This one goes out to the one I love - REM

First, there was the Beatles. Their musical influences were all around us, but it was rare that this sheltered Mississippi girl heard them very often. The Beatles' music was the excited discussion in the cafeteria when I was in the second grade. Their music defined and changed a generation of young people, how we listened to music, how we talked about music, how we felt about music. We still list them as one of our favorite bands today. I could not fathom their break-up, the death of John, the death of George. The death of Paul may just kill me.

Nirvana was of a different generation. Yet, I responded to the music and I remember hearing Smells Like Teen Spirit the first time. I mean, really, who wouldn't stop to listen to a song with such an amazing beginning riff? It seems that when the music industry has reached death by pop, true musicians rise up and save us. SLTS may not have even been Nirvana's best song, but it was certainly the rock song that captured and defined a generation. That was 20 years ago, now.

Yesterday, REM announced the band's break-up after 30 years. As did many people, I had begun to listen to college radio because it was the only station where I could hear something new as many of the radio stations had taken the classic rock road most traveled. It was here I first heard REM. Scrappy, unpolished, difficult to understand but captivating. Rolling Stone magazine named their first album, Murmur, as the #1 album of the year above Michael Jackson's Thriller, The Police's Synchronicity, and U2's War, all tremendous albums (source) I had a shoddily-made mix tape with Radio Free Europe, Driver 8, Can't Get There From Here, and (Don't Go Back To) Rockville that I played for my then-group of friends. They were tolerate but concluded, "you can't dance to it" and a solid "you're weird".

I was at a concert (who?) and overheard two younger boys discussing REM's signing with Warner Brothers. One of the boys said, "I know it's selling out, but I just love this band".  Oh, the teenage purist angst. As reported by the BBC:

But (Michael) Stipe, too, had qualms about the band's new audience.

"I had to grapple with a lot of contradictions back in the 80s," he told the Guardian.

"I would look out from the stage at the Reagan youth. That was when REM went beyond the freaks, the fags, the fat girls, the art students and the indie music fanatics.

"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. And I had to look out on that and think, well, what do I do with this?"

I will admit here and now that while I love the early music I will forever love the song Losing My Religion. There are just some songs that resonant. The music video is a visual feast of images. Some religious zealots tried to make an issue of the phrase. Southerners knew the reference immediately.  That's me in the corner..... 


Everybody Hurts is musically incredible and socially relevant. For the amount of airplay it received, it became Zepplin's Stairway to Heaven. Hearing it so often led to a mental backlash, at least for me.

Endings are hard and they're personal. We feel a little more of our youth chiseled away. But, the music will be with us forever. And, for that, we thank all the bands we carry in our hearts and our heads.