I thought I’d share my personal R.E.M. “Best of” list. It consists of nothing more than a list of the songs that I thought I would enjoy listening to if they came up as I played through this list on random play or if they were thrown in a “Genius” playlist on my iPhone.

While Steve and I have often found agreement in our shared love for R.E.M., our specific preferences regarded the band’s discography have seldom matched perfectly. As such, I must, without using any hyperbole whatsoever, pronounce his list completely misguided. (I mean, he labels the song “Superman” as “I Am Superman”. You should know right off the bat that this guy has no idea what he’s talking about.) A lengthy exercise in futility follows below the jump.

Steve’s list is arranged in alphabetical order by album title. I would prefer to do this in chronological order by release date, but we shall stick with Steve’s formatting for the sake of easy comparison. He ended up with 66 songs on his list. Since a precise number of songs was never the goal, I won’t try to match that total exactly, but I will aim for a list of roughly 60-70¹ songs, again for the sake of easy comparison. Finally, I should note that I essentially created my list prior to reading Steve’s post, albeit unintentionally: I also find the storage space offered by my iPhone slightly limiting and therefore have my iTunes library sorted by the simple star ratings offered by the software, with only songs rated three stars or better being automatically transferred to my iPhone. It was a simple matter to copy the R.E.M. songs which I had previously marked with three or more stars and use it as the list here, although I did make minor changes (both additions and removals) based on the simple fact that I added the star ratings on a haphazard basis and over a relatively long period of time while working with my entire music library rather than all at once while looking only at R.E.M.’s music.

Here, then, is my list:

Accelerate

1. Living Well Is the Best Revenge
2. I’m Gonna DJ

Around the Sun:
_²
Automatic for the People:

1. Drive
2. Try Not to Breathe
3. The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite
4. Everybody Hurts
5. Ignoreland
6. Man on the Moon
7. Nightswimming
8. Find the River

Chronic Town³:

1. Gardening at Night

Document:

1. Finest Worksong
2. Welcome to the Occupation
3. Exhuming McCarthy
4. Disturbance at the Heron House
5. It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”
6. The One I Love

Fables of the Reconstruction:

1. Driver 8
2. Can’t Get There from Here

Green:

1. Pop Song 89
2. Stand
3. World Leader Pretend
4. Orange Crush
5. Turn You Inside-Out

Lifes Rich Pageant:

1. Begin the Begin
2. These Days
3. Fall on Me
4. I Believe
5. Swan Swan H
6. Superman

Monster:

1. What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?
2. Strange Currencies
3. Bang and Blame
4. Let Me In

Murmur:

1. Radio Free Europe
2. Pilgrimage
3. Talk About the Passion
4. Perfect Circle
5. We Walk

New Adventures in Hi-Fi:

1. How the West Was Won and Where It Got Us
2. E-Bow the Letter
3. Bittersweet Me
4. Electrolite

Out of Time:

1. Losing My Religion
2. Shiny Happy People
3. Country Feedback

Reckoning:

1. So. Central Rain (I’m Sorry)
2. Pretty Persuasion
3. Time After Time (AnnElise)
4. (Don’t Go Back To) Rockville
5. Little America

Reveal:

1. All the Way to Reno (You’re Gonna Be a Star)
2. She Just Wants to Be
3. Imitation of Life
4. I’ll Take the Rain

Up:

1. Lotus
2. Hope
3. At My Most Beautiful
4. Walk Unafraid

The obvious difference between my list and Steve’s should be in our respective preferences for the band’s early and late work. While I may like more songs from Automatic for the People than from Out of Time and Steve may like more songs from Monster than from Document, our lists for those albums are pretty close to one another. However, whereas I listed five songs apiece from R.E.M.’s first two albums, Murmur and Reckoning, Steve listed a total of only four from those two works. Meanwhile, the two most recent albums have produced only two songs I felt were worth inclusion⁴, while Steve has listed six from Around the Sun and Accelerate.

You could chalk all of this up to aesthetic preference, but I prefer to state that I am unequivocally right and Steve is unequivocally wrong when it comes to the relative merit of R.E.M.’s early work, and especially of Murmur. Murmur is, quite simply, one of the best rock albums of the 1980’s (and I’m speaking as someone who loves both the post-punk of the early 80’s and the proto-alternative rock that grew out of it during that decade). Moreover, it’s probably one of the best debut albums ever released by a band that went on to a long and successful career. Steve, as an R.E.M. fan, owes it to himself to give the album another listen.

I think this is my favorite short anecdote:

When Trig was born, Palin wrote an e-mail letter to friends and relatives, describing the belated news of her pregnancy and detailing Trig’s condition; she wrote the e-mail not in her own name but in God’s, and signed it “Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father.”

Sarah Palin writes emails and, apparently without irony, signs them in God’s name! The article is filled with revelations like that one, as well as the regrets of McCain staffers who can no longer believe they were working to put this woman the proverbial heartbeat away from the presidency. I can’t wait for the 2012 Republican primaries.

1) Mark Sanford

People who would theoretically be justified in being a bit annoyed to have been totally and inescapably overshadowed:

1) Farrah Fawcett

News cycles are weird.

Yeah, Dana Milbank should probably STFU now…

Go read it.

He’s doing fairly well; he’s figured out how to get around his cage relatively smoothly on one leg (he uses his beak to pull himself up a bit more than normal and uses his wings for balance), and the cast should be able to come off this weekend. And, yes, the whole thing is a bit amusing to watch when I can forget how painful the initial injury must have been.