“Best Song on New Adventures in Hi-Fi: A Case for ‘So Fast, So Numb’”

H-h-hey guys, I got a 12th different favorite song on New Adventures in Hi-Fi, wanna hear what it is? [Response omitted for practical and profanity-related reasons].

Oh, hmm. Well, anyway, I do, and it’s you guessed it “So Fast, So Numb,” which always seems most fast and numb, luging in at the 12 spot between the spooky instrumental “Zither” and what I call the “resident Pearl Jam song” in (albeit the excellent) “Low Desert.” 

My last favorite song on this album in the days leading up to this post had been “Be Mine” (by the way I still hold that Up is a better album, hence retaining maybe some opacity as a self-righteous blogger here) and I could have sworn I’d settled on my own little token of celestial greatness and perfection there. It’s a love song the lyrics of which are penned by Michael Stipe, per general band songwriting blueprint, and he was really funny pointing out in this one interview that every line contains either the word “I” or “me,” which is pretty much true. Anyway, it’s got this grand, sweeping approach, with these incessant, lusciously rendered Peter Buck guitar riffs all throughout, governing the whole thing, toward this awe-inspiring 20-bar instrumental arena rock outro that all the while seemed like just an impossible act to follow. 

“So Fast, So Numb” had always been a solid, head-nodding tune in my mind, but had always been buried back there as sort of innocuous, the way truth be told a lot of really hypnotic music has the tendency to like Natalie Merchant’s album Tigerlily. It just wasn’t trying to be anything more than another solid arena rocker on Hi-Fi and truthfully I’d always clumped it in with what I felt was the trifecta of stylistic banality a la the straight-ahead machismo of “Wake-up Bomb” and “Bittersweet Me.” In general, I’d felt, and still generally feel, that this album were at its best when it hewed something along the lines of rhythmic eccentricity, as in the three-four masterpiece “New Test Leper,” “Leave” and its crazy, twisted and non-melodic quarter note guitar shrieks, “Departure” and its off-kilter, syncopated riff, “Be Mine” and its deliberate pace and “Electrolite” with its placid campfire majesty.

“So Fast, So Numb” was just The Scorpions with just a little more guitar texture. And then… I had a dream about it and I know this is cheesy but the dream had to do with being able to “feel” being something illogical. The basis is this, essentially: there’s a left-brain paradigm we take to living this life, which amounts to, like, every person is for his own, all’s fair in love and war, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and all that stuff. “So Fast, So Numb” is a song about what transpires when somebody’s actually crazy enough as to IMBUE this paradigm — with a need for speed in how he or she lives everyday life and maybe without an extraneous impetus for compassion or anything affective like that. 

But music is affective. “So Fast, So Numb” is affective and truthfully it had always been my favorite in the arena rock trifecta of this album. It doesn’t follow the need-for-speed logic of everyday life. Actually, as I said, I’ve always felt this album were at its best when it slows down (you’ll notice I’ve omitted “E-Bow the Letter”… I kind of have a slight bone to pick with Patti Smith and also think “Leave” is a similar number that’s superior) and you won’t believe me but I actually prefer Up (1998) to New Adventures in Hi-Fi (1996), for reasons probably along those lines but that I don’t have the energy to retrieve just right now. But the person Stipe is singing to in “So Fast, So Numb” is basically like the ideal person and that’s part of what hurts Michael Stipe — it’s not in his or her best interest in terms of everyday society to stop and really FEEL what’s going on with this person professing these feelings. In this way, you could say, artists are people who are wrong and who strive to stop being wrong by the way of creative expression. And for it to be rendered in such an apparently conventional format as the arena rock of New Adventures in Hi-Fi seems to make it all the more charming, like a singer/songwriter who just happened upon the best blues revue around as a backing band.