Automatic For the People.
"Automatic For The People" is the motto of Weaver D's Delicious Fine Foods in Athens GA. It's also the title of R.E.M.'s eighth album which lots of fans (including this one) rate as one of their best. Weaver D's mission statement is "to provide delicious fine foods at an optimally set price that is pleasing to both the customer and us". R.E.M. definitely lived up to D's motto on this album.
Or to continue with the R.E.M. food, if Around The Sun is like mashed turnips, Automatic For the People is Southern comfort food. It's a song cycle about life and death and the passage of time (I cribbed that from Matthew Perpetua's essay on stereogum's AFTP tribute Drive XV) where each track explores a separate theme. Comfort food for the soul.
The best food equivalent for Automatic For The People is southern fried chicken. Maybe mock fried chicken made with "tofu and gluten", in honor of that Simpsons Thanksgiving episode where R.E.M. played in Homer's garage. This famous 1984 photograph by Laura Levine of the members of R.E.M. eating at another Athens eatery (Walter's Bar-BQ) shows that they were not always vegetarians. This picture hangs on the wall at the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame cafeteria and shows them all eating barbecue. Maybe it's just "tofu and gluten" smothered in barbecue sauce.
There was an episode of Beverly Hills 90210 in the early 90s where the characters all went to an "R.E.M. concert" as part of the plot. The only problem was that this was during the period when R.E.M. weren't playing live. I always mark that episode as the symbolic "jumping of the shark" for 90210. Plus Luke Perry and Jason Priestly playing high school students. "I'm late for homeroom." You're like ten years late for homeroom, dude!
Since most of the songs on AFTP were focused on life and mortality and R.E.M. didn't tour behind the album, this fueled a lot of speculation (whatever "internet rumors" were called before Al Gore invented the internet) that Michael Stipe was not in good health. Stipe wasn't doing a lot of promotion for the album, and hadn't yet "come out", but his orientation wasn't a huge secret to anyone who followed the band. In late 1992, the lead singer for the Manic Street Preachers said he hoped Michael Stipe "would go the way of Freddie Mercury" which I don't think meant bravely coming out to confront the horrors of AIDS. This was neither the first or last time that a British pop star made an idiotic statement to get his name in the papers.
1 comment:
Thanks for, among other things, supporting my suspicion, based on what I've heard and read, that I'm not particularly interested in the Manic Street Preachers.
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