We Are Hope Despite The Times

By Wm. on July 28, 2026

I’m seeing that today is the 40th anniversary of the release of REM’s fourth album, Lifes Rich Pageant. This was the second of their records to make its way into my collection–I’d acquired Fables of the Reconstruction via Columbia House earlier in that summer of ’86, soon after graduating. (Yes, I had been aware of REM to some degree while still in college but not quite enough to find out if I wanted to jump on the bandwagon, I guess. My soon-to-be officemate Will would rip his copies of Murmur and Reckoning to cassette for me in the spring of ’87.) I feel pretty certain I would have eventually bought LRP, but Dame Fortune smiled and saved me some coin. I was in my first weeks of grad school in Urbana-Champaign and had discovered student-run AOR station WPGU, 107.1 on your FM dial. I was the right caller one hour during an LP giveaway marathon (Labor Day weekend, perhaps?), and the new one by the boys from Athens was my prize.

Anyway, enthralling as that story is, the real excitement lay ahead when I actually put the thing on my turntable. I already knew and really liked “Fall on Me” but I was knocked out by the two songs in front of it on the A (“Dinner”) side. Both “Begin the Begin” and “These Days” are full-out rockers, replete with fury but also acting as calls to action. I consider the latter my favorite on the album, and it wound up on a mixtape I assembled later that fall. Maybe it’s a song for today, too, forty years on.