So Fast, So Numb

one of the best on this album. I think its about friends who use drugs heavily to the point where that's all they care about, they're numb to everything else. Kill Devil Hill is where the Wright brothers first got a plane of the ground which is a metaphor for being high. Sometimes, instead of "it's all amphetamine" i hear "its so unfair to me" though either of those lines work but i would say that instead of "you spit it out, the bitter pill" its actually "i'm spitting out the bitter pill."

i actually read somehwere this is a song about the fast-paced life and eventual death of River Phoenix or maybe even Kurt Cobain...remember, it was alleged (by Courtney Love, so it doesn't count for much) that Stipe and Cobain fucked a few times --> "i've played your lover"...basically, i think it's about someone changing due to the drugs they've done; about someone who grows apart from reality...i related, unfortunately b/c i'm at the other end of it

Reynard Muldrake you're an f'ing moron.

I always thought this song was about someone, a jaded person, who has been hurt countless times by people who supposedly love them. they've been dropped and kicked and beaten down too many times to love again...and then they find the real deal, actual love, they can't accept it because they can no longer trust, thus hurting the person who really loves them. just my take. hence the blood running cold and "I've played your lover".

this song fucking kicks...it's the best on this most underrated of albums

This song is pretty self explanitory. If you don't get it, you don't get it. I like the Shark eyed and blood running cold part. Way to put it out there.

It's about drug relapse--you love it, you hate it, you want to recreate it. Chasing a high. Anybody that's been through it know's what I'm saying.

Yeah, pretty sure this is about the drug-induced demise of River Phoenix - who was often said to be the James Dean for a new generation. The title of the song sounds like a play on the saying: "Live fast, die young" often associated with Dean.

In any case Phoenix was a good friend of Michael Stipe's - however you want to interpret that - and Stipe was reportedly so devastated by the young actor's death that he sunk into a deep depression and experienced writer's block for a period of five months. R.E.M. also dedicated their "Monster" album to River.

The first verse seems to reference the (alleged) abusive treatment Phoenix claimed to have suffered as a child at the hands of the quasi-religious cult his parents were involved with - which in turn may have led to Phoenix's later drug use (in order to numb feelings of pain).

Ex: "How could I be so blind, mis-sighted, not to see there's something wounded deep. Anyone could scratch your surface now, it's all amphetamine You're blasting yourself into the present to blur some past indignity".

I think the River Phoenix connection is interesting, but this song is in the present tense so it sounds more like a warning to someone who is alive than a lament over someone who died. Also, the song feels angry, like he's singing at someone and not about them.

"So Fast, So Numb" on REM's Hi-Fi album isn't a curt lament for a River that's run dry, or about a wasted or dead Cobain, or any Phoenix rising from the ashes. That's intentionalist fallacy and somesuch. No, this song tells you what it's about if you just pay attention to it and stop trying to engraft or super-impose tabloid fables onto it. This song stems from the same Stipe-y sentiment that penned "All The Right Friends," just more jaded, older, more cynical, more burned, more... yeah. One interesting interpretation that floats in the fringe is that this song is about the narrator (don't mistake that for Michael himself) sending a "Star 69" missive to a lover who spurned him. Explicate the lyrics to mine the golden truth: "I've been around, I've been your lover"; the late 90s sly "cum/come" references throughout the song; the late 90s closeted-gay, pre-nonbinary self-loathing of "you love it, you hate it/ you want to re-create it" (anticipating Brokeback Mountain's "I wish I knew how to quit you" quip); the milieu's club-drug references to "amphetamine" and "numb[ness]"; the spitting spite of Stipe at his most inimitable -- his cryptic cloaked version of Dylan's "Positively Fourth Street."