“Automatic for the People” at thirty-two
I’m listening to R.E.M.’s “Automatic for the People”, released in 1992, and it never gets old.
I remember the fall of 1992 vividly. I was living in South Jersey, working two unfulfilling retail jobs, and didn’t know what was next for me. The end of the summer season that year, like all the others after 1976, meant less people on the beach and boardwalk but no real decline in the tourist trade, thanks to the 24/7/365 draw of the casinos.
Twenty years old. Not yet old enough to drink or gamble, but somehow old enough to be world-weary and cynical. I spent a lot of my breaks looking out over the ocean from the rear of the mall that was supposed to look like a cruise ship. Stephen Dunn’s “Atlantic City” sums it up:
“To stare at a city half in ruin,
half in glitter,
is to know why the beach
and its beautiful desolation in winter
is a fearsome place
if one risks being calm and clear.”
It’s this complexity of feeling that, for me, was captured beautifully by “Automatic for the People”. Taken separately, each song tells its own story; together, they become a perfect snapshot of a life: “Drive” and its clarion call to youth. “Everybody Hurts”, as overplayed as it was, still speaks to the existential dread and pain we’ve all felt. “Find the River”, where Michael Stipe’s lyrics exquisitely detail the inevitability of death and the renewal of life.
Fifty-two-year-old me loves this album just as much as twenty-year-old me did, if in new and different ways. Some days I still feel directionless, but listening to “Automatic” reminds me that whatever comes my way, I should loosen my grip on the wheel and just enjoy the journey.
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