Talk:Man on the Moon (song)

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Robbins, Ira (October 1992). "R.E.M." Pulse. Retrieved January 28, 2024. R.E.M. may have come in second with Montgomery Clift, but 'Man on the Moon' must be the first song about Andy Kaufman. As Buck plays '50s slide guitar over a warm samba beat, Stipe hangs such characters as Fred Blassie, Charles Darwin and Elvis Presley (a Kaufman specialty) onto a seductive melody. Buck claims there's no secret compartment here. "When Michael sings about Andy Kaufman and Elvis, he's singing about Andy Kaufman and Elvis. It's not about wheat prices in Russia."

Music video

The music video I've seen is completely different (members of the band trying to break out of the inside of a TV set, interspersed with scenes presumably from the movie). AnonMoos (talk) 20:21, 13 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Wrong video That's The Great Beyond. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 21:13, 13 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

OK (though it's not described very clearly on that article either)... AnonMoos (talk)

allmusic review by Stewart Mason

This article relies on some unsupported claims by some editor at Allmusic.com. While the site is pretty good, there is no evidence that the author of these claims cited in the article, Stewart Mason has any basis for his analysis. I'd like to see some corroborating sources and have tagged this source as having questionable reliability. Toddst1 (talk) 04:08, 7 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

In the future, please be specific about the "claims" that are questionable. Critics rarely source their analysis, so it's unclear if you took issue with the claims (believing them to be false), had a problem with the critic in question (perhaps previous indications of unreliability), or simply wanted more voices. Your comment here made the latter the most likely, but not after spending some time being confused. After all, one line that is flagged is a critical interpretation of a musician's lyrics referencing a comedian's legacy of obscuring the truth. I'm not sure how much further a sentence could get from reliable facts.

A quick search would have supported the popularity of the song, and it's an easy change to reword the sentence from an assertion of fact to critical opinion for the second. Despite the fact that the lyrics of the song itself reference Elvis, the moon landing, and Kaufman's claims to fake his own death, without metaphor or poetry. So on the other hand, as far as critical analysis goes, I'm not sure how less controversial and reliable it is for anyone to claim that Michael Stipe wrote the lyrics as an intentional nod to Elvis, the moon landing, and Kaufman's legacy of blurring the line between truth and fiction. Not that I blame you. If there's any weak point for Wikipedia, and a problem for her editors, it's those cases where truth is mixed with fiction and facts are being opened for interpretation (which, ultimately, sums up every human experience of reality, not just Andy Kaufman's work). --WildElf (talk) 22:33, 4 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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Charting as a source for genre

Per a sensible suggestion by Koavf, I have started a discussion at WikiProject Songs so we aren't discussing this same idea in multiple places. - SummerPhD^v2.0 14:06, 20 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]