked fun at our consumerism with giant, spiked Diet Cokes. So “meh” and we didn’t even know it. I cut my otherwise long hair into a severe bob and wore lots and lots of androgynous GAP khakis. I sang along to the stalker-ish lyrics: you don’t really love that guy you make it with now do you?
Otherwise, Life’s Rich Pageant is filled with moody social consciousness. So why do I care now that a heady 80’s album ended with a sunny, harmonized cover? I turn to my friend Chris, slightly older than me and a lifelong musician, for a sense of why bands or artists choose to cover songs in the first place. Chris, whose intellectual pursuits run the gamut from his home department of Public Administration to collaborations with physicists to poets and every discipline between, and whose musical influences flow through genres from folk and jazz and good ol’ rock-n-roll, opines easily on the question of covers. Love of the song, resurrecting lagging careers, paying homage are just a few in a catalog of answers he rattles off. I take each as plausible. Chris, as at ease in tweed as jeans, rakes a hand through his thick salt and pepper hair. He recommends kd lang’s version of “Hallelujah” and after taking it in, so do I. This doesn’t explain “Superman” however, just a delightful diversion.
I wonder if there is something irresistible in inhabiting another artist’s musical imprint, if only through a three to five-minute song you get to be them.
And just as quickly as we get into the cover conversation, we are on other topics, and Chris and I are padding the streets towards our favorite coffee supplier.
Still, I can’t get “Superman” out of my head. Not even with latte.
My foray into cover-listening, I come to understand, situates itself less in the music itself and more in the then-and-now aspect of the songs and their relationship to me. Midlife crisis? Maybe. An audacious undertaking, these artifacts and their re-imaginings inspire me to think about me in the re-imagined state. Who might I still be? It’s a pedestrian kind of mystery, like Michael Stipe’s singing. Nostalgia itself seduces us with our fleeting moments of youthfulness. And in my personal pantheon of nostalgia-inducing catalysts, there’s R.E.M. My bedroom in the house in Boca Raton, the place I hated for being too hot and too presumptuous, young me on the Laura Ashley floral bedspread, like someone had puked flowers everywhere. Through the tinny speaker: Flowers of Guatemala. Pictures of famous ballet dancers tacked on my door, pink radio/cassette player feebly producing the Mills/Stipe harmonies of I can do anything. If it wasn’t an original, maybe I wasn’t one. Everything ahead of me, from that land of pink stucco and sailboats, hot humid South Florida I’d soon leave. Never a place I belonged, as Mills crooned, I can see right through you, as if a soundtrack to my becoming.
