R.E.M.'s Murmur (33 1/3)
by J. Niimi
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Book Summary Information
Author: J. NiimiEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-04-28
ISBN: 0826416721
Number of pages: 160
Publisher: Continuum
Book Reviews of R.E.M.'s Murmur (33 1/3)
Book Review: A Fine Book on Rock and Culture by an Excellent Writer
Summary: 5 Stars
There are so many things that I like about MURMUR, J. Niimi's recent book on R.E.M.'s legendary 1983 album of the same name, that I scarcely know where to begin.
On one hand, there's the crisp organization. This compact book is broken into four chapters that provide in efficient succession (1) crucial background information on the band and the album, especially the technical aspects of the latter's production; (2) a song-by-song and line-by-line perspective on an album whose expressionistic and often absurdist lyrics are famously difficult to understand and/or to ascertain; (3) a reading of (and, perhaps more importantly, "a listening to") the album that emphasizes ideas of the sublime and positions this work of musical art as an instance of the Southern Gothic impulse as filtered through the ephemera of the 1980s; and (4) a second reading of the album that accents the semiotic and the linguistic, examining MURMUR and its lyrics through, among other things, the lens of Walker Percy's essay "Metaphor as Mistake." There is also a very useful appendix in which Mr. Niimi supplies and in some cases reconstructs the album's lyrics. If you like the album, this appendix is worth the cost of the book.
I have little patience for baggy monsters and loose piles of crud prefaced by a title page and, less often, a preface. Mr. Niimi's organization is, happily, nothing if not tight and craftmanlike--no bags, no monsters, no crud. But what is most admirable about Mr. Niimi's structure is that it acts as a control on the very best aspect of the author's book, i.e., its free-flowing and always highly accessible intellectual manner, which combines personal reminiscence with a variable prose style and with cultural allusions that are at once wide-ranging and intensely specific to the world about which Mr. Niimi writes. (The author has a great deal of first- and second-hand knowledge of said world as a musician, engineer, and critic.)
What I am trying to say, and taking much too long to do it, is that gee whiz, Mr. Niimi can really write. A uniquely satisfying (and often quite droll) combination of the readerly and the writerly is what is most immediately appealing about MURMUR, yet it is the book's structure that finally moves the reader along and disciplines the author's ideas, restricting any flight into the ether of fundamentally idiosyncratic intellectual reference and cultural critique.
If you need further convincing, just leaf through the start of the third chapter, which is one of my favorite parts of the book. Before moving smoothly into an impressive examination of the album's cover art, this chapter begins with a glib and accurate passage that contemplates the abject history of the cassette tape, which Mr. Niimi describes as the "the worst existing way" of listening to music-not to mention a musical mode that has colored his memory as well as that of an entire era. Being of the same "passing generation" as the author, I know exactly what Mr. Niimi means here and elsewhere. The author's glibness, like his style in general, acts as a vehicle to understanding. Such is not usually the case, in my view. Not in any book.
If there is one drawback for me, it is the book's tendency to romanticize its object. Mr. Niimi fights against this tendency in several salient ways. For example, he foregrounds the subjectivity of his own responses to the album; he emphasizes the importance that R.E.M., especially Stipe, ascribes to linguistic and existential indeterminacy; he discusses theories of art and language that coalesce around postmodern ideas of decenteredness and subjectivity; and he highlights the album's straightforward flirtations with romanticism. Yet on a number of occasions, Mr. Niimi seems to forget all that and say, in effect, it really is great Art. I'm of the opinion that this impulse is always to be resisted, problematized, mocked. Yet I also know that this impulse is very seductive--and that an inevitable surrender to it is in a sense built into our language and its aggregate customs. This "deficiency" is, in other words, an inescapable one--especially in a project like Mr. Niimi's, which is uniquely susceptible to essentialist attributions of aesthetic value. On the whole, then, readers should thank the author for having resisted homage in all the ways outlined above.
I've said more than enough. Here's the point: MURMUR is well structured and well written. It is, moreover, informative, intelligent, and very lively. Buy it.
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