For a better reading experience, make sure to listen to the songs before you read the entries. You can see this and previous entries at rorschachmusic.substack.com, “Everybody Hurts” by R.E.M.  In 2014, Irish priest Father Ray Kelly became a viral sensation when he burst into song as a couple he was marrying walked down the aisle. The song he chose, inevitably, was Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah":  The reason most covers of “Hallelujah” are bad is because they misunderstand, or are entirely indifferent to, the meaning of the song. As Cohen put it, the song is about the fact that “this world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled, but there are moments when we can reconcile and embrace the whole mess.” As such, the song is a profound creation that looks straight at the ugliness of the world and finds beauty in it. Most cover artists, however, choose the song not because of what it has to say about our fallen and broken world, but because it has a nice melody that allows them to wail “Halleluuuuuuuuuuuuujah” over and over again the chorus. Still, the song usually maintains its dignity because the lyrics are so very good that they withstand this drubbing. This is decidedly not the case with Kelly’s cover, as he takes the blasphemous step of changing all the words. Instead of this:
We get this:
I can grudgingly accept this as a little surprise at a wedding, but, after the viral success of the video, some enterprising record executive decided to get Father Ray into a studio to record this abomination as a professional single. It’s atrocious. But I bet grannies ate it up: I can see the CD case sitting in their plastic rack above the porcelain dolls and doilies, flanked on one side by their Andrea Boccelli and Michael Bublé albums, and on the other by that unopened CD of flamenco guitar songs they picked up that time they went to Spain with their neighbors on a bus tour (Asked for a review of the record, granny would respond, “He’s a very nice man and he has a lovely voice”). But I digress. I mention all of this because Kelly had to choose a B-side to accompany the official release of “Hallelujah.” He needed something similarly saccharine and granny-friendly, something that would make the crowd applaud and wipe the tears from their eyes when he inevitably performed it on America’s Got Talent. And what did he choose but R.E.M.’s 1992 single “Everybody Hurts.” As he did with “Hallelujah,” Kelly strips away all the song’s magnificence, similarly reducing it to schmaltzy, manipulative sentimentality. But what’s important here is that, to do so, he did not have to change a single word. Unfortunately, you’re going to have to listen to the official if you’re going to follow the rest of what I have to say:  “Everybody Hurts” is a very uncharacteristic song for R.E.M. Lyrically, Michael Stipe is much more likely to write lines like “Seconal, Spanish fly, absinthe, kerosene, Cherry-flavored neck and collar” or "butterfly decal, rearview mirror, dogging the scene” than “take comfort with your friends.” On the few occasions in which he does write less cryptically, there’s usually some irony at play, like in “The One I Love” when he follows “This one goes out to the one I love” with “A simple crutch to occupy my time,” or when he sings “shiny happy people holding hands” (which has to be tongue in cheek, right? Right?). “Everybody Hurts,” in contrast, is entirely irony-free. There’s an argument to be made that Stipe is going for the Ur-song here: that almost every great song, from “Hey Jude” to “YMCA,” is really just saying “everybody hurts” in different ways. But there is a fine line between “archetypal truth” and “meaningless platitude” and, in the hands of most songwriters, such direct, artless statements fall into the latter camp (see “You Are Not Alone” by Jackson, Michael). And, indeed, Kelly’s version makes it hard to see the song as anything more than a Hallmark sympathy card set to music. This is interesting to me, because it suggests that the success of R.E.M.’s version (and I do think it’s a success) is not due to the words or melody alone – as both exist essentially unaltered in Kelly’s diabolical cover – but because of the performance. Maybe comparing the two versions can give us some insight into why R.E.M.’s works while the other doesn’t. First, let’s look at how Peter Buck plays that central riff. Most of the song is built around a I - IV - ii - V progression (D and G, and then Em and A), which is essentially a I-IV-V ( the most common progression in music) with an Em thrown in to offer the “minor fall, the major lift.” It’s simple, simple stuff: the D and G are pretty; the Em and A are sad. All bases are covered. In both versions, the chords are not strummed, but arpeggiated: three strings down, then three strings up. This riff, if you can call it a riff, was written by their drummer, Bill Berry. This makes sense, as it sounds like a guitar part written by a drummer. What I mean is that a “proper” guitarist would have written something more clever, tagging on some little Tears-In-Heaven-y hammer-ons rather than sticking with that up-and-down music box thing. Buck, however, stays true to Berry’s design. Kelly’s guitarist, in contrast, has no such restraint, adding a whole bunch of pointless twiddles into the arpeggiated riff. For most of the song’s running time, R.E.M. don’t accompany the riff with anything other than some understated Rhodes organ and a metronome-like drum part. The song has no groove, and, importantly, there are no drum fills: when the music drops out after the chorus, the only percussive punctuation to bring us back into the song is a solitary hit on a cowbell that’s almost comic. There are strings that come in during the “don’t throw your hand” bridge, but they’re used to emphasize the darkness of the song, rather than its beauty, and they’re also mostly drowned out by a more aggressive electric guitar sound. Kelly’s arranger, in contrast, goes for broke with the emotive pads, adding layers and layers of swelling instrumentation right from the start: an Irish fiddle, Disney-esque orchestral strings and My-Heart-Will-Go-On flutes, with big cymbal splashes to punch home every crescendo, power ballad style. Kelly also saves the drums for the big climax, to provide maximum punch. But that, in itself, isn’t the reason Kelly’s version stinks. Restraint isn’t inherently better or more powerful than grandiosity; no-one listens to Wagner or Phil Spector or Queen and goes “This would be better if they held back a bit.” Restraint works in R.E.M.’s case because it focuses your attention on where the real power in the song lies: Michael Stipe. The phrase “everybody hurts” doesn’t mean very much in itself, but it can be powerful when said with the right intention by the right person. It’s the speaker that matters, not what they say. And consider this: When you sing a song, the sentiment you’re expressing has to make it through a gauntlet of thoughts that run the risk of interfering with what’s being expressed: “Does my voice sound good?” “I hope this makes people cry.” “Let’s make sure I get my breathing right.” “Am I in tune?” “Do I look cool or lame?” “Ooh, look, that person is enjoying this.” “Here comes the high note!” “What a good song this is” and so on. The entrance of any one of these distracting thoughts weakens the sentiment and makes it appear insincere, like when you’re pouring your heart out to someone and they check their watch. And message as high stakes as “Please don’t kill yourself” makes that sincerity even more important. Stipe’s sincerity, thankfully, is almost inhuman. I read a bit of R.E.M. criticism recently that said that Stipe sings and dances like a man who can neither sing nor dance, but cannot resist either when they call to him. This is absolutely true. When Stipe has something to say, his focus – his sincerity – is absolute. He has no pretense, no hypocrisy, no cynicism. He can even do artifice sincerely: When he wore a sarong and painted a blue stripe across his eyes, it never felt like he was doing it to look cool; rather, he was doing it because he had to. Even those gibberish lyrics never feel like they exist to dodge direct communication; rather, they feel like he’s saying the exact thing he needs to say; it just makes sense to his heart, rather than his thinking mind. It’s not his sincerity alone.. You can be sincerely angry or sincerely righteous, but these are not Stipe’s dominant modes. Stipe’s mode is kindness. He appears to be a genuinely lovely man, those big sad eyes full of empathy and care, and he sings songs to help people and make the world better. If anyone else did it, it would be cringeworthy, but I find it impossible to roll my eyes at anything he’s said or done. In short, “Everybody Hurts” is the most un-coverable song of all time, because it can only be sung by someone as sincere and kind as Michael Stipe, and there is no one as sincere and kind as Michael Stipe. “Ode to Billie Joe” by Bobbie Gentry  When teaching style to my writing students, I help them see that only a very small percentage of the words we utter exist to impart information. I give them the example of me waiting to use the photocopier in the Writing Program. Often, I go in there and there’s someone already using it, so I’m forced to wait, but I can’t just stand there in silence, so I’ll say “How are things?” or “How are your classes?” or “How are your kids?” And they’ll reply, “Yeah, things are fine,” or “You know, the usual,” or “Susie just started second grade,” or something like that. They might return the question, and I’ll answer in the same way, and then they’ll leave. What I want my students to understand is that not a single one of those sentences existed because one of us wanted to know things about the other. If they’d replied “Actually, I’m really depressed right now,” or “I’m thinking of quitting” or “Susie has bone cancer,” I would have immediately regretted asking. But that never happens because both participants in the conversation know I wasn’t actually interested in the answers to those questions; I was just putting those words into the world because I didn’t want to be seen as rude, or because that’s the sort of thing that’s expected. Really, though, it was just talk to fill the empty space, because no one likes empty space. It was chatter: signifying nothing. It’s actually pretty horrible when you think about it. “Ode To Billie Joe” is a song about the awfulness of chatter. While it’s often described as a Southern Gothic song, I find that it’s more like Samuel Beckett or Jacques Derrida than Flannery O’Connor. The narrator of the song does nothing except relay to the listener the dialogue between a family at the dinner table. It’s a stretch to call it dialogue, really, as no one is talking to each other; rather, they’re just saying things. Papa complains how much more land he has to plow; Mama proclaims that the preacher dropped by; brother says he wants another piece of pie. Amongst all of this mundane table talk, Mama drops a bombshell: “Today, Billie Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge." It doesn’t appear in the song as a bombshell, though, as Gentry sings it with the same distracted emphasis as the rest of the chatter. It’s just more words; Mama might as well have been asking for the salt shaker. Later in the song, we get a bit more information. Mama says:
We never find out what this was, because the narrator, apparently central to the story, says nothing in the entire song. Her perspective is absent; she’s just an ear. As a result, listeners have debated this mystery since the song’s release. Was it a body? A miscarried child? Ultimately, there’s no way of knowing. But, unlike other musical mysteries – like who’s so vain in the Carly Simon song – the absence of an answer is the entire point. The song is ultimately post-structuralist: the gap between words and reality is as deep as an abyss, and we can never really know anything; it’s impossible to know what goes on inside other people, and words are a terrible way to access it anyway. We live in the company of other people, talking with them, sharing spaces and lives, and yet we hardly know them at all. Even worse, we don’t really care. For Mama and Papa and Brother, Billie Joe’s suicide is just another thing that happened. We, as listeners, sit there with the narrator watching all this happen, feeling its essential wrongness, but unable to do anything, because the reality underneath this talk just isn’t accessible. It’s a bit terrifying, isn’t it?: Words can’t impart reality. They can’t connect people. They’re just empty floating signifiers. (Unless they’re spoken by Michael Stipe). Honorable Mentions: “Red Dirt Girl” by Emmylou Harris  This was going to be my number two song for “Friends” week for quite a while, but I realized that what I wanted to say about it is almost identical to what I said about “Everybody Hurts.” The story Harris tells here isn’t that meaningful — another sad person living a sad life — but the song transcends the mundanity of the tale because of how deeply the singer loves her friend. “We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful” by Morrissey  I imagine this would be true if I had any successful friends. You can read older entries on the Rorschach Music website. You can hear Jim's own music on his other site, Jim Clements Music. If you liked this post, please share it!
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