#129, “Final Straw,” R.E.M. (2003)

150 Favorite Songs, “Final Straw,” R.E.M. (2003)

R.E.M. certainly wrote greater songs than “The Final Straw,” simply because the band’s catalog is stacked with a pretty big number of some of the best songs anybody ever wrote, and “The Final Straw” isn’t particularly famous. But I might love “The Final Straw” more than any of the other ones, because it’s such a clear mission statement, sung with a moral authority that Michael Stipe—one of the true good guys, by all accounts, of rock and roll—was able to call upon.

“The Final Straw” was released in March 2003, five days after the U.S. invaded Iraq, dropped for free on the band’s website back when doing something like that was still new and novel. R.E.M. was never a particularly political band, but they were one of the first to record a protest song against the war, and the only one whose anti-war song was any good. (I love the Beastie Boys, but their “In a World Gone Mad,” released the same week, is not a highlight of their career.) It is, appropriately given that Stipe was in his mid-forties at the time of the invasion, a fairly mature challenge to the idea of waging a war in the name of peace. There’s a gravity to it that comes from Stipe, who doesn’t sing slogans or argue politics, but instead makes a moral argument. “Now I don’t believe and I never did / that two wrongs make a right,” he sings during the bridge, the part that still gives me chills when I hear it twenty years later. “If the world were filled with the likes of you / then I’m putting up a fight,” before explaining that “love will be my strongest weapon,” and that he’ll offer it even to the person he’s singing to—I guess George W. Bush, if you take it literally? but probably a more abstract embodiment of American military aggression—if they can, “with conviction / tell me why / look me in the eye / and tell me why.”

The anti-war movement of 2003 was a really strange thing to be a part of, and to witness. There’s a sense now that the entire country was on the same page after September 11, which isn’t true—there were massive protests not just against the invasion of Iraq, but also against the war in Afghanistan—but what is true is that there was a very deliberate effort from people across a broad spectrum of media to make those who opposed the war feel marginalized, and to treat them as unserious hippies who didn’t understand the stakes or maybe just preferred terrorists to good ol’ American leadership. It was deeply cynical, and—despite Bush’s image being rehabilitated into a daffy, good-natured scion of a previous generation who would prefer to stay home and paint than maintain a presence in his party’s current, ugly politics—it was also very much a significant part of building the authoritarian trajectory that conservative politics are on now. If you were young and felt like the push towards war was destructive and dangerous and opposed to your values, you could find people protesting on the street to join, but real leadership, back in 2003, was depressingly difficult to find. Movement building just worked differently, and so did media. Liberal financiers spent a ton of money trying to figure out how to get a few hours for Al Franken and Mark Maron to host shows on talk radio. The face of the anti-war movement was maybe Michael Moore? It wasn’t a great time. Meanwhile, grown adults who had been elected to Congress were voting to rename French fries at the Capitol cafeteria “freedom fries” because France opposed the war.

Everyone knows what happened to the Dixie Chicks (more on that when we get to “Not Ready to Make Nice”), but the idea that opposing the war was treasonous was widespread; a website called ProBush.com launched a “Traitor List” that same month, posting pictures of people who opposed the war and declaring “tribunal for you” for Susan Sarandon; eventually, it got sued by a group including Jane Fonda and former U.S. senator; also, for some reason, I was the thirteenth person on it (between Madonna and Jesse Jackson Junior!) despite being a nobody dipshit.

All of that made “The Final Straw” especially meaningful to me. Because there was such a dearth of political leadership, and because the leaders who did exist were these sort of cartoonish figures like Moore, just having someone like Michael Stipe stand up and say, clearly and forcefully, that hatred and revenge are not his values, and to put that in a song I could listen to when I was trying to find a way to say “you don’t get to do this in my name.” Because I don’t believe, and I never did, that two wrongs make a right, and I needed as many ways to hear that as I could find. In most contexts, that’s a simple platitude—but when you’re saying it to a country whose leaders are screaming for blood, it’s an act of defiance. There are greater R.E.M. songs than this, but at the time I heard it, I needed this one in a way that I didn’t need most of the others.