R.E.M., ‘Everybody Hurts’: Songs of faith and doubt

R.E.M.
‘Everyone Hurts’

Highest UK Top 40 position:
#7 on May 9, 1993

Folks, I have been thinking about God recently, ever since I saw a sign.

Not a burning bush, no. I saw an actual cardboard sign attached to a lamppost, advertising a Dawn Mass on Easter Sunday at the local graveyard. I caught a glimpse of this sign as I was driving past, and I thought to myself, “…that actually sounds quite nice.”

Which was a surprise. I grew up Catholic, like most Irish people, but I turned into an aggressive atheist during my mid-teens, and the abuse scandals of the 90s only made me more anti-religion.

My atheism has softened over the years, and I’d now identify as more of an agnostic. Nevertheless, I’ve never felt the urge to rediscover religion. I’ve never doubted my doubt.

And yet here I am, looking at this sign for a dawn mass during the wettest spring in recorded history and thinking, “sounds great!”

Where did that thought come from?

When your day is long

Last week’s issue on David Bowie talked about feeling lost at 15. Judging by the comments, many of us had a similar experience at that age—and music helped us survive.

‘Everybody Hurts’ was written specifically for people like us, for teenagers who feel lost and hopeless. In the sleeve notes for R.E.M.’s Best Of, Peter Buck said:

This song doesn’t really belong to us anymore. It belongs to anyone who’s ever gotten any solace from it. The reason the lyrics are so atypically straightforward is because it was aimed at teenagers. I’ve never watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but the idea that high school is a portal to hell seems pretty realistic to me. It’s hard for everyone.

And by all accounts, the song seems to have worked. The Samaritans used it in an ad campaign aimed at young men, and Michael Stipe says that many people have thanked him personally and credited ‘Everybody Hurts’ with saving their lives.

Why does this song give some people solace? I think it’s because the song gives a sense of community, a feeling of togetherness. Everybody hurts, everybody cries. You can take comfort in your friends. And that line where Stipe’s vocal is at its most precise, most unambiguous:

“You’re not alone.”

Loneliness and isolation are at the root of most problems—especially in teenagers, who crave community. A song like ‘Everybody Hurts’ helps people feel like they’re connected.

But this raises a bunch of other questions. Why do people—especially teenagers—feel so isolated and disconnected?

The night is yours alone

As a parent to a teenager, I’m heavily invested in solving some of the mysteries of adolescence. This often means thinking back on my own teenage years and trying to remember how it felt back then, during that strange time when you were so big but also so small.

And there’s a lot to unpack, but I think that one universal teenage trauma is the moment you lose faith in your authority figures. You learn that your parents aren’t so reliable, that your teachers aren’t so smart, that the government doesn’t care about you, that the cops don’t come when you call.

It’s scary. You start to feel more alone than ever.

Losing my religion (hey, that would make a great song title, someone should tell R.E.M.) was possibly one of those traumas in my adolescence.

Not that I was super-religious or anything. The typical Irish religious education is: getting dragged to Mass every Sunday; listening to boring Bible stories in school; getting dressed up for ceremonies like your First Communion and Confirmation, which are great because you get money and cake. Apart from that, it’s a lifetime of weddings and funerals and never really thinking about God.

The only genuinely religious feeling I ever recall having happened when I was seven. It was Good Friday, and I remember being in my garden, doing normal kid stuff, just poking at a worm with a stick or something equally stupid.

The sky above me suddenly turned black with rainclouds, and I thought to myself, “It’s around 3 o’clock, and that’s when the crucifixion happened.” Suddenly, all of it seemed very real, as if it were happening right now, as if it were happening to someone I knew.

I stopped poking at this worm, and the worm stopped moving, and I was overwhelmed with a sense of grief for this poor guy in so much pain, with his mother weeping at his feet. And I also felt this uncanny sense of connection, like millions of other people were feeling this same grief, and we were all connected.

The feeling only lasted for a second, and then I ran inside to avoid the rain.

Apart from that, religion was just a mundane fact of life. I believed in God the same way I believed in the sun and gravity, or the inevitability of sudden black rainclouds in an Irish sky. I sacrificed my Sunday mornings to sit in uncomfortable churches, surrounded by strangers who would also rather be in bed, and we all mumbled the same prayers, and we all shared the same vague feeling that God was listening.

Until I turned 14 and started wondering… what if he’s not?

Everybody cries

So began my journey into angry teenage atheism. I told people I was inspired by Nietzche, but the book that actually turned me to godlessness was Terry Pratchet’’s Good Omens. I largely boycotted church, and I dismissed all religious people as gullible rubes.

And then, one year in my mid-20s, I went to a midweek mass with my mother. It was the anniversary of my father’s death, and his name was one of several that would be mentioned during the ceremony.

Catholic mass on Tuesday morning attracts a real rabble. You get the elderly, the confused, the people with nothing better to do, the people just trying to stay warm, and the foreigners who pray with an intensity that lackadaisical Irish people find a little embarrassing.

It was a tiny group, a few dozen people scattered in ones and twos around a church built for 500. The priest droned through his readings, and I spent most of the time looking at the 1960s architecture and wondering if there was asbestos in the ceiling.

When my father’s name was mentioned, my mother squeezed my hand and tried to stifle a sob. I could see other people shivering with private grief when they heard the names of their loved ones. And there was a sense that we were all together, united not by God but by grief, and our common need to share that grief with others. Our need for community.

This is why people sit in a church on Tuesday morning. Just to be with people.

At that moment, I was struck by a realisation that still haunts me today.

We don’t have places like this in the secular world. And it’s killing us.

You’re not alone

Covid has woken people up to the that our world is in the grip of a loneliness epidemic. People had been sounding the alarm for decades. Back in 2002, the author (and dogged atheist) Kurt Vonnegut wrote:

“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”

Community is a vanishingly elusive concept in modern life. We’re slowly losing the spaces where communities naturally flourish: town squares, big family gatherings and, yes, in churches.

That’s why a dawn mass in a graveyard sounded appealing. It would be nice to share that feeling with people.

And that’s why so many people say, “music saved me.” Music is one of the few secular things that can give us that same sense of community (that’s also why music is such a big part of religion). Live gigs are places where you can be emotional in a room full of strangers. I was at Henry Rollins show recently that honestly felt like a religious event, if not a cult indoctrination.

Even if you’re listening to music alone at home, that feeling of community can still come through a record. A moving song makes you feel connected to the singer, and connected to the thousands of people who are also listening to this song, and feeling emotions similar to your own. You’re all joined together by something supernatural.

Kurt Vonnegut once addressed the question of whether it’s worth the trouble of making art. In his reply, he wrote

“Still and all, why bother? Here’s my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.”

That is the message of ‘Everybody Hurts’, stated plainly so teenagers don’t miss it. In a way, it’s the message of all art.

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