A Half-Assed Defense of R.E.M.'s "Shiny Happy People"

Yesterday on Facebook I asked my friends to name a song they hate from an album they love.  (Yes, I am that guy.  I also post obnoxious political diatribes.)  I got very good responses, the least surprising of which was "Shiny Happy People," from R.E.M.'s 1991 bestseller Out of Time.  R.E.M. fans really don't like that song.  R.E.M. themselves seem to not care for the song--they left it off of their 2003 greatest hits compilation In Time despite it being one of their, you know, biggest hits.  (I suspect that part of their disregard for the song, if such a disregard exists, stems from the fact that they don't play the song live, due to the importance of non-member Kate Pierson's vocals.)

Now, "Shiny Happy People" does not make my personal list of favorite R.E.M. songs.  (Nor, for that matter does Out of Time rank highly on my list of favorite R.E.M. albums.  I find it one of their lesser efforts, to be honest, one that I rarely return to.  See what I mean about a half-assed defense?)  But R.E.M. have plenty of mediocre songs, and let's be honest, even mediocre R.E.M. is better than most of the music polluting the airwaves on a daily basis.  So why the hate for this particular song?

And believe you me, there has been plenty of hate, from both R.E.M. fans and non-fans alike.  The backlash began soon after the song's release in September 1991 as the follow-up single to "Losing My Religion."  "Losing My Religion" was everywhere the summer of 1991, and so some backlash was inevitable.  The video for SHP was goofy as hell too, in marked contrast to the arty and symbolic video for "Religion." In spirit, the song was more of a sequel to "Stand," another goofy garage-rock tune that somehow mostly escaped the ire of R.E.M. true believers (perhaps because the song came first, or perhaps because the song's lyrics can be connected to environmentalism and so are "important").  My theory is that for R.E.M. fans, the song's upbeat attitude contrasted with the growing perception of R.E.M. as a "serious" band, a reputation cemented by the "Religion" video.  R.E.M., like U2, Sting, and 10,000 Maniacs, wrote political lyrics and advocated progressive politics.  They were making art, dammit.  How dare they tell us that everything is "shiny" and "happy"?  Have they forgotten who is in the White House?

But SHP fits well into the R.E.M. canon, much better than many R.E.M. fans want to admit.  R.E.M. is, at its heart, a postmodern garage rock band.  Garage rock began in the late 1950s, was extremely popular in the 1960s, and is seen in the 1970s as a progenitor of punk rock.  The best garage rock combined the goofy fun of 1950s rock with the tunefulness of British Invasion bands, all while retaining a harder blues sound that would provide inspiration for a 70s punk scene put off by the overindulgence of most AOR music.  The first garage rock hit was "Louie Louie," reportedly the most performed rock song of all time.  "Louie Louie," with its amateurish musicianship, unintelligible (and suspected to be obscene) lyrics, and fast rhythm, is practically the prototypical rock song.  It is also goofy as hell.  "Shiny Happy People" is a throwback to an earlier era, when rock songs could be goofy without also being seen as girly.  At some point in the late 60s, we decided that rock music had to fit certain masculine stereotypes, and any songs that didn't were either banished to feminine "light rock" or to children's music.  (Indeed, many of the classic 1950s and 1960s rock songs are now known exclusively as children's songs.)  This is why SHP was so successfully reinvented as a Sesame Street song.  (Seriously--go youtube "Happy Furry Monsters."  It's fantastic.  Replacing the strings with a banjo is genius--I wish R.E.M. have done that on tour.  And the Kate Pierson muppet is strangely hot.) Once placed in its "proper" genre, the song loses most of its annoying qualities, despite being the same damn song. As Michael Stipe himself wrote in the liner notes to their 2011 greatest hits, "Not my favorite song.  But kids do love it."

"Shiny Happy People" is certainly less goofy than a 50s song like "Chantilly Lace" or "Splish Splash."  And it is less goofy than many classic Beatles tunes.  (Seriously--the Beatles have a song about driving a car in which the chorus is them beep beeping like a car.  That's a hell of a lot more goofy than SHP.)  But SHP didn't premiere in 1961; it came out in 1991, and so got caught up in several backlashes.  In addition to the backlash against R.E.M., SHP came to represent the wussification of the American male.  Remember, fall 1991 was when Nirvana exploded onto the music scene.  SHP was the anti-Nirvana; happy, not angry. 

Therefore, with even the true believers ambivalent at best about the song, there was little defense offered when the haters began hating. And hate they did.  Dennis Leary famously ranted that "Hey, hey, hey! Pull this bus over to the side of the pretentiousness turnpike! I want everybody out, I want the shiny people over here and the happy people over here! I represent angry, gun-toting, meat-eating fucking people! ...Sit down and shut the fuck up, Michael."  Here we see the real crime that "Shiny Happy People" commits--it is not masculine enough.  If further proof is needed, in 2006 AOL Music ranked SHP #1 on its list of Wussiest Songs, ahead of such classics as "You Light Up My Life" (#22), "Your Body Is A Wonderland" (#23), and "Hello" (#11).  The song was seen as belonging to the "light rock" genre, a feminine wasteland inhabited by Anne Murray and Peter Cetera.  True rock and roll has to be about adolescent alienation and/or wanting to fuck a girl, dontcha know? (And you can't tell me that Michael Stipe's sexuality doesn't play a part in the perception of SHP as "wussy.")

Except, of course, for the small fact that the song was incredibly popular.  Though the song was rejected by angry Nirvana fans, and only begrudgingly tolerated by R.E.M. fans, it sold quite well.  But the history of music doesn't really value the opinion of the vast middle, those non-obsessive Americans who aren't looking for a deeper message, but just want a happy, shiny song to sing along to in the car. And perhaps it is just my middle-aged depression talking, but I already spend too much time thinking about how my life sucks, you know?  Sometimes it's nice to be reminded that there is happiness in the world.

Or perhaps I should just quote Matthew Perpetua's fantastic Pop Songs 07-08 blog:

Ah, yes. The most unfairly maligned song in the R.E.M. discography.
Actually, that’s not quite true: It’s actually one of the band’s biggest hits, though they’ve gone out of their way to distance themselves from it by never performing it in concert, and omitting it from their second greatest-hits collection in favor of several songs that were not even close to being popular.
Though I can understand why the song would not work well in concert — the string accompaniment is crucial, and perhaps the single best thing about the composition — it’s a bit sad that the band are not proud of it, or at least enough to acknowledge that it is one of their most successful and best-known singles. It’s a lovely song, and it takes the band’s long-established penchant for chiming, jangly chords and sunny harmonies to a logical conclusion: Full-on retro bubblegum, complete with a guest vocal from the high priestess of camp, Kate Pierson.
Clearly the trouble with “Shiny Happy People” is not the song so much as the lyrics. Frankly, it’s always a bit tricky to work out to what degree the song is meant to be ironic. There’s certainly a touch of irony in it — I mean, c’mon — but I think what puts some people off is that it’s mostly quite sincere. In the middle of an album of love songs and/or songs about love, “Shiny Happy People” takes it all to a radical extreme: It’s this relentlessly cheery vision of utopia where everyone is in love, all of the time. Whether you laugh at it, cringe, swoon, cry, or sing along, it’s revealing something about your outlook on life. It’s kinda like a Rorschach test that way.

I am listening to SHP as I write this, and it is just a delightful song.   The beautiful three-part harmony between Michael, Mike and Kate!  The uber-jangly guitar riff!  The opening strings!  The never ending "dit dit ditditdit"!  Handclaps, for god's sake!  This song is pure, distilled joy.

We are firmly entrenched in an ironic worldview which rejects any attempt at sincerity as childlike and naive.  And therefore there is no room in rock and roll for a song about laughing, about happiness, about community, about non-sexualized love.  When Stipe sings "Everyone around--love them, love them," he might as well be singing "I'd Like To Teach the World To Sing."  Hey look--it turns out that the song is political, after all.

Last Friday

So last Friday I was sitting in the library waiting for my son to get out of school.  I was chatting with another parent--my son is best friends with her daughter, so we spend a lot of time together, and I really like the whole family.  We rarely discuss politics or other serious matters, but on this day, for some reason, she brings up the Trayvon Martin murder (which, unbeknownst to her, I've been following obsessively).  Serious conversation ensues.

 I won't bore you with the whole conversation, but at one point it gets brought up that Zimmerman was paranoid in part because of recent thefts in his neighborhood.  Whereupon my friend goes off on a tirade against thieves.  She really hates thieves, hates the idea of them, wishes we could "string them all up" (which is a really, really unfortunate turn of phrase that I let go by because a) she used the phrase unthinkingly and b) there was no stopping her anti-thievery rant).  She was lighthearted in tone as she said all this, but it wasn't a joke--she meant every word. 

I've been thinking about that conversation all weekend.  Not to get too Marxist on you, but I'm struck by the centrality of the concept of theft in our capitalistic society.  We often place other crimes within the framework of theft--rape as the theft of virginity or innocence, murder as theft of life or of the future--theft from both the victim and the victim's family.

Zimmerman's actions, according to the 911 call he made, springs from this hatred of theft--"they always get away with it."  Government welfare is disparaged because it is seen as theft--undeserving people taking money that doesn't belong to them, taking it from hard-working people.

The concept of theft requires us to make moral judgements.  Heist shows can be moral because, like Robin Hood, the thieves steal from the undeserving and give to the deserving (yes, I've been watching Leverage recently, why do you ask?) 

So here's my point: one of the most insidious traits of modern racism is how it has mapped itself onto this central feature of a late-capitalistic society--out hatred of thieves.  In different ways (and I don't want to elide those differences, though they aren't my point) both the native black and the immigrant experience in America is one of being accused of theft. 

George Zimmerman didn't set out to kill a young black man--he set out to catch a thief.  I'm sure Zimmerman would say that he hates thieves, regardless of color.  Of course, the bigger question is why, when Zimmerman looked at Trayvon Martin, did he see a thief?

Deception (1946)

As part of my ongoing quest to watch all the movies used in Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, last night I watched the 1946 Bette Davis film Deception.  Shorter review: meh.  And so I wasn't going to write about it.  And yet, one thing kept bothering me.  You see, at one point in the film, our bad guy, Claude Rains, monologues while stroking a cat.  Straight up James Bond villain strokes a cat, twenty years before the Bond films even existed.[1]  I wanted a screenshot of this cat-stroking, but the Internet has none.  Which blows my mind.  Wasn’t the Internet invented in order to catalogue cat pictures?  And so, I decided that I must create one myself.  Which meant teaching myself how to use DVD software, since I had no clue how one grabs screenshots from films and posts them online.

 Fast forward several hours, and I give you—Claude Rains stroking a cat, evil villain style.

And since I’ve gone through all this trouble, I might as well talk about the rest of the film.  Disclaimer: of the three main actors (Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, and Claude Rains), I only care for Rains.  If you are a Davis or Henreid fan, then you’ll most likely disagree with my mostly negative take on them.  If, like me, you don’t much care for either actor, this isn’t the film to change your mind.

Deception opens with a reunion between Christine Radcliffe (Davis) and Karel Novak (Henreid).  The couple met while studying music in Europe; Radcliffe was able to return to America, but Novak was trapped in Europe.  The background to this story is incredibly vague.  (I suppose the filmmakers assumed that 1946 audiences didn’t need a rehash of Nazi atrocities.)  Novak never discusses what happened to him in Europe with Radcliffe; the closest the audience gets to an explanation is in the cat-stroking scene, when Alexander Hollenius (Rains) comments that Novak “wouldn’t perform for them” (or some such words) and that he’s lucky he still has his fingers.[2]  All we need to know is that Novak is a delicate, broken man, prone to jealous fits alternating with absurd naivety.  The opening reunion is all tears and chaste embraces, with Radcliffe saying that “I saw them kill you!” (or some such words).  How this statement is possible is never explained.  Really, we aren’t supposed to think too much about it.  All we need to know is that, for whatever implausible reason, Bette Davis thought Paul Henreid was dead, and so moved on with her life.  And now that her dead lover has returned, she’s got some ‘splaining to do. 

Radcliffe takes Novak back to her NYC apartment, explaining as they walk how she is a struggling musician.  Then they get to her place, which is—I kid you not—the greatest NYC apartment I have ever seen.  (Apparently the design was modeled after Leonard Bernstein’s apartment.) 

Novak is naturally suspicious, and accuses her (without directly saying it, of course) of being a hooker—even choking her at first.  (This is the scene Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid uses, and since it occurs so early in the film, I thought about just turning it off here, as so far the film was a bit of a snoozefest.)  Radcliffe naturally can’t tell her domestic abuser the truth—that she is now a famous composer’s kept woman—so we get the first of her many, many lies.  She tells Novak that she takes in students in order to pay for her fantastic apartment with its opulent artwork and décor, and her fancy fur coats.  (No wonder Warner Brothers lost money on this film—the sets and costumes are crazy ritzy.)  The fact that Novak falls for such a terrible lie is either proof that the concentration camps destroyed his brain, or more likely, proof that the filmmakers don’t expect us to think too hard about this film.  Any trauma Novak may suffer from is merely a convienent plot point, which surfaces when needed and disappears otherwise.

And this is my biggest complaint about the film—it is a melodrama where characters act as they do not for any realistic psychological reasons, but because the plot demands that they act in this way.  The plot is especially jarring to contemporary audiences, since Bette Davis’s central dilemma—preventing her lover from finding out that she’s been unfaithful to him—makes little sense anymore.  A simple “I thought you were dead, and so I moved on with my life; if you can’t accept that, then you obviously don’t love me” won’t suffice for a film which insists upon a very conservative view of female sexuality, even as it exploits that very sexuality in order to drive the plot.

What this film needed was more Claude Rains, who plays the manipulative, scenery-chewing composer.  His first appearance, crashing the wedding reception of our not-so-perfect couple, is a hoot.  Rains comes on like a cross between Richard Burton in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Simon Callow in, well, anything. 

Rains almost single-handedly turns this film from a flaccid melodrama into a camp classic.  Deception is part of a long tradition of films about the creative class, and had the potential to be an ur- All About Eve.  Sadly, only when Rains is on screen does the film come alive.  I would say he steals every scene he’s in, except that makes it sound like he’s doing something wrong.  To be fair, Rains’s character is a lot more fun than the PTSD cellist or the anxiety-plagued kept woman.  After crashing the party, Hollenius discovers that his kept woman’s new husband is a world-class cellist; coincidentally, his just-finished work is a cello concerto.  So he offers the part to Novak, partly because Novak is really, really, good, but mostly just so he can mess with him. (Rains and Davis have zero chemistry, which leads one to believe that Hollenius’s interest in Radcliffe was not sexual; rather, he just likes having people around to jump through his hoops.  Rains’s campy demeanor and extensive collection of cravats and dressing gowns furthers this “no sexual interest” theory.)  After his initial disappointment wears off, Hollenius seems delighted to have not one but two people to play mind-games with.

The middle section of the film is the most enjoyable, what with Hollenius finding more and more creative ways to fuck with the not-so-perfect couple.  Radcliffe is convinced that Hollenius is going to destroy them, even at the expense of ruining the premiere of his new work.  (The Netflix blurb states that “Christine’s efforts to conceal her actions are hampered by Hollenius’s insistence on sabotaging Novak’s career,” but this isn’t quite right.  Christine thinks that this is so, but as we shall see, she is catastrophically mistaken.)

Long story short, Radcliffe keeps sneaking off to see Hollenius to beg him not to tell, and Hollenius keeps saying, “What, me?  I wouldn’t do such a thing!” while flashing his best shit-eating grin.  Then he messes with Novak some more.  Finally, on the night of the big concert, Radcliffe shows up at Hollenius’s palatial brownstone and shoots him dead.  (Yeah, yeah—spoiler alert.  The DVD is obviously not concerned with keeping this little secret—check out the title screen:

Oh, and this final Rains scene also contains the best line of the film.  When Bette Davis walks in the room, Rains is sitting at his dinner table, and he says “You look positively majestic.  I’d better remain seated.”  That’s how you do an erection joke, people!)

The film ends after the concert, with Radcliffe tearily confessing all to Novak.  (Because why not?  She just killed a man to keep her secret from him, so why not immediately spill it?  Women, amiright?)  We also learn explicitly what some of us suspected all along—Hollenius was never going to spill the beans.  Spilling the beans would ruin his fun.  Radcliffe has made the crucial mistake of thinking that this love triangle was all about her[3], that Hollenius was so distraught over losing her that he would sabotage his own concerto, and that if Novak found out he would sacrifice his career.  But it was never about her at all, it was about the creative class, and how members of the creative class love power for its own sake, love manipulating people, and love being the center of attention, even negative attention, at all times.  Hollenius has been fucking with them because that’s what directors composers do.  If he didn’t have the “kept woman” stuff to use as blackmail, he would’ve just found something else.  Hollenius plays mind games for the same supposed reason that they all do (to evoke emotions that lead to better performances) and for the actual reason that they all do (because he can).  The real tragedy, the film tells us, is that Radcliffe, despite being a musician herself, never understood the masculine world of the creative class.  So not only is Radcliffe a loose woman and a compulsive liar, but she’s an idiot to boot. 

The film is categorized as a film noir, which doesn’t seem right to me.  The form may be a film noir form—I really don’t know enough about the specifics of film noir composition to say.  Deception is certainly a beautifully shot movie, with its noiry high ceilings and shadows everywhere. (Half the film seems to be Davis blowing out candles.)  But the content doesn’t seem all that film noir to me.  Davis is a femme, and she does fatale someone, but I wouldn’t call her a femme fatale.  The movie certainly tries to take itself as seriously as a film noir, which is its biggest mistake.  This film is all about overwrought musicians talking endlessly about their craft, making themselves out to be the most important people in the world.  Only Rains seemed to know that this pomposity required acting of the highest camp in order to keep it from being insufferable.

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[1] Which reminds me—someday I need to write a post about how James Bond is a film noir hero.  More specifically, how Bond retains all the affectations of a film noir hero while removing the reason for those affectations; i.e. his outsider status.  Bond is an establishment hero who co-opts the manners of a hard-boiled detective.

[2] Of course, this hint of violence must only be discussed between the two men—wouldn’t want to hurt Bette Davis’s delicate fee-fees.

[3] Radcliffe obviously never read Eve Sedgwick.