Next up in my R.E.M. lineup is New Adventures In Hi-Fi. This album was mostly recorded during soundchecks on 1995 the Monster tour, and is often marked as the start of their artistic and commercial decline, but some people see it as the last great R.E.M. album since it was their last one with Bill Berry and the last one produced by Scott Litt.
When I listen to New Adventures now, I like it a lot more than Monster or anything that came after it, but it's not without it's flaws. One problem is that it seems a little long (both the album and individual songs) and a little unfocused and off-the-cuff, but that can also be seen as a good thing. There are about five or six songs on the album as good as anything R.E.M. has ever done, and definitely better than the albums that came after it (two of which I still have remaining in my queue -- so much for alphabetical order!).
Before the release of New Adventures In Hi-Fi, R.E.M. signed an $80 million long-term deal with Warners that was one of the top music business screw-ups ever, according this article in Blender.
I don't buy that for numerous reasons. Even though R.E.M. were at the end of their U.S. commercial viability in 1996, they still sell well in Europe, are still a major concert draw, and are a nice long-term "prestige artist" for a major label to have. Signing R.E.M. was nowhere near as much of a screw up for WEA as signing Michael Jackson and Mariah Carey was for Sony around the same time. Those contracts were like Sony throwing money away.
WEA signing R.E.M. was kind of like the SF Giants signing Barry Zito to a lucrative long-term contract last year. Barry probably isn't going to regain his 2002 Cy Young form, just like R.E.M. albums won't sell umpteen gajillion copies like they did in the early 90s, but they're both steady performers who help the team they play for.
Barry Zito is going to start 30-25 games a year, win 12-16 of them, and finish each year an ERA around 4.00. He's not a world-beater anymore, but he's a solid major league pitcher. It's not his fault the Giants are paying him $100M to do that, and it's not R.E.M.'s fault that they got $80M to do what they do. "Don't hate the playa, hate the game" as the kids say.
1 comment:
I don't know if Warners expected R.E.M. to be U2-like in sales (then, neither was U2), but the buzz around the forthcoming CD suggests it will do fairly well, at least initially. Plus, as it turns out, signing older artists who appeal to older audiences turned out to be a lot smarter than labels would have guessed then: we old people are the only ones who still buy CDs once in a while.
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