What’s the Frequency, Kenneth remembered

We’ll pause my regular content for a moment to take a look back at an old R.E.M. song, “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth,” that saw its release 30 years ago today. I still remember the first time I heard it. And the third or fourth. It was an event.

The first time I heard What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?

Monday, September 5, 1994 was Labor Day. I’d finished the first two weeks of classes of my sophomore year of college and come home to St. Louis for the long weekend. The radio station I regularly listened to was KPNT, 105.7 FM, then based out of Ste. Genevieve, Missouri. Some said it wasn’t a true alternative station, but unlike the truer, bluer alternative stations at 89.5 and 89.7 FM, you could hear KPNT all throughout the St. Louis metro area.

I can’t remember if I was packing my things and getting ready to go back or if I was already on the road when the DJ came on and said he’d just received the new R.E.M. single. But I do remember him warning us this was a little bit different from what we were used to hearing from R.E.M.

He was right. Peter Buck’s guitar came charging out of the gate, fully electric and cranked up to 11. There were no acoustic instruments on this track. This was R.E.M. alright, you could tell from Michael Stipe’s ambiguous and sometimes mumbled lyrics. But it was something completely different too. It sounded like four minutes of the world coming to an end, and it took me to a place I hadn’t been since the first time I heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

If I’d been thinking, I would have taped it. That’s why I think I was already on the road, because I know I didn’t tape the song. But they had me covered.

One more time for the road

I hadn’t gotten over the initial impact of hearing the song for the first time when the DJ played a recording of a phone call. The caller told the DJ he was heading back to college and asked the DJ if he’d do him a favor and play the song one more time.

The Point’s DJs did have rules they had to follow. But the Point’s DJs were generally pretty cool about things. And this DJ felt for the guy and he played the song again, even though he’d just played the song 30 minutes ago.

For me, college was about two hours away, in Columbia, Mo. I usually lost 105.7 sometime past Warrenton, a little over an hour into the drive. But they played the song at least one more time before I lost the signal. I cranked the volume each time. I normally switched to 106.1, which was then KBXR in Columbia, after losing KPNT. They had the song too, so I heard it at least one more time before arriving in Columbia.

I’m sure some of us just liked it because it was loud. Michael Stipe’s lyrics were always difficult to figure out. Inevitably, at some point someone would ask him in an interview and he’d say what the song was about and it would make sense. In the case of “Kenneth,” he said it’s a song about Generation X and the older generations not being able to understand what motivates them. I certainly didn’t catch that on the first few listens. For me at least, on that day it was a loud and angsty song that caught me off guard.

Not quite the song of the summer of ’94

The album didn’t drop for a few more weeks and I honestly don’t remember if it was something I ran out and bought right away or if I waited a bit. The song dropped too late for “Kenneth” to become the song of the summer. Monster did end up being a monster record for R.E.M. It wasn’t necessarily R.E.M.’s best record, and arguably, “Kenneth” wasn’t the best song on Monster either. At the time, the reviews were a bit uneven, with some calling the album a fitting tribute to Kurt Cobain and River Phoenix, two Gen X celebrities and friends of Stipe who’d died within the past year. Others said it tried but fell short.

But on the day it was released, “Kenneth” was the sound of every college student between the ages of 18 and 23 going back to school during a time when things were changing fast. We didn’t all realize it right at the time, and R.E.M. probably didn’t either. But soon, there would be no going back to how things used to be. R.E.M. captured something that day that they probably could only pull off once. And it was awesome.

Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.