Ms. Teschmacher, she got her own place.

Not just a fairy tale character- Beauty and the Beast.  Obvious, but effective, nonetheless.  

Not just a fairy tale character- Beauty and the Beast.  Obvious, but effective, nonetheless.  

Got to disagree with you… that had potential for cheese, no doubt.   Ridiculous as it is, the lyrics about the life for dreams and the life for reality I thought did the trick.  

Got to disagree with you… that had potential for cheese, no doubt.   Ridiculous as it is, the lyrics about the life for dreams and the life for reality I thought did the trick.  

Thanks for a great series.  I saw the same Milwaukee show you referenced earlier, (and, Steven, I think we were writing for rival papers in Madison around the same time in the 90s), so you hit some REM- nerves.  Certainly cost me some productivity time at work, that's for damn sure… but this series was good therapy…

Thanks for a great series.  I saw the same Milwaukee show you referenced earlier, (and, Steven, I think we were writing for rival papers in Madison around the same time in the 90s), so you hit some REM- nerves.  Certainly cost me some productivity time at work, that's for damn sure… but this series was good therapy…

Only in back of  the middle school.

2 1/2 hour, "Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen"-styled finale, please.

Yep… I think it did work tremendously for Up.  I guess I just wonder if they went back to the well twice and came up with diminishing returns each time… that's not entirely fair either, cause I think Reveal has a laid back charm and a certain monotony that works for it.

Kind of hoping installment 5 or 6 covers those two.  Collapse Into Now just keeps getting better.  

I always that this stretch of albums was overanalyzed, and thought the answer was simpler than all of this:   I know REM had a good working relationship with McCarthy, and never wanted to sacrifice him over it, but the production was the problem.  Over the course of the three albums, with the same producer, there…

Man, I couldn't agree more.   Take the Bowie-Young-Reed list, and expound on the percentage of their albums that landed without a splash, and really suck, and they didn't take half the shit for it that R.E.M. did for having one universally reviled album, and two that landed lukewarm and have gathered steam since…

In that they're both pretty convenient to hide behind.

Blackface on 30 Rock:  B+!
Brownface on Ashton Kutcher:  Racist potato chip controversy.

Paint A Vulgar Picture.  Reissue, repackage.

Man, I hate to give this show too much credit, but any chance the Armisen/ Fallon thing was a joke on Fallon/ another nod to live television and Fallon's tendency to break during SNL?

Their 2008 tour was their farewell tour, they just didn't announce it as such… the picked such rarefied gems for those shows, it's hard to see how it wasn't.

It's hard not to conflate them, especially at the time.  It's kind of lost twenty years later, but I have a hard time understating how influential both Zooropa and the REM were at the time…  I'd also throw in that the U2 parallels between the specific tours Green/ Joshua Tree and Zooropa/ Monster are impossible to…

So, what exactly prevents the Rock and Roll HoF from turning around and saying, 'alright, cool, you're out' and putting someone else in?  Are the rules for this game ironclad and stuff?