Shiny Happy People - name reasons why it is so bad and hated/Defend the Indefensible

OH I'M SO SAD!

It was recorded as they became very, very successful. Therefore, people who were disowning them at the time disowned it.

OR

It really isn't their best musical moment. Its nice to do a happy, meaningless song - there can be such joy in these things - but this band always did sombre and posturing so much better. This just..didn't seem to work - it seemed forced, somehow. Perhaps the DJ Sammy remix will do it justice.

Unless, of course, its about seeing all these happy people and being so distanced from them that you couldn't cope with them. The feeling of paranoia that comes from being convinced that everyone is happier than you - that everyone around you seems to be laughing and jolly and that frankly dragging your sorry arse down the street is all you can manage.
But I don't think it is about that.

Anyway, some combination of the above two reasons, I think.

Actually, if there's one REM song I hate more than any other, it's "Stand", which is a song for Big fuckin' Bird to sing.

I've always read it like that, even when the song first came out and I was about 11. Somehow it seems to couple well with the lyric "That's me in the corner/That's me in the spotlight".

I was actually starting to reaquaint myself with REM around the time this came out, having got a little bored with them and drifted away after Fables Of The Reconstruction and Life's Rich Pageant (I still don't think they've ever done anything to match their first couple of albums 'though) although Automatic For The People was the last one of theirs I've bought.

So that sort of blows my second argument out of the water.

Which leaves the first one. They'd gone and got popular, and lots of people begrudged them that.

You are just young because you don't.

(Disclaimer: "Ignoreland" obviously poopiest R.E.M. song ever, but no one ever defends it so far as I know.)

Oh boohoo!

Thus I WIN!

More like Dukes of Stratosphear or like Chris Gaines?

I just think these songs sound like Beach Boys songs and I've always had a theory that REM picked up where the Beach Boys left off.

Only someone who's too young to remember the 80's could conceivably believe that being too young to remember the 80's could in any way whatsoever make them a winner!

As a psychotic REM fan in elementary school I was jealous of all the tots who got to dance in it. I'm not anymore.

Still dig the song though. up, HERE WE GO! doot doot doot doot...

Easily. Don't get me wrong -- I like the B52's (well, their first two albums, anyway)...but everything else she duets on just turns to crap. Kate probably didn't have any part in writing "Candy", so she can't help the crap she was handed to sing, but it doesn't make her inclusion on the already rancid track any less awful.

That's as perverse as hating the sun.

The sun is overrated.

My theory is that the dislike of this song is from people who were relatively early REM fans who were with them from the beginning and felt that the poppy optimism of this song was a "sell-out" move or an attempt at mass appeal

Whomever said it had something to do with the video was OTM! Seeing Stipe bounce about like a jackass in a backwards baseball cap with an idiotic grin on sticks in my mind the most. That and the ridiculous dancing. The central riff (courtesy of Peter Buck, the only cool man left in the band following the departure of Berry) is actually quite cool to my ears. Lyrically, it's shit, Shit, SHIT, SHIT, SHIT!, SHIT!

Hahaha I always skipped "She's So Heavy" which may explain why I don't think Abbey Road needs to be lighter.

(double xpost)

But why do you think the "relatively early" fans might suddenly have realised that the band were trying to write nice radio-friendly singles in order to appeal to a wider audience when they heard Shiny Hapy People, if they hadn't noticed it when they heard e.g. Can't Get There From Here, Superman, It's The End Of The World As We Know It, The One I Love, Pop Song 89, Stand or Orange Crush?

Not disagreeing necessarily, just puzzled.

If these fans missed a signal as glaringly obvious as the band leaving IRS and signing to Warner Brothers, I'd have thought it would have needed a small nuclear explosion to make them notice.

Personally, "Shiny Happy People" pretty much bores me to death, but no more so than "Stand" did before it. In fact this morning when I glanced over the active threads on ILM, the first thing I thought of as an answer to "Remove one song from an almost perfect album to make it a perfect album" was "take 'Stand' off of Green." Hell, from the time I got Green on CD (maybe 2 years after it came out and I retired the cassette copy I had before that), I've skipped that song consistently. Sometimes I've even gone so far as to program the CD player to play every song in order but leave off number 4. (Or is it number "R"? What the fuck was the deal with that on the jacket anyway?)

I like the guitar riff, though. I agree with some here in that the video spoiled it for me.

Anyway, where's the Out of Time love? It's one of my favorites. Also, Stand pretty much ends Green at least in terms of good songs until you get to the last two. And as for stupid pop songs wasn't Cant Get There From Here years and years before Stand?

It's obviously not here in a discussion of why "Shiny Happy People" is crap. I mean, come on. What'd you expect?

I disagree that Stipe lyrics are consistently bad until around the Out of Time era and later. Also, I already addressed the difference between a silly REM pop song pre-Warner and post-Warner. I still think production has a lot to do with it. Perhaps that is uber indie or rockist of me, but I don't care.

That alone is reason to hate it for me.

Jesus, now I've got "Stand" stuck in my head.

Sucks, don't it?

Dude, that goes for almost every lyricist!

(Oh, and Alex, have you heard "Fretless"? I don't know whether it would change your mind, but that's one example of Kate Pierson's presence on a duet with R.E.M. not -- imo -- being crap. Give it a listen if you haven't already. But if you have, and you still think it's crap, ignore everything here in parentheses.)

xpost "Losing my Religion" has just been overplayed and overexposed and the associated video was silly (Stipe as an angel?). It's actually a great pop song. As are many R.E.M. songs. I'm beginning to think there's something in the "disappointed fanboy" theories. Sorry to be so reductionist, but R.E.M. always were a great pop group. They wrote songs.

the guy upthread said they were good up to green/out of time, when they went shitty. i said they were often pretty bad from the begining. he said No! and i said "yes, they're inconsistant." thats all. i doin't see where "almost every lyricist" fits in there. i mean, i agree with that, that was kind of my point.

people draw this wierd distinction between 80's and 90's rem that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. like first they could do no wrong and then they could do no good. i like them a lot but they're a mixed bag from the begining, and well, shiny happy people and the whole of out of time are easily on the better side of there stuff.

Also, I always assumed this was an AIDS song, I'm not sure exactly why. Just the time it came out, I guess, plus having Kate Pierson there. So it always seemed tragicomic or elegiac or something to me.

Oh, and: Stipe is probably the least consistent lyricist in rock. He can be amazingly literate and witty ("Sad Professor," "Low Desert") or painfully stupid ("New Test Leper," "I'll Take the Rain").

I have a feeling that once in a while he forces himself to be "direct" in his writing, to address emotions head-on in some sort of therapeutic way -- and that's when the crap starts pouring out ("I used to think / as birds take wing / they sing through life / so why can't we?"). His best lyrics are clearly and unabashedly phonetic ("Seconal, spanish fly, absinthe, kerosene, cherry-flavored neck and collar / I can smell the sorrow on your breath" etc)

Those lyrics are more interesting in the context of the whole song. A lot of his lyrics are not his own poetic takes on things, but thoughts of the characters he's portraying in the songs, of course.

(Just a question, folks. It's my suspicious nature. And I know their post-Berry albums have had, um, a more minority appeal, shall we say, which doesn't necessarily make them worse, but indicates that somewhere around the late 90s, let alone the early '90s, the band finally let go of the tether that tied them to the zeitgeist, or whatever... perhaps they're happier, and shinier, for it.)

Maybe not great, but it's jangly damnit.