REM song

Darned if I know. REM picked random letters of the alphabet for their name. Maybe the randomly picked a movie title for their song. LOL

Seriously the lyrics describe something as being "Hollywood" and one of the lines goes "no one can see you cry. A lot of people find the ending of "Imitation of Life" as sad and it is certainly a high concept Hollywood movie. Maybe the song is about the writers feeling while watching the movie.

The video doesn't help much. It's some dude catching on fire and jumping into the pool, some girl telling off her mother and other things over and over. There is a scene at the end with a Asian girl looking down at a cake with a whale on the top but that is probably an off topic protest about Japanese whaling. At Least that is what everyone says it is.

In 1969 Diana Ross and the Supremes did "I'm Livin' in Shame"; inspired by "Imitation of Life". It was about an inner city women who distances herself from her impoverished background by distancing herself from her mother. The connection between the song and the movie was much more obvious then the REM take on the subject.

TAG LINE: True genius is a beautiful thing, but ignorance is ugly to the bone.