Celebrating 40 years of R.E.M.'s Murmur

Or, how one alt-rock band's debut album continues to endure after all this time.

There are a lot of stories about the kudzu weed. Clambering and smothering the plants that stand in its way, many Americans nicknamed it “the vine that ate the south”, or “mile-a-minute”. Its green tendrils creep up, up, up, twisting around telephone poles and trees, trailing into your house when you’re asleep. Some say that it steals children sleeping from their beds. A foreign creature in a foreign land, shrouded in mystery.

R.E.M.’s debut LP, Murmur, beckons listeners with a similar sense of intrigue. Not unlike the overgrown weeds that adorn its sleeve, it hums with something haunting. Something strange. The 80s were a decade defined by its over the top aesthetics, bold colours and copious amounts of hairspray. Murmur stood in stark contrast: desaturated cover art of weeds and wooden trestles, photographs of band members who looked like they didn’t want to be in front of the camera. The four portraits of Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills, and Michael Stipe almost feel like old snapshots from a bygone era. Swathed in coats and jackets, standing in front of a draped cloth, the members of R.E.M. could’ve been from another century entirely.

2023 marks 40 years since Murmur was released. R.E.M. had made their studio debut a year earlier with the release of their EP Chronic Town, but it was Murmur that would put them on the map - both in the short term, as Rolling Stone proclaimed it the best album of 1983 (over Michael Jackson’s Thriller), and in the long term, as Murmur would pave the way for countless alternative bands down the line. Many fans still even consider it R.E.M.’s finest work.

As a huge R.E.M. fan, it would bore me to tell you how the album was recorded and produced - those stories have been covered numerous times, so if you’re interested in that, I’d highly recommend either watching R.E.M. by MTV or reading J. Niimi’s excellent book on Murmur for the 33⅓ series. Rather, what intrigues me is how this record has held up over 40 years - not necessarily from a musical angle, but something broader. Yes, the music itself sounds timeless (in no doubt thanks to the production work of Mitch Easter and Don Dixon), but what makes it a staple of the alternative music canon? Why is it that almost half a century later, some fans still believe this to be the best thing the band ever made?

Murmur’s back cover

“Murmur has a real Flannery O’Connor feel to me, I don’t know why.” - Peter Buck

R.E.M. are often hailed as one of the best bands from the American South, responsible for transforming the sleepy student town of Athens, Georgia into a hub for exciting new music. Ironically, none of the members were born in the south excepting Michael Stipe, although all of them eventually moved there to go to school. Yet in spite of this, a great deal of the ethos and atmosphere that surrounds R.E.M. feels unmistakably southern, and you can hear it bleed into the music. 

The term ‘southern gothic’ gets thrown around a lot when discussing R.E.M.’s early career, and I’d argue that it’s not without reason. Although mostly associated with literature and film, the enigmatic darkness of the genre can definitely be found on Murmur. And it makes sense: Buck was a huge fan of native Georgian author Flannery O’Connor, whose works in part help to define the southern gothic genre as we know it. Being the extremely devoted R.E.M. fan that I was at 13, I myself went out and read Everything That Rises Must Converge. Since then, it’s always been my favourite story of hers, but in all of O’Connor’s works there is this marrying of the grotesque and unsettling with the pastoral landscapes of the south. 

While there might not be anything particularly grotesque about Murmur, the record does draw upon southern scenery in its packaging. The railroad trestle depicted on the back cover has become so iconic that it’s been nicknamed the ‘Murmur Trestle’ and was a popular site for fans to visit until the structure was closed permanently in 2021 due to rotting wood. On the front cover is that infamous symbol of the south, the kudzu vine, swallowing up everything in its path. There appears to be some sort of structure smothered underneath the plant, but it’s so overgrown you can’t tell what it is.

The Murmur trestle. Photo by Reynolds Rogers.

Both images, along with the portraits of the band members, feel incredibly washed out. The desaturation and sepia filters create a sense of abandonment, as if these photos and these places were left to the hands of time to ravage them. It fits in with the decrepit and decaying settings of southern gothic stories, humming with an ominous energy that at once both frightens and intrigues. In his book on Murmur for 33⅓, J. Niimi sums up the LP cover best:

“It's an utterly static image, with a gnawing subtext of movement and drama… we clearly see a haunted forest, except it’s still alive. Maybe you’re the one haunting it.”

The songs on Murmur feel like a haunted forest too, atmospheric and dark. A track like ‘Pilgrimage’ begins with Stipe’s voice echoing in your ears, followed by a low, haunting piano. It’s a sparse arrangement, full of open space and ringing notes. But then you reach the chorus, and the harmonies of Mills and Berry feel like otherworldly ghosts, as if they’ve come to occupy that space. 

Murmur’s closer, ‘West Of The Fields’, also has this darkness to it that can be felt in its almost galloping pulse; the frenetic chanting of “west of the fields, west of the fields” and the call and response of “long gone” fosters a sense of urgency. You’ve gone too deep into the forest and disturbed the ghosts. The song itself ends on an unsettling minor note, as if you have now become a part of the shadows too.

R.E.M. in the early 80s. Photo by Richard E. Aaron.

“There have been times where I have not known what [Michael] was talking about exactly, but usually I don’t bother to ask, because one way or another [his lyrics] conjure up very strong images in my mind.” - Mike Mills

What’s in a name? According to Niimi, Murmur was chosen as the title for the album because it is apparently one of the easiest words to pronounce in the English language. Yet it also feels indicative of Stipe’s trademark early vocals: mumbled, obscured and not very easy to distinguish. Prior to 1986’s Lifes Rich Pageant or even 1987’s Document, the band would often get requests from fans to provide lyrics or ask if there was somewhere they could get ahold of a lyric sheet. Even now, I’ve seen people tweeting Mike Mills and asking him to translate some Stipe garble for them.

Language is a huge theme on R.E.M.’s debut, both in terms of communication and how one chooses to communicate. While it would be foolish to try and decipher or dissect the ‘true’ meaning behind any of Stipe’s lyrics, Niimi notes that within the narratives sung on Murmur, there is barely any use of the ‘I’ pronoun. As a result, it feels less like a record about someone’s personal experiences and more like an attempt at embodying a broader feeling, capturing more abstract narratives.

Yet there is unmistakably a motif of communication that underpins Murmur. In ‘Shaking Through’, Stipe asks listeners “could it be that one small voice doesn’t count in the room?” as if ruminating upon the final lines of ‘Sitting Still’: “I can hear you / can you hear me?”. Sandwiched in between these two tracks is the Gang of Four-inspired ‘9-9’, which starts off with an almost stream of consciousness ramble smothered under loud bass and guitars. In fact, the only real discernible phrase in the whole song is “conversation fear”. 

These three consecutive tracks highlight a desire to be heard. The question of whose desire it is is probably one that cannot be solved - Stipe’s reluctance to use the ‘I’ pronoun suggests it’s something bigger than him. That being said, whilst reading Niimi’s book on Murmur, I learned about an interesting anecdote in 1982 where the band had just performed ‘9-9’ and an audience member shouted, “turn it up!” Stipe replied, “listen harder.”

Maybe that’s what Murmur is doing. It’s urging us to listen harder. It’s asking us if we’re even listening in the first place. Beyond the neon and the glitter and the decadent aesthetics of the 80s, what happens when we strip that all away? When we dim that saturation and look at the greying past, what do we see? What do we hear? For all its mystery, Murmur is also a record about going back to basics. There’s no dated synths or gated reverb, just organic rock n’ roll instrumentation and production. That’s not to say one is better than the other; rather, my point is that the former completely swamped the latter for a moment in music history. Murmur’s release in 1983 was a breath of fresh air.

But Murmur’s language motif can also be brought back to the record’s southern gothic overtones. The static images of kudzu and the railway trestle conjure up a sense of intrigue: something happened here, but we don’t know what. These places are haunted with secrets. We can find out what they are, but only if we listen. Only if we drop the needle on the record.

As R.E.M.’s debut album celebrates its 40th anniversary, I believe this is why we keep coming back to it. Intoxicated by its mysteries, we want to try and solve them. A part of us believes that if we listen hard enough, the secrets will reveal themselves, coaxed from black wax and paper. As Niimi says, maybe we’re the ones haunting that sprawling scene of kudzu on the front cover. We can never let go as long as the mystery still remains. But what if it’s the opposite - what if Murmur has been haunting us?