SONGS OF THE YEAR: "Blue" by R.E.M.

Our Top 21 Albums issue comes out Dec. 22, but that doesn't come close to telling you what 2011 sounded like. To help find the devil in the details, we've asked City Paper's critics, friends and family to name some of their favorite songs - be they secret gems on terrible albums, sleeper tracks you missed, huge pop songs that need defending, or just plain good songs everybody already knows and loves. (Ignore the video, this is about the audio.)

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SONGS OF THE YEAR: “Blue” by R.E.M.

POSTED: Tuesday, December 20, 2011, 10:00 AM

Filed Under: Music Song

Our Top 21 Albums issue comes out Dec. 22, but that doesn’t come close to telling you what 2011 sounded like. To help find the devil in the details, we’ve asked City Paper’s critics, friends and family to name some of their favorite songs — be they secret gems on terrible albums, sleeper tracks you missed, huge pop songs that need defending, or just plain good songs everybody already knows and loves.

R.E.M. were always at their best as mythmakers and unravellers. With “Blue,” as the exclamation point on their last album Collapse Into Now, they stack Michael Stipe’s spoken-word mode between the haunting chords of their darkest meditative selves and the jangly resuscitation of the album’s opener “Discoverer.” Patti Smith enters, stage left, “I saw your face…” Stipe, self-effacing, self-reflexive, sends shudders with his “ha-has,” “blue, blue,” and the desire for the fable of the past to continue: “20th century collapse into now.” Mike Mills harmonizes in the raw, Peter Buck packs a final Rickenbacker wallop. The end of their finest album post-Automatic for the People and they know it. Not to scuttle in a dirge forever, the final words of their last album track have so much hope: “discoverer.” Yes, we found you and you found us. And the world of music will never be the same.

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