So many puns. There’s going to be so many song title puns. I am in no mood for puns. R.E.M. is breaking up.
I remember seeing the world premiere of the Losing My Religion video on MTV – which, my generation is fond of joking, once aired “music videos”. Automatic for the People dropped when I was a high school misfit – band geek/theatre geek/honor student…hell, I did Academic Decathlon.
This made me a younger brother to R.E.M.’s core fans, the ones who heard Radio Free Europe on their college radio stations in the early 80’s and wondered who this band was with those lovely jangling guitar lines and the mumbling poet front-man with the spasm-ing arms. What Nirvana did for Seattle, they did for Athens, Georgia 10 years earlier, with the B-52’s and, later, the Indigo Girls enhancing the scene-changing waves emanating from that little dot on the map, the home of Weaver D’s Soul Food.
But I became a true fan, and bought the whole back catalog. I thought it was universal rock music, but I was wrong, it was simply the first band that had reached that deep into me. I was too young to understand the magic of how specific and personal it could be to feel music speaking to YOU. I was still not sure there was a ME to speak to. They helped me see it.
By the time they pinged my lonesome radar, they had already “made it”; and yet they had a defiant relationship with stardom. They didn’t tell it to fuck off like some bands would, and they didn’t freeze in their maturation in the quest to repeat their successes. They had a way of insisting on the truth to their own selves that got them there. The hardened edges of their follow-up Monster were just part of a collage of intense melancholy; not what the label was looking for, I’m sure, but when you hear Let Me In – Michael Stipe’s shattering grief-cry following the death of Kurt Cobain – you never doubt that he was putting his real feelings of the moment on the record.
I missed a concert of theirs on that tour – it had been delayed because of drummer Bill Berry’s brain aneurysm, and I shipped off to college before the replacement date. Berry left the band soon after, the first departure. This launched a phase of experimentation that took them out of the spotlight but produced some absolutely luscious work. Be Mine is one of the most beautiful love songs of 90’s rock, but you never heard it on the radio.
Thom Yorke of Radiohead has the chance to sing one song with R.E.M. – he chooses Be Mine
They never seemed to mind losing their grip on the zeitgeist – they saved their complaints for themselves when they delivered a sub-par album like the moping and directionless Around the Sun.
I saw them twice in concert – and the second time, I remember Stipe giving a long, rambling speech about the beauty of a starry night, and a charity benefit happening nearby, before announcing that the next song belonged to us, and they were privileged to play it for us. And then, with a little bow, began Losing My Religion. As a way of summing up the transition of a creative work that bursts through the upper atmosphere and gets taken in by the culture at large, it was humble, concise, honest, and perfect. They made the song, but it was ours now, and they were at peace with that.
They could have kept going. The best tracks on Accelerate showed that they still have songwriting mojo; and their catalog of hits is stuffed enough that they could have toured the nostalgia circuit for aging Gen-Xers for the next 15 years. They could have played the Super Bowl, with lights flashing and fireworks blasting as they proclaimed it the end of the world as they know it, brought to you by Chrysler.
In the liner notes of every R.E.M. album it generally reads some variation of “All songs by Berry, Buck, Mills, and Stipe”, with Berry out of the later listings. You might glimpse the internal dynamic from time to time, but when it came time to speak, they spoke as a band. Maybe there has been tension within or without, but today they said, as a band, that it was time to stop.
As always, I believe them. And I love them.
True coincidence – about two weeks ago I became freshly-obsessed with this song. There really was a span where every track on every album of theirs had some strange beauty to it.