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.

Female Mentors, Female Role Models

I blogged this old quote from Michael Stipe on Tumblr yesterday:

The day Horses, by Patti Smith, came out, I skipped seventh period and rushed to the PX at the nearby Army base to buy it. I then went to work at the Waffle House, second shift, until 11PM. I drove home and sat in the living room in the dark, with headphones on. I was hungry, so I got this giant bowl of cherries out of the Frigidaire and sat on the couch until morning, when I had to go back to school. I couldn’t stop listening to it. The record blew my shit away, and I got a terrific stomachache from the cherries. -- Michael Stipe in Spin, '93

Such is the nature of the Tumblr beast -- when in doubt, reblog content from other, preferably long-forgotten, sources and file it under "nostalgia;" however,  I thought this could be a good jumping off point for a larger discussion on musicians and their influences, specifically, how rare is it for a male musician to name a female musician among his influences. This is one of the few examples I've seen, though more recently, on the VMAs, Bruno Mars named Amy Winehouse and one of his influences.

This may come as a complete shock, but I never really wanted this blog to be a series of posts on various aspects of the music industry being underrepresented by women, but I don't know that many ways to be a feminist music blogger without repeatedly mentioning the large elephant sitting there. And it should come as no shock that mentoring and influence is another way women get the short end of the stick. It's disappointing that more male musicians don't name women as their influences, mentors, or even peers.

Michael Stipe: The Interview interview

(Link via Perpetua)

courtesy of last.fm

Interview Magazine recently posted a pretty meaty article on REM's Michael Stipe. He candidly talks about his band, growing up in the early years of AIDS awareness, and even his bout with bulimia:

We had moved out of opening for the Gang of Four or The English Beat. At that point we were playing our own shows and people liked us, but I was unraveling on the inside. I was also vegetarian, trying to eat from fast-food restaurants without meat. I didn't know how to eat properly and I was starving. I was adrenalized to the eyeballs from performing. I was afraid that I was sick with AIDS. We were playing five shows a week. I even went through a period of abstinence where I didn't drink and stopped having sex. Which is crazy. Maybe I'm answering too many questions at once here, but this is where my mind was at the age of 25.

I hate throwing out platitudes,  but I think those few sentences speak volumes about the multi-faceted nature of eating disorders, their persistence in the music industry (that's compounded by road travel/bad food), and men's resistance to talking about what is thought of as a "woman's disease."