What would you say is the frequency, Kenneth?: A Musical Awakening Story (Part 1)
As "Monster" and "Under The Table and Dreaming" turn 30 this week, I reflect on how R.E.M. and Dave Matthews Band triggered what would become my personal Musical Awakening™️
(Note: To celebrate this week’s simultaneous 30th anniversary of the release of R.E.M.’s “Monster” and Dave Matthews Band’s “Under The Table And Dreaming,” I’ve put together a two-part retrospective review of these albums and how they literally changed the way I heard and consumed music. Part 1 will focus on R.E.M.)
Can you name a moment in time when your life changed forever?
I’m sure you can. It could be something personal, like when you got married, when your child(ren) was(were) born, or when a loved one passed away. It could be something public and shared, like the fall of the Berlin Wall or the time Appalachian State hilariously beat then-No. 5 Michigan 34-32 on Sept. 1, 2007.
For all of us, days — even singular moments within those days — stand out in the timeline of our lives. They’re frozen in our minds, moments we’ll never forget. Those days/moments are the bright line between the person we were and the person we will forever be.
For me, Tuesday, Sept. 27, 1994, specifically was NOT a lifechanging moment, a day which inherently contained some sort of cosmic significance, almost as if it were the temporal junction point for the entire space-time continuum, like, say, November 12, 1955. (Great Scott!)
Tangentially, however, that day DID ultimately change my musical life. It was the unofficial day of my Musical Awakening™️, the phrase I use to describe the period of time where I went from being a passive music listener to an active participant in discovering and curating my own music. It was the day R.E.M. released “Monster” and Dave Matthews Band released “Under The Table And Dreaming.”
R.E.M. and “Monster”
On that particular day in September 1994, I was not at a record store. I was probably sitting at home after high school, doing homework and listening as my dad played hits from the ‘70s and ‘80s on his living-room stereo system. The songs were probably considered “adult contemporary” for the time, so something smooth like “Steppin’ Out” by Joe Jackson or “Ride Like The Wind” by Christopher Cross.
I loved those songs, and still do to this day. But the winds were changing and I was beginning my push to start “steppin’ out” of the shadow of my dad’s generation’s music and follow my own path. That path began when I was listening to a friend’s mix tape on a high school trip in the fall of 1994 and I heard Michael Stipe loudly ask: “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?”
I LOVED this song from the moment I heard it. I’ll talk about it in a bit more depth when it becomes the featured song in the “Modern Rock Tracks No. 1s” portion of “Chart Chat” in a few months, but there’s something about that opening guitar riff and the explosion of all the instruments at once that just captivated me. Those screeching electric pulses in the middle of the refrain, the passionate squeal of Stipe’s vocals, the throwaway “don’t fuck with me” at the end of the song — it’s all gold. From that moment on, I was sold on R.E.M.
(The listening public was sold on them as well: “What’s The Frequency, Kenneth?” holds the distinction of being the first No. 1 hit on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart to DEBUT at #1!)
Funny thing about R.E.M., though: “Monster” was the band’s NINTH studio album. It’s a weird time in a band’s history for someone to become deeply invested in them, but that’s how it happened for me.
I’m not saying that I never heard some of their more famous tracks before I heard “Kenneth”; after all, “Losing My Religion,” “Shiny Happy People,” and even “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It” were legitimate pop staples I’d passively hear on occasion, but they never registered in my pre-Musical Awakening™️ brain. “What’s The Frequency, Kenneth?” effectively unlocked the part of my psyche that made the rest of those songs relevant to me. After that, it was like I found them all over again for the first time.
As “Monster” went through its year-long release cycle, each new single was a new revelation. “Bang And Blame,” the second single and ALSO a Modern Rock Tracks #1 hit, tricks you into thinking the band is going to go slow, but then they hit you with the refrain, a sonic blast of percussion, electric guitar and Stipe’s pipes. The track would often get cut in radio edits, but there’s a good 30 seconds at the end of the song, when it seemingly fades out, where the track comes back with a haunting reverse reverberation of the guitar with the bass beats and the drums. It still gives me chills to this day.
Third single “Crush With Eyeliner,” which peaked at #20 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart, takes the hard edge with the guitars and mixes it with a whiff of unrequited love, a combination that this unrequited lover felt palpably in my teenage years. The image of a “sad tomato” made me smile at the time, as did the overly obnoxious refrain: “I. Am. Smitten. REEEEEEEEEEE RRRRRRRRRRRR RRRRRRRRRRRRRRREEEEEEEEE RRRRRRRRRRRRR…”
By the time “Strange Currencies” was officially released as the fourth single in April 1995, my Musical Awakening™️ was complete. I didn’t need the magnum-opus ballad from “Monster” to sell me on R.E.M., though the radio-attuned public ate this song up, crossing over to mainstream pop radio and dominating all the airspace (it peaked at #14 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart and #47 on the Hot 100, which seems weirdly low).
Because of “Monster” and its first single, I was forever smitten, my life changed thanks in large part to a song whose title was inspired by a person who attacked Dan Rather in the 1980s, repeatedly asking him, “Kenneth, what’s the frequency?”
Reflecting on the effect of “Monster”
It’s interesting talking with people about R.E.M. and “Monster.” A lot of folks who discovered and loved R.E.M. before I did talk at length about how smitten they were with their earlier albums. Because of that and the tonal differences between “Monster” and those earlier efforts, a lot of those fans see “Monster” as a subpar aberration on an otherwise amazing discography.
This makes sense. If you came into R.E.M. in the early to mid ‘80s, you were treated to the jangle-pop, college-radio version of R.E.M., the band with the somewhat unintelligible lead singer and far-less-polished but super-charged guitar-based rock. If you cut your teeth on classic tracks like “So. Central Rain,” “Radio Free Europe” or “Can’t Get There From Here,” odds are good “Monster” is not going to be your jam (though “Can’t Get There From Here” is an unheralded classic and one of my all-time R.E.M. favorites).
If you came to R.E.M. in the Warner Bros. era, beginning with the superlative “Green” album, you likely fell in love with R.E.M. at their commercial best. Almost all the popular tracks and radio singles from “Green,” “Out Of Time” and “Automatic For The People” are instant classics. I like plenty of songs from this era, don’t get me wrong, but the slower, reflective vision of R.E.M. didn’t strike as strong a chord with me (clearly, as their earlier albums did not open the door to my Musical Awakening™️ in the same way “Monster” did).
If R.E.M.’s discography were represented on a number line, “Monster” is at position “0,” and my discovery of the band was a ripple effect incremental movements before and after that midpoint. For each new album going forward, I’d discover a new album going backward. I discovered “Green” right around the time “New Adventures in Hi-Fi” came out; I really sunk my teeth into “Document” at about the same time I was falling in love with “Up.”
Getting down to revisiting "Up"
“Monster” changed how I consumed music. I knew R.E.M. existed before “Monster,” but I didn’t know how that existence affected me until after “What’s The Frequency, Kenneth?” blew the doors off of everything I knew about music and set afire inside me a passion to discover and follow alternative rock that remains unsated to this day.
But at the same time “Monster” was dominating, another band with a much smaller discography popped up out of nowhere and became one of the signature bands of the ‘90s. With them, it wasn’t about finding a band in the prime of their career, but rather discovering something new and unique and following it from its humble beginnings in the mid ‘90s to something unstoppably huge by the end of the decade.
(Part 2 of this retrospective, featuring Dave Matthews Band and “Under The Table And Dreaming,” will post later this week.)
What’s YOUR Musical Awakening™️?
I don’t often ask my readers to comment, but I’m curious to know what your Musical Awakening™️ moment or moments are. What time period triggered your love of music? What band set you on the path to independent musical discovery? When did it happen? Reach out in the comments!
This is such a great post. I'm not exactly sure when my musical awakening was, but in the summer of 1986 I started paying attention to the charts and started (for lack of a better word) "charting" my own course when it came to my musical tastes. Granted, most of it was determined by what was playing on the radio at the time, but I came into my own and got out from under my parents' musical tastes (although the influence my mom had on my taste is very evident.)
In any event, my college roommate loved REM and that was my introduction to them beyond what was played on the radio in the late 80s. I vividly remember going to Musicland with him to buy Monster and I'm pretty sure I was buying the 2CD release "Barbra: The Concert" lol - I was still pretending to be straight at that time although the signs were definitely there.
Hi there Matt,
As someone who has written a LOT on R.E.M. it was fascinating for me to read this. I struggled with Monster on release, and your couple of paragraphs right under 'reflecting on...' pretty much sum me up. I do NOT think it's up there with Automatic for the People, but then again, I am surrounded in my life by people who feel about the 8th R.E.M. LP, compared to the 7th, and all the way back to someone who thinks they never bettered Chronic Town. I do believe a lot of this comes down to "they were my band before they were your band" and it's understandable when a band can have changed your life the way that R.E.M. did for so many people. When Monster was remastered and reissued a few years back, I approached it afresh and on its own merits, it's a wonderful album. And what I have always loved about R.E.M. has been their willingness to take risks and turn musical corners. At the time, it sounded like they were 'going for it' when there was no 'it' left for them to go for except the stadium tour, which didn't work out so well. It's really beneficial for me to read from your perspective of how fresh this album sounded and how it sent you back on a voyage of discovery.
On that (musical) note, I'm afraid I was a little precious. When I got into The Who around age of 11, I set about discovering their back catalogue. It took years because, it was back then and the first LP wasn't even available in the UK. (For real: the My Generation LP was only available as an expensive import.) R.E.M. are t he only band who rival The Who for me in terms of those musical twists and turns, a band for whom my fave LP depends what mood I am in.
Thanks for sharing!
Tony