What in the World? – Can't Get There From Here and the Strange World of 1985
June 1985.
The world was getting smaller.
Television was making everything immediate. MTV was turning musicians into visual icons. Compact discs and videocassettes were changing how we consumed entertainment. The Cold War was still very much alive, but something was beginning to shift in Moscow.
And somewhere between the optimism of Live Aid, the hysteria surrounding New Coke, and the increasingly polished world of 1980s pop culture, four musicians from Athens, Georgia released a song that sounded like it had wandered in from somewhere else entirely.
Can't Get There From Here.
It was R.E.M. being decidedly un-R.E.M.
And perhaps that was exactly the point.
Welcome to 1985
If you wanted to understand the mood of 1985, you could hardly have picked a stranger year.
The Cold War was still casting a shadow over everything. But in March, Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union, beginning a period of change that would eventually transform the relationship between East and West.
At the same time, the West was becoming increasingly obsessed with technology, entertainment and consumer culture.
The future was arriving—and it was being advertised to us.
Television screens were everywhere. MTV had turned music videos into a cultural force. Videocassette recorders were bringing movies into people's living rooms. Compact discs promised perfect digital sound.
The world was becoming faster, louder and increasingly difficult to escape.
And then Coca-Cola changed its recipe.
The Great New Coke Disaster
In April 1985, Coca-Cola did something almost unthinkable.
It changed its famous formula.
After 99 years, the company replaced its original Coke with something called New Coke.
The reaction was extraordinary.
People complained. They stockpiled the original. Some staged protests. The backlash became so intense that Coca-Cola eventually surrendered and brought the original formula back as Coca-Cola Classic less than three months later.
It was more than a corporate embarrassment.
It was a sign of something happening in Western culture.
Companies were becoming increasingly sophisticated at selling us the future, but consumers weren't necessarily asking for it.
Sometimes they wanted the familiar thing they'd always loved.
Meanwhile, the World Was Watching
Then came July 13.
Live Aid.
Two enormous concerts, one in London's Wembley Stadium and the other at Philadelphia's JFK Stadium, were broadcast around the world in an unprecedented global television event.
An estimated 1.9 billion people across roughly 150 countries watched as some of the biggest names in music performed to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia.
For a few extraordinary hours, music became a genuinely global language.
The event captured the optimism of the decade—but also its obsession with spectacle.
Everything was getting bigger.
Bigger concerts.
Bigger television audiences.
Bigger stars.
Bigger media events.
And somewhere underneath all that noise, R.E.M. were making something wonderfully strange.
Enter R.E.M.
By 1985, R.E.M. were already heroes of America's burgeoning college-rock scene.
But their third album, Fables of the Reconstruction, was a departure.
Instead of recording at home in Athens, Georgia, the band travelled to London to work with producer Joe Boyd. The sessions took place at Livingston Studios between February and April 1985.
The distance mattered.
They were physically, culturally and musically far from home.
The album that emerged was darker, murkier and stranger than their previous work. Even R.E.M.'s own Peter Buck later described how proud he was of how strange the record was.
And right in the middle of it sat Can't Get There From Here.
A Very Strange Little Hit
The title alone seems appropriate for 1985.
Can't get there from here.
The song is funky. It has horns. It has a loose, almost chaotic energy. Michael Stipe sounds less like a conventional rock vocalist and more like someone trying to communicate from inside a fever dream.
It is not the polished, synthesizer-heavy sound dominating mainstream pop.
It doesn't sound particularly British despite being recorded in London.
It doesn't even sound particularly like the R.E.M. people would eventually know from Losing My Religion, Everybody Hurts and Man on the Moon.
It's restless.
It's bewildered.
It's slightly uncomfortable.
And that's precisely what makes it such a perfect soundtrack for 1985.
The song's surreal imagery and Stipe's famously enigmatic delivery seem to reflect a world where everything was moving faster than anyone could quite process.
Technology was changing.
Media was exploding.
Politics was shifting.
Corporations were reinventing themselves.
And everyone seemed to be telling us that the future was wonderful.
R.E.M. seemed to be asking:
Are we sure about that?
Lost in the Noise
Can't Get There From Here never became a major mainstream hit. It reached No. 10 on Billboard's Bubbling Under chart, but never crossed into the main Hot 100.
Yet that almost makes its survival more satisfying.
Because this is exactly the kind of song that What in the World? was made for.
It doesn't simply remind us what 1985 sounded like.
It reminds us what 1985 felt like.
A little confused.
A little over-stimulated.
Excited about the future.
Suspicious of the future.
And perhaps slightly nostalgic for something that hadn't disappeared yet.
Looking Back From Here
Forty years later, the irony is almost perfect.
In 1985, people were discovering CDs, MTV and videocassettes.
Today, we stream practically everything.
In 1985, Live Aid represented an astonishing new level of global communication.
Today, an event can reach billions of people almost instantly.
In 1985, Coca-Cola tried to reinvent itself and discovered that people sometimes don't want the future.
And R.E.M.?
They simply made a strange little song about being unable to get where you thought you were going.
Maybe they understood something the rest of us didn't.
Sometimes the world changes so quickly that the only sensible response is to stop pretending you know exactly where you're headed.
The B-Side Man Verdict
Can't Get There From Here is not R.E.M.'s biggest song.
It isn't their most famous song.
It probably isn't even the first song most people would choose to introduce someone to the band.
But put it back into 1985, and suddenly it makes perfect sense.
The Cold War was shifting.
Pop culture was exploding.
Technology was accelerating.
The media machine was getting louder.
And four musicians from Georgia arrived with a horn section, a funky groove and a song that sounded gloriously out of place.
Maybe that's why it still works.
Because sometimes the perfect soundtrack for a changing world isn't an anthem telling you where you're going.
It's a song admitting:
Can't get there from here.
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