Album – Green (1988)
Highlight – Untitled
Reason – If your definition of “selling out”, if you have one, is making an album that lots of people like and want to buy, or when a band on an independent label signs with a big corporate, then this would be the album that caused REM to take a long pull on a purple scaly phallus and imbibe its black, manky produce.
Actually selling about the same number of copies as Document, Green is a more pop-oriented album, with the likes of Get Up, Stand & Orange Crush, but Stipe had managed to hone his lyrics and vocal performance to make some poetic statements on the way the world was going.
I first heard Green on a tape-to-tape copy (the 80’s version of illegal downloading) so always assumed the untitled track at the end was a B-side or a bonus from another album. This was pre-internet so my only recourse was to buy every single album and compilation CD trying to find out the name. Only after buying their biography did I learn the truth. Fail.
Stipe Gayness Factor – 5. Let’s not labour this point, but on their 1989 world tour Michael was flamboyant and dramatic, to say the least.
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