R.E.M.

I had music growing up. I say that because, particularly in geek circles, it’s not always assumed that people had music as children. My first boyfriend only owned one CD, and it was the Star Wars symphonic soundtrack, and he didn’t really listen to popular music. Or classical music. He didn’t really ‘listen’ to music, it just happened to be something that was on. That still strikes me as odd to this day, that you can literally, culturally, be immersed in music and have it have no affect on you. It don’t stick. He was a lovely guy though and I liked him a great deal and did my best to try and develop his interest.

I liked to dance as a kid too. Weddings were my favourite, because everyone was dancing and you didn’t have to be self-conscious about the fact that you liked to dance quite a bit more than the other boys.

My parents liked music a lot, my mom’s tastes sort of calcifying around the time of late 80s radio pop, my dad’s much earlier in the late 60s and early 70s–classics but not so far ‘out there’ as Led Zeppelin or anything. Anything earlier than that and it was their parents’ music, anything later and it was ‘crap’. So the soundtrack of my youth was a steady stream of pop music from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Middleschool introduced me to a slightly wider variety of mainstream popular music, as pop R&B and Rap artists of the day–Milli Vanilli, NKOTB, Boys II Men, Whitney, Mariah, Paula, Salt n Peppa, and many more were added to my musical lexicon. And that’s where I discovered R.E.M.

Pop hits like Radio Song (featuring KRS-One, of course), Losing My Religion, and Shiny Happy People were mega-successes, and while I had remembered hearing Stand on the radio, it was that triumverate of songs that caused me to remember who was singing them. It’s kind of funny, I still enjoy those songs a lot, but my favourites from Out Of Time are still Country Feedback and Half A World Away, probably my first exposure to southern gothic anything. They still resonate today.

And then when I was 15, about a month after starting grade 10, they released Automatic For The People. Someone lent me a tape of it, and I listened to it incessantly for months. The first single, Drive, had done my head in. When you’ve just broken up with someone, every song on the radio sounds like a sad love song. When you’re an alienated 15 year old, every song on R.E.M’s Automatic For The People sounds like it is about you and about your life and they are performing the songs directly in your head. I spent about 3 solid months being powerfully depressed about my life and about the world with “MAYBE YOU’RE CRAZY IN THE HEAD” echoing around thanks to Michael Stipe. Drive, and then Try Not To Breathe… how’s that for a one-two-punch to start off an album? For a depressed 15 year old? To this day, Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight still seems sad to me, sandwiched as it is between those two songs and Everybody Hurts.

Everybody Hurts. Fuck. After just months and shitty months, that song on the tv, on the radio, on my cassette player, hearing it constantly from all sides. It was catharsis, a good cry. I still didn’t really snap out of my misery until almost a year later (came out, got some gay friends outside of school), but it was a start. I made a wonderful friend named Isaac during the time, who liked R.E.M. a great deal more than I did, and shared their back-catalogue with me. Green, Out of Time, Document, and the Eponymous singles collection. Their easily-available back catalogue, I guess I should qualify that. Actually I remember Isaac loving Pretty Persuasion and a few other songs, South Central Rain, from their I.R.S. years, but I really don’t remember listening to those songs with him. Probably my fault that they didn’t stick. But Eponymous, that stuck. It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) was my favourite song for almost 10 years, after that. It’s still up there. I still know all the words. That collection of their early years was the then-perfect survey that I needed.

I was a total convert by the time Monster rolled around. My friend Franz lent me Life’s Rich Pagent, Fables of The Reconstruction, Reckoning, and Murmur. I’m still not entirely sure I’ve owned Chronic town. I was pretty well-versed in their catalogue by that point, and I welcomed Monster with open arms. Their fans… did not. I didn’t really understand at the time, I didn’t realize how anyone who liked Drive couldn’t ‘get’ Let Me In, or the clear musical transition from Everybody Hurts to Strange Currencies. And What’s The Frequency Kenneth and Star 69 just kicked ass. But the instumentation had shifted to crunchy rock-guitars that put off their earliest fans, their sexiness and specifically their queerness put off the radio-fans. They still toured to sell-out stadiums, but the show didn’t end until the encore where the hits came out to play.

I finally saw them in concert, on the tour for Monster, by the way. I was 17. It was exactly what I’d hoped for.

And then came the album they recorded on tour for Monster, and it was called New Adventures in Hi-Fi, and if people didn’t like Monster, man did they not like New Adventures in Hi-Fi. It was dark, dark dark dark. The first single, E-Bow the Letter, was the most southern-gothic thing they’d ever done, they brought Patti Smith to wail over top of it. That’s sort of the opposite of radio-friendly. Bittersweet Me had some of the old R.E.M. flavour to it, and it’s a great song, but the video aggressively confused members of my family, with its homaging to obscure italian cinema. It was a bit like a Francesca Fiore/Bruno Puntz Jones thing, but with models. Electrolite would’ve been a touching love song for the radio, if anyone knew Michael Stipe was singing about exactly. I bought the album on release day, and I listened to it over and over again, and I really did like it… But for an arena-rock album it was pretty fucking complicated. Best listened to lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling.

Then Bill Berry left the group, and ‘everyone’ agreed that the band should break up, and they didn’t, and their next album had a drum machine on it and that was pretty much the end of R.E.M. in the public eye. In private though, I loved Up. Just, just loved it. It represented a departure and an evolution, dovetailed nicely with my broadening musical tastes (dance, electronica, and an unhealthy fascination with the lost Beach Boys album SMILE thanks to Matt Fraction). It was a good run for them, and I was secretly quite pleased that I was a fan of one of the biggest bands in the world, but seemingly no one else I knew was. It was all the benefits of both populism AND being avant-garde and cliquey, with none of the work!

I tortured my roomates with Daysleeper. Tortured them.

Sure R.E.M managed to stay relevant and in the headlines. Mike and Peter were on tons of side-projects and events. Michael produced films and music, guest appeared on stuff. Velvet Goldmine was Stipe and friends. And then the Andy Kaufman bio came out and R.E.M. was all over that, with Imitation of Life from Reveal prompting the radio-fans to give them one more go. But Reveal revealed the band wasn’t the same as Green or Out of Time or Automatic for the People, and nor should they be… that was more than 10 years earlier. Summer Turns to High, I’ll Take The Rain, All The Way to Reno? Still make my list.

Then Around The Sun. Then Accelerate. Then a Live Album, finally, after years and years of high-quality bootlegs. And then today, they broke up.

Honestly I’m still processing it… that’s what this is. R.E.M. was not my first music, but it was probably the first music that well-and-truly spoke to me. They’ve been a constant in my life since I really started paying attention to music, and they’ve been recording almost as long as I’ve been alive. They formed when I was 3. I’m sad that there aren’t more R.E.M. albums coming. I’m happy that they made so many and gave me such good music. I’m frustrated at myself that I didn’t respond as intensely to their last few releases, I kind of feel like this is my fault somehow? I’m glad I can turn on my computer and all of their music is there. I’m going to miss them.

I didn’t come to R.E.M. early, and I didn’t recognize them right away, but they have been profoundly important to me for longer than they haven’t. Thanks to Michael, Mike, Peter, and Bill for everything.

– Chris