On Sitting and Spinning:
R.E.M's Accelerate

December 4, 2008

R.E.M.'s recent album Accelerate is growing on me. The opening song is "Living Well is the Best Revenge".. and it continues a theme that I have mentioned before: a dialogue with those who would attack the singer's sexuality. The chorus contains some lines that seem elusive at first:

all your sad and lost apostles
hum my name and flare their nostrils
choking on the bones you tossed to them
now I'm not one to sit and spin
because living well is the best revenge
and baby, I am calling you on that.

The singer again faces those who disapprove of him. These people were evidently set on in their hatred by some unnamed "you".. who I would imagine as an establishment Evangelical like James Dobson. The vitriol of this message eventually destroys their own followers: "choking on the bones you tossed to them." The song is permeated by a conviction of the self-destruction of the attackers.. as hatred comes home to roost.

A line that particularly interests me is "now I'm not one to sit and spin." It's here that I continue to think that Michael Stipe is a careful reader of the poetry of John Ashberry. The line is an elliptical allusion to what people (back in junior high?) would say when they gave you the finger and wanted to be expansive: "sit and spin baby." It was a vulgar expression that meant something like "go fuck yourself." Bound up in this line, then, is the notion that someone has given Stipe the finger and told him to go fuck himself.. and then the response is "I'm not one to sit and spin." The line demands the filling in of that implied context. From a broader point of view the message is: "I won't fall into the self-hatred that you are seeking to impose on me.. I'm going to live and love and ignore you."

Stipe refuses to imagine any overt vengeance against his attackers. But he does allow himself the satisfaction of seeing the failure of his attackers:

don't turn your talking points on me.
history will set me free
the future is ours and you don't even
rate a footnote. now

The double time references to "history" and "future" point to a growing certainty that history is on his side. Although there is nothing explicit about the nature of the conflict, it is hard not to hear this as a reference to the growing acceptance of gays and lesbians in American culture. It is no longer difficult to imagine a future in which those who oppose these rights are no longer remembered ("don't even rate a footnote").

The final verse brings a fascinating challenge:

you, savor your dying breath
I forgive but I don't forget.
you work it out.
let's hear that argument again.
camera 3. go. now

This calls to mind Dylan's classic "Masters of War." In that song Dylan baldly sings to war pushers "And I hope that you die/ And your death'll come soon." A little before that he notes that "Even Jesus would never/ Forgive what you do." Both of these ideas are present in the lines by Michael Stipe, but in a more passive way. We seem to hear the attacker wheezing on a deathbed.. and forgiveness is allowed.

Stipe refrains from a Dylan-like attack and instead offers his attackers the purgatorial fate of having to explain themselves for the cameras over and over again. He takes pleasure in the notion of the patent absurdity of their hateful argument.. which repetition only makes more patent. The last line sets the camera rolling so that they can show to the world their emptiness. This is as much a revenge song as "Masters of War".. but the revenge is all passive. It is a victory gained by a refusal to return hatred for hatred.

By the way, I think the video announcement below by Stipe in which he "outs" his bandmates as heterosexuals (but remains silent about himself) puts his own sexuality on the table. It's pretty clear that in this song and elsewhere we are dealing with personal struggles to understand himself. As Stipe sings in "Hollow Man":

I took the prize last night
for complicated mess

This sense of the complexity of the personal.. often hidden in veiled and difficult comments about public issues.. is exactly the halllmark of my favorite work by Michael Stipe.