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:
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.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.
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.
