Nothing is real. Here, REM employ their trick of the shiny happy song that isn’t. It’s a sugar-sweet track for people who still think The One I Love is romantic. It was a fake: it always seemed built over the line of an earlier REM track, Driver 8. Imitation of Life really is based on Driver 8, or at least coincidentally uses the same chord progression. It takes its title from a 1959 film, itself a remake of a 1933 adaptation of a novel. The song is four minutes long, the video comprises 20 seconds of footage. Forwards it goes, backwards it returns, in twenty second loops. Until Losing My Religion, Michael Stipe always refused to lip sync in REM’s videos. Here he’s repeating a single refrain Come on, come on….

Cool pool party, though.