Note: Since R.E.M. have not authorized publication rights to their lyrics to practically the only legal lyrics site on the www (the one that provides dividends to songwriters/publishers), you are advised to google the lyrics yourself, which will provide you with the ready conclusion that whatever entity enforced this hasn't really bothered with the illegally operating ones. However, there is enough of a chill that I have not provided you with the fan site link that has impeccably hosted the whole R.E.M. catalogue (find it yerself if you so desire). In short, I have left the dud links to highlight the issue as an indication as to why the links as pertain to R.E.M. don't exist. Incidentally, that means this page as exists is also illegal.
You might also want to consider that with the legal 'progression' of the TPP et al, not only were such hosts already actively illegal, but this may well prove enforceable in the not so distant future. (Don't worry, your porn will always be safe, -your searches archived for all of posterity. Web censure doesn't apply to this, b****es. All hail Google Play! Dontcha love the selective enforcement of the market, the commodification of information and women's brutalized bodies.)
“Hope” managed to capture so much, describing what was a suicide/car crash elsewhere as a botched operation; one where the alligators that threatened had indeed been trussed up; the threats in her dreams, circumstance and foresight incapacitated. It captured her belief in the transcendent “forever” potential of the universal consciousness, being beyond the bounds of what was acceptable as connections that could be formed by mere brain chemistry, captured by the sense of, “you hope that we are with you, you hope you’re recognized, you want to go forever, you see it in my eyes”. She had of course. She’d recognized him in how he’d defined her. “You lock into a pattern, and you know that it’s the last ditch” connected to,
you want to trust religion
and you know its allegory
but the people who are followers
have written their own story.
so you look up to the heavens
and you hope that it's a spaceship
and it's something from your childhood
you're thinking don't be frightened
you want to climb the ladder
you want to see forever
you want to go out friday
and you want to go forever.
In the context of the feedback loop, she’d been written into a new revelatory age she could see in her own mind, that of revealing the feminine aspect of the triune Christian God. Here and mind-blowingly so, just after she’d re-discovered her own personal formula, one that had been written and juxtaposed outside of herself (how she’d felt trapped by the whole sun/moon conjunction someone else (Bono) had written/initiated and what her father had conceived of himself), here Stipe described the escape/path as arising out of something from her childhood, which had just happened when Cave had unconsciously patched into her child myth, making her realize where she existed was a product of her own self-conception. The song also described her in terms of her constant night life; the pull between the two poles of the spiritual (“you want to go forever”) juxtaposed with the carnal (“you want to go out Friday”). The next couplet was of the most import: “and you want bridge the schism, a built-in mechanism to protect you”. This was utterly astonishing to her because it took on something she had always embraced from the opposite approach; she had always been perilously open with her father, and she had done everything in her power to prevent a potential schism with him, right down to her own internal suicide. She had always tried to bridge the schism, and it was a new angle entirely to hear someone tell her the schism was built in so that her father couldn’t perceive her, in order to protect her. It made her recalibrate. And that was another thing, she felt she could embrace “them” now, and listen. They weren’t coming from the quarter she perceived as rebellion any longer; the redemption had taken place on both sides of the equation, transforming their standpoint as well as hers; now she was absorbing.
and you're looking for salvation
and you're looking for deliverance
you're looking like an idiot
and you no longer care.
The real world home environment was definitely casting arched eyebrows her direction by this point, their brows furrowed with disapproval. The mentality would whip itself into a veritable shit storm frenzy by the following Spring.
“You’re in the Air” captured the reciprocity of mutual recognition happening in a context that was intangible, Stipe describing someone who was “in the air”, -“you’re everywhere”, that he could breathe in. It well captured the existential paradox of the fall with, “I landed on my feet by crawling”. “Walk Unafraid” articulated the straight and narrow as being confined by the definitions of others in the aura of their self-righteous definition of holiness (the reference of being a “little lamb” subtly inferring a Christian parable context, as did the narrow path, implying this judgmental attitude arose in a Christian mentality), a mentality to blame for imposing strictures in order to make one stumble. The song describes this as a dilemma of Stipe’s he transcends with dignity, one where he’d sooner stumble and be uplifted and supported by those surrounding him, but it was one that also managed to reflect on her by the inclusion of just the one opening couplet:
as the sun comes up, as the moon goes down
these heavy notions creep around
In her frame of reference this was extremely loaded, as the “sun” (her father) had vanquished “the moon” (herself) in a climate of holy, infallible and irrevocable judgment. Her father was the very definition of “heavy”.
say "keep within the boundaries if you want to play."
say "contradiction only makes it harder."
Having being reawakened in the redemptive context, this was the very threshold she found herself at, for Cave’s condemnation of her father combined with the transcendence of the redemption happening to him had had the effect allowing her to accept and identify evil; for the first time her boundaries were no longer shattered, she was no longer continually open and vulnerable to the innumerable seductions of others; she was capable of defining boundaries. She was no longer frozen in the perpetual question of what “exceptions” God might permit or what redefinition They might have sought in putting her in such a deviant position. She knew quite exactly just how extremely hard existing in contradiction was (thanks to the assault of the innumerable variables it inflicted); it was a situation she’d wish upon no one; that gave her the impetus to define boundaries. She found herself at a new beginning of building from the ground up. The closure was eloquent in its transcendence of obstacles accepted and not resisted, in the interest of finding mutual spiritual recognition.
This was followed by “Why Not Smile”, which for her described surviving a fall that would have invariably killed anyone else (“the concrete broke your fall”), and appealing to know the truth of it, along with elucidating the deep sadness her isolation and the severance had caused her, asking her to smile again.
To her “Diminished” was sung in the context of one of the condemnatory voices in the universal consciousness discovering that how they’d reacted might have been a harsh indictment, i.e., as Bono might have apologized indirectly for how deeply cauterizing his castigation had been with “Gone” and the bulk of PoP, so Stipe might have recognized a personal reckoning for the likes of “Bittersweet Me” and a number of songs in that vein. In a perverted inverse sense these had echoed (quite inadvertently) the condemnatory tone in which her father had judged her, Bono’s implacably so. To her mind the feminine “justice” described in the song might have stood in for the Holy Spirit, certainly justice from the feminine side, as opposed to the masculine OT/Father/Judgment type side. This was especially notable in the sense that Stipe’s appeal for personal vindication emphatically rested on the question of, “does she know I sing”, i.e., does she know I express Her common inspiration in the music? -Iterated alongside the bedrock of Christian ideals. It is of note that his second sense of vindication lay in whom he loved.
“Parakeet” was an image capture analogy of a bird suffering because it had been wounded and attacked, near death as it could barely breathe. This shifted seamlessly into the otherworldly consciousness of the universal feedback loop with an extraordinary middle verse, which followed an appeal to the bird to release itself by flying out the window into the aspirations of her own dreams.
the sunspot flares of the early
nineties light up your wings.
and scan the shortwave radio
it's tracking outer rings.
Again there was the implication she should leave, which had happened at the crux when she’d expressed her intention to do so, followed by an elegant poetic manifest of how the radio had become a reflection of her soul-mind, capturing the time this had flared across the lyrical spectrum and achieved radio dominance. The fact that she could barely breathe was a literal physical fact by the time she heard the song, as throughout this season and well into the spring she would recurrently come down with something so severe she speculated it must be a sinus infection, her first, which led her to express, “it’s like my body is telling my soul that it cannot breathe”, and significantly she found the infection would re-flare right after her father subjected her to one of his extreme personal attacks, which were meant to stop her from entertaining departure (this happened three times in succession). It was also of note that the Parakeet’s sense of solace and healing was contextualized with “warm Pacific breezes”, since Stipe’s origin had nothing to do with the West Coast, but hers certainly did, right down to conception.
“Falls to Climb” captured the essence of the very principle she had embraced in putting herself under and disappearing in the context of the universal consciousness by embracing her father’s personal condemnation, accepting full blame completely in the moment so it wouldn’t have the potential capacity to affect anyone else. In short she felt embraced in deep common identity by one who was truly with her in spirit.