donderdag 22 september 2011

R.E.M. Call it a Day


The successful band R.E.M. have called it quits. They were especially popular in the Eighties, and in the early Nineties they skyrocketed towards star status with their albums Out of Time and Automatic for the People. Some of their songs have entered the mainstream canon, like ‘Everbody Hurts’, ‘Losing My Religion’, and ‘Man on the Moon’. They stayed popular throughout their entire career, despite their more recent outings not being as well-received as their work in their heyday. To illustrate, in recent years they headlined an American stadium tour with The National and Modest Mouse. R.E.M. will go down in history as a very influential indie rock band, one that went on to also have a lot of mainstream success. My personal favourite album of theirs is Document, which includes the song ‘Disturbance at the Heron House’.

Though various stories go round about what exactly entailed the disturbance at the Heron House, in his new book L. Levarious points out that it might all be about an argument between several husbands and spouses at a party thrown by one gentleman called Jay. A reconstruction:

Two wives putting on their coats in the hallway.
- Whenever he sees I’m having a good time he wants to go home
- Never heard anything so selfish in my life
-We’re always the first ones to leave
- So are we!
Enter husband 1
- Well, we’re almost the last to-night. The orchestra left half an hour ago.
Thanks to the wives’ agreement that such malevolence was beyond credibility, the dispute ended in a short struggle, and both wives cleft their husband in twain, hollowed them out, and mounted them in the cloak room.

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