Goodbye REM

After three decades of making music, REM calls it quits:

To our Fans and Friends: As R.E.M., and as lifelong friends and co-conspirators, we have decided to call it a day as a band. We walk away with a great sense of gratitude, of finality, and of astonishment at all we have accomplished. To anyone who ever felt touched by our music, our deepest thanks for listening. (via REM's official website)

I only got to see them once, in 1999 after drummer Bill Berry had left, and at a huge outdoor arena that managed to be less than half-filled, despite the band being near enough to their commercial -- and creative -- peak. The outright majesty of their live show blew me away,  especially since they weren't exactly arena-rock stars. (I take it the proper venue would have been a small club in Athens, GA or another college town in 1984, but I was still too young, too naive, and too into Wham.)

REM was never "my band" (an honor that goes to their contemporaries, The Replacements, the only band for whom I've managed to cultivate an unhealthy obsession), but their influence loomed large, not only over my record collection, but how I saw myself in general. It feels wrong to claim ownership or a band, but when indie rock was still the domain of college radio, it was the most conspicuous way one could say, "Yes, I'm different. I think differently. I don't but into all the bullshit."The first song of theirs I ever heard was "Fall On Me," I want to believe streaming from a cheap boombox flanked by a group of older, cooler kids I saw on a trip to the zoo (I swear this is what I remember!), but I probably caught it late-night on MTV. I didn't know what this was, or who was singing, but it was something I wanted to be a part of.

REM was the rare band who never compromised their ideals while courting mainstream fame, though not without a cost. In a interview in the Guardian this past March, singer Michael Stipe said, "Suddenly we had an audience that included people who would have sooner kicked me on the street than let me walk by unperturbed. I'm exaggerating to make a point but it was certainly an audience that, in the main, did not share my political leanings or affiliations, and did not like how flamboyant I was as a performer or indeed a sexual creature. They probably held lots of my world views in great disregard, and I had to look out on that and think, well, what do I do with this?" But it's hard to deny they were bona fide rock stars, while still maintaining that cool, underground, college band image. And in Stipe  they had a queer-identified frontman who managed to avoid a lot of the pigeonholes that plague other out artists. In the 80s and early 90s, this was pretty revolutionary stuff.

It's hard to wrap this up without feeling like I'm writing a eulogy, though in a sense I am for a band that spawned a generation's worth of underground rock, and made it palatable for mainstream audiences. Without bands like REM, there would have been no Nirvana, no 90s "alt-rock" explosion (however you may personally feel about that), or how we define rock music today. Goodbye guys.