On the Surface: It’s a song with a character who is deaf
Is that all there is to …. Sitting Still?
What else is going on: Sitting Still goes back to the earliest days of R.E.M. — it was the B side of the original “Radio Free Europe” single in 1981. It was the Michael Stipe era when you could hardly make out a word or two in his lyrics and believe your ears were at fault. Fittingly one of the lines in the song that’s audible are:
We could gather, throw a fit
and
I’m the sign and you’re not deaf.
(Even though that’s the published lyric to the song, I only hear, “I’m the son, and you’re not deaf.)
So I naturally believed it was a song about a deaf kid. Then Susanna Hoffs and Matthew Sweet did a clear-diction cover of the song in 2017. Hearing the lyrics clearly for the first time, I realized more than meets the eye is going on here.
The lines that stood out once I heard them clearly:
Sit and try for the big kill
A waste of time sitting still
The rest of the lyrics are too oblique for me to wrap up a coherent narrative. But the “sit and try for the big kill” and “we could gather, throw a fit lines” seem to suggest this:
One kid is deaf, but otherwise unimpaired. A second kid is his bully. This bully has no friends, but neither does the deaf kid. So the bully decides to stage a stunt where he will beat up the deaf kid in front of others. The bully’s hobbled and outcast mind believes this will help him make friends. The deaf kid, naturally doesn’t like this idea. This sets up the lines in the song’s emotional climax:
You can gather when I talk
Talk until you’re blue
You could get away from me
Get away from me
Then the final chorus after the big kill:
I can hear you (x3)
Can you hear me?
This interpretation of a schoolboy drama between a deaf kid and his bully is a stretch, but that’s the point of early R.E.M., whose songs had a dreamlike quality, and like dreams, you try to create meaning out of bits that don’t make sense.
