10 Things (I Think) I Think About the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)

Untested Hypothesis #10: Michael Stipe = Poet(s) + Prophet(s)

Factoid: Again, I’m a poet. So I appreciate the power of poetry. (Prophecy is above my pay grade, for the most part.)

I also believe poetry does more than we think it does. Here again I (re)turn to R.E.M. to illustrate the point.

For example, their 1994 song “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” is a growling, jangly-guitared thing that makes almost no sense. The lore behind the song suggests a link to newscaster Dan Rather, who was beaten by attackers outside his Manhattan apartment in 1986.⁴⁶ One of the attackers bizarrely asked Rather, prior to beating him, “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?” Yet Stipe is on record as saying the song is not about Rather.⁴⁷ It’s about generational disconnects. “I never understood the frequency, uh-huh.” What? Cool.

Then there’s what the band’s lead guitarist, Peter Buck, wrote about another of their iconic songs, “Orange Crush”:

I must have played this song onstage over three hundred times, and I still don’t know what the fuck it’s about. The funny thing is, every time I play it, it means something different to me, and I find myself moved emotionally. Noel Coward made some remark about the potency of cheap music, and while I wouldn’t describe this song as cheap in any way, sometimes great songwriting isn’t the point. A couple of chords, a good melody, and some words can mean more than a seven hundred-page novel. Not a good seven hundred page novel mind you, but more than say, a long Jacqueline Susan novel. Well, alright, I really like Valley of the Dolls. I guess I’ve found a good way not to talk about song that means something dark and mysterious to me.⁴⁸

Earlier this semester I wrote about entropic bursts. I was engaging that term via the scholarship of Brian O’Connor (et al),⁴⁹ who uses it as a metaphor for inserting just the right amount of uncertainty/ambiguity (entropy) into a communication, so as to heighten the effectiveness of that communication. (I have since learned that it also refers to a literal type of explosion.⁵⁰ Which is cool. I didn’t know that. And I need to think more about it. Feels important. Don’t know why yet.) The “entropic burst,” in O’Connor’s use of the term, invites a seeker’s mindset to the communication party. In other words: a little nonsense goes a long way.

Poets — not to mention prophets in various religious traditions (not to mention in popular music) — invariably agree.

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