No trip to Whole Foods is complete without a playlist filled with R.E.M. songs. Georgia’s jangle-pop troubadours have entertained the high-end grocer’s customer base of hippy accountants, animal lawyers, and music listicle writers for over forty years. While the band no longer tours, you can still get the full R.E.M. concert experience by listening to the following tracks on your next Whole Foods run.
“Begin The Begin”
Start your excursion to America’s favorite independent grocery store killer with an unusually hard-rocking track from the normally low-key group. Stipe and the boys kick off 1986’s “Life’s Rich Pageant” with the distorted guitar-driven track, which feels like a last-ditch attempt to remind people that Peter Buck can play guitar. The song’s vocals are a rallying cry for societal change, which is especially relevant as you prepare to buy $9 honey mustard.
“Radio Free Europe”
R.E.M.’s first big hit conjures the same naive youthful energy that led us to believe a chain of high-end grocery stores was a good idea. In a crazy coincidence, both Whole Foods and R.E.M. were both founded in 1980. Finally, two of Humanity’s age-old questions; “What if food were more expensive” and “What if The Smiths but less British.” Who knew that the answers to both would cost the human race its dignity?
“So. Central Rain”
This 1984 track is made up mostly of Michael Stipe yelling “I’m sorry” and screaming several times. Through some Nostradamus-level intuition, R.E.M. were able to write a song about how it feels to wander a Whole Foods for too long. Hope fades quickly with each passing second, followed closely by your sanity as your brain turns to mulch as you fruitlessly search for that keto ice cream brand that your sister likes.
“Man On The Moon”
Who else saw the ‘Jim and Andy” documentary on Netflix? What a fucking waste of 90 minutes. The people who enjoy watching Jim Carrey justify being mean to Grips are the same people who see the Whole Foods deli as a legitimate place to go out for lunch. If that nightmarish combination sounds like a great way to spend your mental health day, then you’ll like “Man On The Moon” because it’s the only good thing to come out of the movie it was written for.
“Orange Crush”
Whole Foods has a weird in-house brand of orange soda that it sells instead of Orange Crush. The design on the package insinuates that the soda is healthy in some way but like, it’s soda? What was the marketing team’s angle here? Healthy soda? Fuck out of here. Fucking scum. Anyway, R.E.M. has a song called “Orange Crush” you can listen to while buying the fake-ass Whole Foods orange soda.
“Maps And Legends”
It’s easy to get lost in Whole Foods, even without whippits. “Maps and Legends,” an underrated track off of 1985’s “Fables Of The Reconstruction,” is all about ill-fated expeditions through uncharted lands, making it perfect background noise for a desperate search for the Whole Foods bathroom. Is there even a bathroom in the store? Only paying customers get to find out. For a fun added challenge, bring your child to the store so you can immediately lose them because you needed a price check on guacamole.
“Losing My Religion”
Just like the old testament God, Whole Foods is an all-knowing, all-powerful entity with unclear motivations. Did you know that you can buy organic clothes at some locations? There are probably people in your neighborhood wearing Whole Foods-branded yoga pants and you are completely oblivious. One shudders to think what Whole Foods wants to accomplish by selling us clothes. As Stipe says himself, “Oh no, I’ve said too much!”
“E-Bow The Letter”
Thom Yorke is on this track, which deftly blends his and Stipe’s unique voices for genuinely great effect. Speaking of collaborations, did you know that Whole Foods is owned by Amazon? That’s right, every overpriced melon you buy from Whole Foods directly fills the bulging pockets of one Jeffery “Billion Dollar Bitch Baby” Bezos. Those eggs might be free-range, but the Amazon workers who packed them definitely aren’t motherfucker!
“Shiny Happy People”
Ever noticed that every Whole Foods looks like the fake town that North Korea puts up whenever a CNN reporter visits? Deceptively naturalistic colors, a manufactured sense of calm, and an ever-present oppressive vibe. “Shiny Happy People” carries a similar dystopian subtext, and there’s still some debate over whether the song is satire or not. It’s a thought to ponder as you pretend that you ‘totally don’t mind’ buying the Whole Foods brand knockoff Oreos instead of the real thing.
“It’s The End Of The World As We Know It”
Whole Foods is proof that the seventh seal has broken and the human race is doomed. There’s no justifying $10 strawberries, we are going straight to hell. But that doesn’t mean the apocalypse can’t be fun! R.E.M.’s end-of-the-world anthem encourages listeners to lighten up and enjoy humanity’s final days. Having a spoon and jar of chocolate Sunbutter close by is entirely optional.
When I sat down to start these rankings I was going to say something about how “isn’t it a shame that the Clash had to ruin an otherwise phenomenal discography with this absolute bloated fart of an album,” but I’m going to revise my perspective here. Not of the record itself, which is entirely awful, but that I am glad they released one collection of work that proves they are fallible. Otherwise, The Clash may have proved to be entirely too powerful.
The Clash were never afraid to experiment with their sound, which is good – but judging by the length of this record, they also never employed a producer who said to them “hey, guys, maybe let’s trim the fat a bit here.” The inflated track list is the main detractor here as otherwise great songs simply get shuffled away and lost in the mix, and it’s likely why this album never achieved a much higher status than being a second favorite of super hardcore fans. “Sandinista!” is the vinyl embodiment of the old axiom “too much of a good thing.”
C’mon, you all know this one. Especially you, M.I.A and every step-dad who thinks they can make their new wife’s kids think they’re cool by playing “Should I Stay or Should I Go” mostly right on an acoustic guitar. Despite being, arguably, the band’s most commercial effort, “Combat Rock” doesn’t try too hard to sound grown up and follows up on the reggae and dub experimentation of previous albums effortlessly. I also just want to say that, as much as I love this album, “Rock the Casbah” is an exceedingly corny song when you read into it. Yeah, I know, fight me about it later, nothing matters.
Proof that The Clash has always been way the fuck ahead of the rest of their punk scene peers, the band’s second album sounds more like Bruce Springsteen wrote a ska album than pissed-off U.K. punks comically sneering for the British tabloids. Fortunately, the band figured out a way to develop that did not involve firing the only members of your band who could actually play like some other (*cough* Sex Pistols), and while “Give ‘Em Enough Rope” is often overlooked (being chronologically sandwiched between two of the greatest punk records ever made and all) it’s well worth going back to see how it all got built.
Here it is – the classic – the start of it all. The most impressive part of this record is that it was able to become so completely influential for an entire musical movement despite not being able to understand one single fucking lyric off of the entire goddamn record. It sounds like they tried to transcribe Joe Strummer using semaphores. But, barrelling through one blistering track after another while still dropping in needling hints of the reggae influence the band would later flog beyond death like a heap of pale horses, “The Clash” will always remain an iconic landmark in U.K. punk.
If you meet a punk who claims they never had this poster taped up on their wall in middle school, immediately check to see if they’re wearing a wire because they’re probably a cop. It’s not exactly a rule, more just happenstance that if you grew up in the punk scene then this was your favorite album at one time or another. I used to listen to the copy I’d burned from the library every day after school, chain-smoking Salem cigarettes in my room until my parents got home from work. And I’m willing to bet a lot of people have some augmented version of that same story attached to this record. There aren’t a lot of universal truths in this world, but one of the few I can confidently affirm is that this album kicks ass.
