Radio Song

R.E.M. (1991)

By Chris Johnston

THE CRATE
The Age (Melbourne, Aust) 2012-03-02)

DON'T Dream It's Over by Crowded House came first, in 1986. And then there was R.E.M.'s Radio Song, the fourth single and first track on Out of Time. The link is the idea of trying to drown out the world, of trying to make an intimate environment bigger than che evils taking place "outside".

Neil Finn wrote, so beautifully: "... in the paper today tales of war and of waste but you turn right over to the TV page ..." This is not ignorance but a wilful choice not to know.

Then Michael Stipe from R.E.M. wrote, as a way of introducing Out of Time,"... the world is collapsing around our ears so I turned up the radio, but I can't hear it..." So he tries to block, but fails.

The noise outside — unrest, incivility, greed, bloodshed, whatever — is too endemic.

What Stipe does then is so clever. He dismisses this single as a nonsense, but it isn't. He uses the idea of a radio song as a constant through a journey. One that can drown out his problems in a number of areas: domestic and international. It never works.

All it does to Stipe is echo what is real rather than obscure it.