"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."
"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."