Taking Sides: Smiths vs. REM

I mean, REM have some very good songs but overall their sound is just not very interesting. Whereas every canonical album by the Smiths is better than every album by every other band.

Ah, but in the grand scheme of things, who wasn't?

"who the hell are the smiths?"

This is a toughie...going by which meant more to me back in the day, I'd go with REM. I'd rather listen to the Smiths now, though, and that's more important. So the Smiths it is.

A great "taking sides" question, because they were like the UK and USA sides of the "college rock" coin when I started school.

That depends on where in America you mean. I grew up in Southern California where Morrissey was practically worshipped as a God. Ditto Portland, Oregon when I lived there. It was an American band, too, who penned the immortal smoulder-up-to-the-chorus lines: "And I sure hate those people who like the Smiths/but I sure as fuck don't trust nobody who don't." Cockney Rebel, now, for sure, that'll raise twenty shrugs to every faint glimmer of recognition. Anyhow, I'm from America, and while I think the point about the Smiths having broken up and thereby ensured their immortality is a good one, the end it's not even close. It's the Smiths. Lyrics, music, overall aesthetic. Yes. The widely bootlegged practice tape of Marr & Mozz doing acoustic renditions of BOC's "True Confessions" gives them the final nod, if any further support were needed.

Look at Morrissey's solo career. There's your answer.

You forget I'm a hyperfan who has everything down to the singles.

(Lingering shame over ill-advised 13-year-old Morrissey obsession prevents me from actively buying recent singles, so I'm not much good on the A+B-side half of the question.)

(Note: the above is the same reason I have nothing of substance to contribute to the main question of this thread. For maybe three years of my young life, REM and the Smiths were the absolute core of my listening.)

*ILL-ADVISED?* *beats Nitsuh down*

Um, anyway, violence aside. Single...*ponders duly in musty corners of brain* John's choice is a good one, franks to that great "Moon River" rendition. Were gun held to head, though, and allowing for the B-sides -- "November Spawned A Monster" (due to "Girl Least Likely To"), "Roy's Keen" (for "Lost" and "The Edges Are No Longer Parallel"), or the _At KROQ_ EP for the phone-in snippets at the end. "THEM AND THEIR SHINY BLACK LEATHER SHOES!" Answers subject to change.

Best *song*? Jesus, John, you're a cruel man, I can't narrow that down. "Nobody Loves Us" = v. nice. "The Edges Are No Longer Parallel" -- particularly great. "Disappointed," "Everyday Is Like Sunday," the cover of "That's Entertainment," "The Loop," the live version and the studio version of "Jack the Ripper," "Hairdresser on Fire," "Speedway," "Billy Budd," "The Teachers Are Afraid of the Pupils," "Reader Meets Author," "A Swallow on My Neck," "The Boyracer," "Driving Your Girlfriend Home," "There is a Place in Hell For Me and My Friends," "The Last of the Famous International Playboys," "Girl Least Likely To," the live cover of "Cosmic Dancer," the cover of "Skin Storm," "I Know Very Well How I Got My Name," "Will Never Marry"...um, stop me if this gets a bit obsessive...

Oh, I prefer the Smiths. They're just better all round-- the music, the lyrics, the fashion sense. And their overall strangeness (as discussed in that Pinefox thread last month) is still compelling. Also, Michael Stipe has never made me laugh. Morrissey-what a riot! "Reggae is vile"-ha ha ha! I can't believe that comment caused such a ruckus, it's so silly.

Not to my knowledge, but I gather he was the one who helped them get the American deal for Shouting Quietly (them being Bradford, the song's originators, who did the Smiths-wannabe thing way better than the bastards in Gene).

Uh? This Charming Man, Panic, How Soon is Now and Shoplifters of the World Unite - one *style* or several?

Smiths vs REM. I was very disappointed when I first heard REM - I found them unfocussed lyrically and too conventionally rock in their song-structures. They were just another bunch of paisley underground janglers to my ears. (It wasn't until I heard 'Murmur' a few years later that I changed my mind - and I still think that is their only truly marvellous record). Somebody bought me 'Lifes Rich Pageant' for my birthday, and I took it back to Woolies to exchange for the Pet Shop Boys' 'Please'. An urgent and key moment in my youth.

What Nitsuh said. I know better than to think I can really look at his work objectively, even though I know he's written bucketloads of terrible songs. Though I'm fond of the earlier REM material and have a certain nostalgia for them always, since they were my first concert, there's no way that they could even come close to the influence the Smiths had on me (for better or worse).

And might I note that I am glad I didn't have to cope with a Morrissey obsession on top of my troublesome years of burgeoning pubescence. Seeing Morrissey "perform" a couple of years ago banged the nail in that coffin snugly. I was hoping to catch a glimpse of Moz chowing on a PB & banana sandwich while "Thus Spake Zarathustra" cascaded down on the crowd - no such luck, though.

What's better - Johnny Marr teaming w/ Bernard Sumner, or Peter Buck teaming w/ Mark Eitzel? The Buck/Eitzel combo (on Eitzel's West album) calls to mind "Fresh Screwdriver" (which is currently annoying me to the far ends of my tether).

All that said, about 40% of The Smiths sucks, though "Reel Around the Fountain" and "Still Ill" pretty much justify the rest. Meat Is Murder is also hit-and-miss. It took Morrissey a while to develop his skills as both a lyricist and singer. The Queen Is Dead is perfect, Hatful of Hollow is delightful, and Louder Than Bombs is very solid though not well suited to listening in its entirety. Strangeways has both great and drab moments.

REM v Smiths - well, duh (though, for a brief while in '91, when it was Out Of Time vs Kill Uncle, I might've wavered).

Best Moz solo song? With Edna on the underrated nature of "Piccadilly Palare" (that swooning coda - "it could go on forever/in which case I'm doomed"), but I'll plump for "Lifeguard Sleeping, Girl Drowning" for sheer creepiness. In my head, Pulp LPs (of which I own none) have the odd track like this on them.

The core issue for me is how much we’re willing to prize that final taboo of music criticism—a desire for familarity. This is one of few “taking sides” issues where I really believe the trans- Atlantic divide to be of central importance, and one of few such issues where my inclinations aren’t completely Anglophilic: while I think the critical side of me would have agreed, at age 13, that the Smiths were a “better” band, REM always seemed more like me, or more with me, or more What I Would Have Done, or however else you want to describe that empathy-relation complex that is so key to 13-year-old listening. In many ways I suspect the trans- Atlantic divide is only a very small part of this: REM offered an emotional milieu that was familiar and understandable and inclusive— one that privileged you as much as them—whereas Morrissey was someone to view from afar or throw flowers at but, miserabilist aspirations aside, not something I could imagine being or even someone I could imagine sitting in a room with for very long. In a sense—“identity” being rather important to a 13-year-old’s interactions with music—the REM vs. Smiths question became a question of rooting for the satisfaction of my critical impulses or rooting for, well, myself. The shoddy little band I had back then would play "Fall on Me," but not "Hand in Glove" by a long shot.

I imagine Mark S would take my admission that the Smiths were better as a triumph of English cosmopolitanism over American suburbanism, but there is something to that suburbanism that I have to credit: easily-mocked as that very American lifestyle is, there is a certain beauty to growing up in its midst that is very, very hard to communicate. I think REM, at their best, did something both to serve and to recreate that beauty, and I’ll risk a savage mocking by pointing out that the “post-REM” “Nightswimming” got dangerously close to it: one shot in the video for that song, of a teenager standing on a picnic table and batting a ceiling fan around in circles, sticks with me as the perfect encapsulation of what it was like to be 13 and live in Pueblo, Colorado, if not pretty much any medium-sized American town or suburb with big lawns and not a whole lot for 13-year-olds to do but lie in the grass and feel beautiful. This, music aside, is my (subjective) defense of REM as they appealed to me at the time.

I have, however, just relistened to Chronic Town, Murmur, Life’s Rich Pageant, and Document, and am prepared to offer a slightly more technical musical defense of the band. The short point is that while I think the Smiths were a rock- ish band that acted as a pop band—each song came storming confidently out of the gate with a very clear conception of what it meant to do and where it meant to surprise you—REM stood maybe two feet away as a pop-ish band that acted as a rock band: there is something to their songwriting that is remarkably smooth, open, and intuitive, preserving verse-chorus-verse dynamics but simultaneously erasing them, turning the flow of not just individual songs but entire albums into these landmarks of naturalism and appropriateness. It’s a mistake to concentrate on what they were doing to the extent of losing sight of quite how beautifully they were doing it.

I dunno—maybe it’s because I’ve listened to the Smiths every now and then for the past 11 years, and completely ignored REM, but right now I would much rather hear “Disturbance at the Heron House” or “Swan Swan H” or “Gardening at Night” than “Rusholme Ruffians” or “The Boy with the Thorn in his Side.” “Better” though it may be, there is something about the stilted intensity of the Smiths that can occasionally seem draining or overbearing in the light of how these REM records breathe.

And Nitsuh's right; there is something strangely American about REM, something hard to put your finger on, but very noticeable. The music really does breathe--it conjures openness, space, stretching out, laying back and looking up. Where the Smiths churn, REM roll. Where the Smiths are sad, REM are melancholy--not miserable, but melancholy, the way it feels to sigh.

I don't know if I can choose. I love the Smiths, but they were a recent discovery. REM have been around my ears for as long as I can remember, and even though I've ignored their past few albums and I rarely listen to them anymore, they'll always be important to me.

My relationship with REM has always been an antagonistic one; doubly so, in fact, because they've recorded some genuinely wonderful songs ("Radio Free Europe", "Fall On Me", "The One I Love", "Losing My Religion", "Texarkana", "Can't Get There From Here", "Turn You Inside- Out", "Orange Crush", "Bang And Blame") but manage to release the most annoying albums ever known to man. The only REM albums I would consider buying are _Murmur_ and _Eponymous_. Nitsuh is correct in saying that there is some measure of Amrecian suburbia evoked in REM's style, but the images evoked push every single one of my loathe buttons. I would rather take the raging fury of a group like Big Black (or even 90's Ministry, who I think seriously lost the plot after _A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste_) over the self-important whine of REM.

Another way of putting all of this might be that while the Smiths wrote pop songs, they never offered a strictly "fun" performance of them -- they were too busy with other tasks to let you hear them stretch out and joyfully kick through a set of hooks. Whereas certain REM songs seem almost Motown-ish in their near-spontaneous kickiness: just try to imagine the Smiths doing something like "Exhuming McCarthy" or "These Days" or that version of "Strange." Why REM failed with "Finest Worksong" was that "Finest Worksong" was a song for the Smiths to be playing.

Post-REM is much worse than REM-REM though because Stipe seems to be trying to be a Morrissey-figure, and you're dead right about the Morrissey-as-leader thing (which I went on about in my B&S article)

The idea of REM as a humorous band does not fit into my world view. Their conception of humor is so alien to mine that I can't conceive humor in anything I've heard by them. "Superman" works, not because it's a quirky cover, but because it's a pretty song with groovin' harmony and a danceable beat. "Stand" is not the least bit funny; in fact, it's an embarrassingly shameless display of hyper-hippy inclusionism that is even worse for coming across as tokenistic and ingenuine. (Thinking of the video here and that stupid dance. "Imitation Of Life" is the song that "Stand" thought it was trying to be, but without the cutseyisms.) Everything I've heard by REM has had an over-arching sense of earnestness that completely masks any of their attempts at humor from my ears. The Smiths, on the other hand, have a core of wry self-loathing at the center of almost ever song I can think of, combined with an eye for absurd images and an ear for goofy phrases that makes them far funnier. The only song REM has done which approaches that is "It's The End Of The World As We Know It", and the strength of that isn't so much in its cavalier dismissal of the end of western civilization as it is in the rapid-fire delivery and the interweaving harmony on the chorus.

And even if I was willing to grant REM a sense of humor, they certainly pissed it all away when they released "Everybody Hurts".

The great thing at the time, though, if you already knew REM, was how great it seemed that this wonderful band could kick out a couple of loose goofy pop songs and the public at large would enjoy them. Maybe I was just too young then to have that "the public is stealing my treasure" reaction, but I actually loved the way they cut through the seemingly dull, static contemporary radio fare with "Stand" -- like if you dropped at 12-year-old next to the podium at some dead-boring seminar and his first reaction was to start dancing and clowning. (NB this was back when the perceived status of listening to indie was that you were "weird," not "hip," so the fact that everyone else read it as a novelty was really just fine.)

I also agree with Tom's saying that Stipe later tried to become a Morrissey-like figure.

Funniest REM live moment: someone whips out a Bic lighter and holds it aloft, lit, at show. Stipe: 'Put that OUT. Put that out NOW!'

Best rumour: Stipe and Moz make the pretzel of LURVE circa '85. Celibacy my arse (or someone else's!). Though Stipe so far up own back passage there would be no room for Moz to pitch.

I vote Smiths, anyway. Would Pete Buck be asked to play on Pet Shop Boys' record? Naaaaah.

Would Pete Buck be asked to play on Pet Shop Boys' record?

Ooh, the collaborative parallels. Smiths have Aztec Camera sideman, REM have DBs sideman. Marr gets PSB and Electronic -- Buck/Stipe get Robyn Hitchcock and 10,000 Maniacs -- Buck, Stipe, Merchant, and Marr all agree to basically share Billy Bragg. Sundays a bit too late to get involved. REM vs. Smiths collaborative choices basically live up to the breathless-stilted-pop vs. open-spaces-suburban- singalong dichotomy posited above: see Bragg's "You Woke Up My Neighborhood" versus the whole of Electronic.

"Don't Fear the Reaper" is better than anything by R. E. M.

Odd this Smiths/REM thing.

"The Revenge of Vera Gemini" must be better than anything R. E. M. or Michael Stipe did with Patti Smith. You know, the more I think about it . . . Taking Sides: Agents of Fortune vs Document.

But then note how they transform it from this knotty, edgy, post-punk thing into a groove-kid singalong?

(Plus: 5% of REM fans now might realize that, but circa Document, that percentage would have been way higher.)

No contest. The former has everything going for it: "Don't Fear the Reaper," "Vera Gemini," "Debbie Denise," "This Ain't the Summer of Love" before such sentiments were de rigeur. Document: bright pop album meant to evoke heady pre-millenial hands-in-air furrowed-brow "serious" dancing. Agents of Fortune: dark pop album meant to scare little children and give guys in Stingrays something to play while they do donuts in the high school parking lot.

But the Smiths lyrics are much much better, and they were also more original musically, stylistically and in subject matter.

Granted that REM only become a boring rock band after 'Green' and we're only truly original on their first two albums, and that it's not their fault that the FM 'sound' of 'good' American rock today is largely of their making. The same could have happened to the Smiths 'sound', but I'm glad it didn't. But perhaps this is becuaee they were at heart more 'original' than REM.

That's because England = the Greeks and America = the Romans. :)

Julian Casablancas to thread!!

Right, I'm as big an REM as you're likely to find on ILM, and even I know NAIHF was a crock of shit.

"NAIHF was a crock of shit" Dom Passantino
well thats your opinion.
dude you want to tell me thet no morrisey album was a "crock of shit" too. every artist has his good times and bad times.

by the way im a huge Smiths and Morrisey fan too.

mark s- how abt 'influance' as an alternative to influence. I'd say that's preety good, don't you?!

"Julian Casablancas to thread!!"
you're right, i read they even hang out togather (seriously).
forgot the strokes frontman. im a strokes fan too.

It's very hard to criticise lyrics that have saved someone's life, and some of the ealry REM lyrics have indeed helped me through some hard times too, but they're just a bit too often too unfocused or too 'clever' wordy to also be great poetry. I think Stipe had a harder time crafting words than Morrissey. Stipe sometimes says great things poorly, occasionally says them well; Morrissey can talk about drivel and still say it greatly. That's the difference.

Re Nirvana et al, yeh, you're right, just trying to make a point. But ever since I heard the Friends theme tune and thought 'you mean Murmur was responsible for THIS?' it's struck me how far the REM sound has penetrated the mainstream.

Which isn't a wish I blame anyone for, but I've lots of respect for those who choose not to make life more simple.

Morrissey and Stipe where friends for a while. I remember Moz said Stipe and he had in common an awareness of the imminence of death, or words to that effect. The Smiths history shows greater courage in the face of mortality than REM's.

Oh shit, did I really write that?

I thought that was why Michael Stipe was largely liked...after all, Morrissey did send him flowers.

REM were great now they are annoying.

Fuck, what was so great about R. E. M. again?
The Big Star leg humping part was the grebt part.

Huh.

Forget Julian -- every emo band ever to thread!

Current Favorite Moz Solo Moment: "The Girl Least Likely To" is sublime.

R.E.M. are one of the best bands ever!

the smiths represent just about everything i dislike about mopey teens and their petty dramas, totally understandable up to a point, but not much fun to listen to,

to me The Smiths ( or their singles at least ) just represent one great pop song after another . immense fun, and nobody takes moz seriously do they?

The three last albums by R.E.M. have all been among their best ever.

'bedsit' collegians in the mid '80s took him verrrrrrry seriously.

80's music education: REM/The Smiths

Is that how you see it then?

Then, along comes three of their best ever albums.

There are 16 tracks on Hi-Fi, yes.

All of this is personal opinion, and I don't mean to say that this should be true for everybody.

?

I loved The Smiths, but they're a hard band to carry on loving in the same way after a certain age.

I pick... Throwing Muses!

REM and the smiths are my two favorite bands; but the smiths are happy music for me now, while REM still invokes emotional responses in me.

and up is in my top three REM albums. took me seven years to get into it, but now it's a must.

I have no stats to back this up. It is entirely a feeling of mine, but it seems to me that when it comes to today's overall cultural relevance, the balance tips so much in favor of The Smiths.

erm duhhh

I think we were talking in another thread about how REM has fallen out of favor, based on the fact that their records can mostly be had for cheap and don't seem to be sought out by younger people.

Kinda hard to compare, though, since REM put out almost four times as many studio albums. Imagine if they'd split up after Lifes Rich Pageant.

Not good bands

True. Theyre great bands

Love both but I'm going for REM.

Surprised darragh doesnt like REM actually

I like both, but I'll take any '80s R.E.M. album over any Smiths album.

Idk I feel like the sublime introspection REM was lauded for only surfaces in fleeting glimpses in their actual recorded output

Idk I feel like the sublime introspection REM was lauded for only surfaces in fleeting glimpses in their actual recorded output
--i;m the worst poster e9er (Drugs A. Money)

I don't recall introspection being a particularly prominent critical touchstone for R.E.M. It's probably not the biggest thing someone would look for in Michael Stipe's lyrics.

Yeah, I think REM is famous for creating hard-to-articulate feelings and mood, not for sublime introspection!

^this

As much as I love Rourke's playing, I think that Berry/Mills were easily the superior rhythm section, and R.E.M. made quite a lot of records which I still enjoy listening to in full. The only Smiths album that I honestly think works from start to finish is The Queen Is Dead, although I've come to appreciate Meat Is Murder a lot more recently.

REM bores me to tears these days, Smiths still vital, funny, evocative, surprising, detailed.

I'd guess that REM will, over time, be more influential on a subtle musical level and The Smiths will be more influential on a conceptual level. The latter is what tends to get written about. Personally I prefer Smiths.

their actual recorded output
you know this brings up an interesting point more broadly, which is that I wonder how much of the initial R.E.M. impact is due to what a phenomenal live band they were early in their career? Also makes me wonder about other bands whose live shows exceeded their recording impact.