R.E.M. was never my favorite band. That comes as a bit of surprise to me, actually, considering that on my short list of perfect albums, R.E.M. contributed two: Murmur and Reckoning. No other artist has made more than one.
R.E.M. is the reason I started listening to alternative/indie/call-it-what-you-will music. I'm not talking about "Rock of the '80s", as the more aggressively promoted and synth-heavy sound of stations like the Quake (98.9 FM, KQAK) used to be called. No, I'm talking about truly independent music made by and for people who were sick to death of the constipated sound of mainstream rock in the early 1980s. R.E.M., though I didn't know it at the time, harkened back to a more melodic strain of music-making from the '60s and early '70s -- more specifically, to the likes of the Byrds and Gram Parsons. The sound was infinitely more appealing than anything else you could hear on the airwaves, and rekindled my then-waning interest in music.
The first single I remember was, of course, "Radio Free Europe" (the Murmur version). Damned if I know, even today, what it's about. Damned if I care, either. As obsessed with lyrics as I generally am, they really don't matter if it's an R.E.M. song: the jangly, echoey sound is all I need. Thirty years later, "Radio Free Europe" still sounds a little odd, a little abnormal -- and still sounds great.
If I had to rank the first five albums from favorite to least favorite, they'd be pretty much in release order. I suppose I never stopped hoping the band would go back to what AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine called the "strangely subdued variation of their trademark sound" on Murmur. That strangely subdued variation was to be less and less evident on each successive album.
I think what I like about Reckoning is what I sense as Don Dixon's and Mitch Easter's contributions to the sound. All I know is, Murmur and Reckoning sound more alike than any of their subsequent albums, and Dixon and Easter are the most prominent common contributors other than the band itself.
Fables of the Reconstruction and Life's Rich Pageant boast memorably distinctive songwriting but not the same kind of foreboding that suffused Murmur and tinged parts of Reckoning. By the time of Document, R.E.M. had signed to Capitol and I was on the verge of diving headfirst into indie hipsterdom, which denied the possibility of anything worthwhile being issued by a major label. R.E.M. and I thus parted ways, though I appreciated the melancholy send-off of "Welcome to the Occupation".
Occasionally R.E.M. would pop up on my radar, notably for the single "Man on the Moon", but essentially they were done with me and I with them. Lest you think this was unjustified pique on my part, let me say that although they were now playing to a mass audience of which I did not want to be a part, I wished them nothing but the best: they had toiled in the college music scene for years and were entitled for their hard work to pay off. It could be argued that R.E.M. created the college music scene, in fact. At the very least, the band made it a viable path to mainstream success for their contemporaries and followers.
R.E.M. announced it was breaking up yesterday. I take the band members at their word when they say the dissolution was amicable and mutually agreed. Unlike many successful groups (the Rolling Stones come to mind), I never sensed that the members of R.E.M. were locked in ego-driven death struggles. Like true artists, they simply recognized that they had said all they could say through this vehicle. I don't doubt we'll be hearing from them again, but separately rather than together.
Thanks for the music, guys, and best of luck for the future.
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