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.Notably, this is the songthat features the most background vocals from Stipe—hedoes all of them here.Unlike Mills’s and Berry’s, they’renot true harmonies, but snippets of sound that could betaken from the lead vocal—the sound of the lead vocal’sunconscious peeking through, in line with the recitation’sassertion that steady repetition is a compulsion mutually reinforced.Stipe’s backgrounds are indistinct, non-musical, non-rhythmic, somewhere between the recitation and thesung vocals, and then they finally align on the closingphrase: “conversation fear” (which parallels the “can youhear me?” at the end of “Sitting Still”—no other songson the album close with such emphatic, not to mentionaudible, lines).S h a k i n g T h r o u g hWith “Shaking Through,” we go from conversation fearto civic fear: “Could it be that one small voice / Doesn’tcount in the room?” Here are three songs in a row aboutcommunication: First, the fear of not being heard literally(the deaf child in “Sitting Still”), then hearing but nothearing (the alienating social prism of phatic conversationon “9-9”), then not being heard in the political sense ofmaking your voice known, in “Shaking Through.” The• 46 •MURMURsong builds from the various everyday levels of non-com-munication addressed in the previous two songs (an inter-esting irony is that these three songs were staples intheir early sets because they did connect so well with the audience).This is my own obtuse interpretation now,but in light of this song triptych, it’s interesting to takeStipe’s odd line “Could this by three be ten? / Ordermarches on” to mean that for these three kinds of failurein communication, there are ten more that haven’t beentouched on.The song’s glorious chorus melodies are much moretweaked-out here compared to the straightforward three-note version they sang live in the days before Murmur, where everyone followed the same descending melodyfigure.Stipe’s verse melody is slightly curtailed and less“bubblegum” than on his previous live performances,sticking closer to one range so as to better contrast thestratospheric notes he hits on the choruses.Buck is pick-ing out arpeggios on Easter’s electric sitar, which buzzesand twangs like a banjo.With any other drummer the alternating ride and hi-hat on the choruses might be written off as sloppiness,or at best, an inspired jam, except that here Berry’s cymbalwork adds such a nuance of feeling in these sections it’sanything but lazy.It is wildly inconsistent, though—henever plays the ride all the way through vis-à-vis the popschool of drumming where ride cymbal = chorus = apexof song.But it is expressive and deliberate and is a bigpart of the emotional ebb and flow of the song.If MichaelStipe didn’t narrate R.E.M.’s early songs, Bill Berry abso-lutely did.• 47 •J.NIIMIStipe’s weaving, multi-tracked vocals in the wordlessbridge section braid together and then suddenly cut off,as if severed with a knife.It’s as though “one small voice”is lost in a whirlwind of voices that are all variations ofthe same one, rising to a confusing glossolalia where toomany variances on one voice equal no voices, a musicalmetaphor for the political.Before the song ends, it modulates up a step, from Dto E.It’s a fun nod to Tin Pan Alley, but more pragmati-cally it’s also a way, within a song whose choruses are sotightly controlled, of creating a separate, self-consciousspace where Mills’s awesomely can-belto background vocals can carry the song home without undermining thesubtlety of feeling created by the rest of the song.u n t i t l e d i n t e r l u d eA necessary palate-cleanser in the form of a short jam,edited with a very 70s ear (faded in and out) and uncred-ited on the track listing.We just finished hearing theband’s three-song manifesto and we need a relativelydumb song now to take it in—this excerpt breaks themomentum gracefully and delivers you to that dumb song(i.e., “We Walk”).It begins with the distant chirpy sound of a tape deckpowering up [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]