“Stand!” by Sly and the Family Stone is a better song than “Stand” by R.E.M. Pretty much objectively. By almost any meaningful metric. I don’t need to break my moratorium on writing music criticism to make this claim. There’s really no contest, as I doubt the members of R.E.M. would disagree.

Singer Michael Stipe describes “Stand” as a tribute to the chirpy ‘60s bubblegum pop of the Archies and 1910 Fruitgum Company with “the most inane lyrics that I could possibly write.” Guitarist Peter Buck calls it “the stupidest song we’ve ever written.” It’s basically a children’s song, catchy and quirky the first time you hear it but cloying in a way that makes people who hate R.E.M. feel great about themselves. Released just before “Losing My Religion” and Soundscan turned R.E.M. into Zeppelin-grade rock stars, it’s on any short list of the band’s most obnoxious hits.

By contrast, “Stand!” by Sly and the Family Stone is a galvanizing Civil Rights Era anthem, a triumph of the will, and an irresistible shout-along call to self-empowerment from an artist who’s at the peak of his powers and knows it. When he focused-grouped “Stand!,” Sylvester Stewart (d/b/a Sly Stone) got a warm reception but wanted that extra X factor, which led him to rework the closing 50 seconds into one of soul music’s quintessential barn-burning breakdowns.

“Stand!” could overthrow dictatorships. “Stand” was the theme song from Chris Elliot’s cult-favorite sitcom Get a Life and was parodied by Weird Al Yankovic as “Spam.”

And yet… No, forget it. “Stand!” is still better. But. Because I have a warm sentimental attachment to the mythos of R.E.M., and because I spent my transformative collegiate years in Athens, Georgia, where I frequented the same bar as Michael Stipe and probably owe him a solid, let’s have fun with this. Let’s steelman “Stand.”

First of all, Buck and Stipe are wrong. “Stand” isn’t anywhere close to the most asinine song they’ve written, even excluding everything after 1996. That would be “Shiny Happy People,” a curse on popular music and the final track on a Spotify playlist I made for whenever it’s time to eat a stack of blueberry pancakes, pop 300 milligrams of pentobarbital, and swim into the Pacific Ocean. “Stand” is fun, in small doses, and it’s not stupid. More accurately, it’s a very stupid song that was also wise and prescient by accident.

As much as it’s become a cliche to promote mindfulness – and as frequently as it’s promoted in bad faith – it can’t be promoted enough. As our mainline culture gets more unbearably overstimulating by the second, the practice of presence is no longer a nice-to-have, but a basic prerequisite for ethical, compassionate sanity and citizenship. You can’t function without it in 2022, and R.E.M. was teaching it to grade-schoolers in 1989. Attune with nature. Be where you are. Notice what it’s really like. Notice that it’s the first and last time you’ll ever be here in exactly this way. Think about direction, wonder why you haven’t.

The message of Sly’s “Stand!” is less simple and self-evident, making it more effective as a soul scorcher but perhaps less so as a pop song. By 1969, the gains and promise of the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam War protests were already giving way to the dyspeptic drag of the Nixon Years. The song mixes Biblical allusions with warnings against psychological manipulation (“It’s the truth that the truth makes them so uptight… they know what you’re saying makes sense at all”) and ends on a deeply conflicted note. “Don’t you know that you are free? Well at least in your mind, if you want to be.” Grand gestures are great, but revolutions tend to fail, eventually. Sovereignty over your inner experience is all you’re promised, in the end, a point R.E.M. makes with less fuss.

Musically, “Stand!” is absolutely smoked by its own B-side, “I Want to Take You Higher.” It’s a less perfect pop song than “Everyday People,” less funky than “Thank You (Fallettinme Be Mice Elf Again)” (which lent one of its hooks to Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation”), and less conceptually interesting than the muggy, druggy paranoia of There’s a Riot Goin’ On. All of that is a lot better than R.E.M.’s “Stand.”

There’s a reason Public Enemy sampled “Stand!” by Sly and the Family Stone and not “Stand” by R.E.M. KRS-One did do a song with R.E.M., and it, too, is worse than “Stand,” which is not as good as “Stand!” Glad we could have this talk.

Recommend If You Like is not owned or funded by a billionaire or even a millionaire. We do have a Patreon. If you can’t afford to become a patron, please sign up to our mailing list. It’s free and we’re asking here instead of a pop-up. Pop-ups are annoying.