R.E.M. Incorporated

(Note for people who wonder what exactly I am listening to when I have headphones on at work. Today I believe I listened to the Garden State soundtrack three times and each of the Shins CDs at least twice. And that made me productive than I’ve been in years so please, I know it might look antisocial but let me keep the headphones on. It’s the only way I can work nowadays.)

A few weeks ago I made an offhand reference to R.E.M. phoning it in for the last decade and since my random number generator had me listening to Fables of the Reconstruction (or Reconstruction of the Fables, no one is quite sure what the actual title of the album is) in my car today I thought that this would be the time to explain my view on what was easily my favorite band on the planet for a long time.

I’ve said for years that if I was placed on a desert island and could have only five CDs R.E.M.’s “Murmur” would be the first one I would grab (followed by Uncle Tupelo’s “Anodyne” and Jeff Buckley’s “Grace” and then a long period of thought for the final two). Murmur is without a doubt the best debut album I have ever heard. A great raw sound from a bunch of guys who aren’t quite sure what they are doing but they know that it works. You’re not sure what any of the songs mean so you could listen to them all day and try to make out fragments of lyrics and start to piece together the meaning of the album. Even the album art is cool, a train tressel being devoured by kudzu as if part of some Faulknerian symbolism.

To me, all of the early R.E.M. albums are incredible. If you made me list the twenty CDs I listen to most often, Reckoning would be on the list. It’s not R.E.M.’s best album from a critical standpoint. It’s probably their worst selling album. It’s not even my favorite. But it always seems to find it’s way back into my CD player just so I could hear Seven Chinese Brothers or South Central Rain one more time. All of those early albums are raw and emotion filled and jangly and sound like they were made by a bunch of kids in Athens just having fun.

Even when they started having hits with Document and Green there was still this Us vs. Them feel to it. The band barely shows up in the video for The One I Love, which when I watched it again a week ago still presented this weird southern gothic feel (along with some really postmodern ironic comedy moments). Or Pop Song 89 with its censored topless dancers including Michael Stipe, which can be viewed as such a swipe at MTV at the time, which was just filled with Poison and Bon Jovi videos.

See, the thing is R.E.M. was our band. And when I say our I mean those of us who weren’t listening to hair bands. The group of kids who you know, read books outside of a classroom. Who understood that while Porky’s is a friggin kick ass movie there is a little more to life out there. In short, there was always this knowledge that when you saw a jock talking about how awesome Whitesnake was you knew that you were listening to R.E.M. and you really knew what cool was.

Then Out of Time came out and the band became really popular and now you had to share. You didn’t realize it at the time, it just kind of happened. They weren’t your band anymore. I don’t have any problems with the music in the Out of Time, Automatic for the People, Monster trilogy period. I listened to them incessantly. Though I will say if you listen to Out of Time now you find out that it hasn’t aged well at all. Think about it, how many times have you heard Losing My Religion? The song was so overplayed that it lost all meaning. That oversaturation really hurt the band.

The other thing is that once Bill Berry left it just wasn’t R.E.M. anymore. They might be the only band where losing the drummer has really destroyed the band. It’s not like no one else could do his riffs, his most memorable role is being the third part of the three part harmony on Fall on Me. But he was just the soul of the group, the one who kept it centered and away from being a caricature of itself. With Bill in the band, they were always the four kids from Athens.

Now it is truly R.E.M. Incorporated, producing the mandated albums and going on a greatest hits tour. Every once in a while they will produce a good album but they simply are no longer required listening. The band that was once the voice of my generation seemingly has nothing left to say. It’s sad, because I think everyone knows what they want to hear one more time.

We all want them to record Murmur again. Not the album, but just that sound and that feeling of not knowing what in the world was going on. The problem is that everyone knows that it can’t happen. That album is now over twenty years old and the band isn’t the same and I’m not the same and you can’t go back to that time. But that is what we all want, just one more moment of knowing that this is our music. To be able to possess something so ethereal as music and know that it is not because of some mass produced pop cultural commodity trading. We just want R.E.M. to give us one more moment of expressing who we are. And I really hope they have that one last great album in them.