I’m Trying Hard Not To Name This Post It’s The End Of Music As We Know It Or Something Else Equally Trite, Because R.E.M. Deserves Better

I remember when my friend–an older friend, already in college–gave me my first tape of R.E.M. That’s how we discovered new music back then, by trading cassette tapes. Sure, the quality sucked, but considering that we were listening to those tapes on boom boxes and Sony Walkmen, it didn’t matter much. You could have stuck an entire live band in there and it still would have sounded like crap.

R.E.M was never my favorite band, but they were the band that changed everything. They taught me to listen to good music, not the music that was on the radio. The more I listened to R.E.M. the less I worried about being like everyone else. R.E.M. was different from anything I had ever heard before, and for the first time in my life, different was a good thing.

A lot has been said in the last 48 hours about how R.E.M. created the model for Indie Music. In paying tribute, some people have gone so far as to say there wouldn’t be Indie Music without R.E.M. That’s not exactly true. Even the greatest innovators don’t operate inside a vacuum. If Darwin hadn’t postulated evolution, than it would have fallen to Mendel. If Edison hadn’t invented the light bulb, then Tesla would have*. If it wasn’t R.E.M. leading the way on college radio, someone else would have been at the forefront.

Progress is inevitable. But it matters who is driving that progress because they are the ones who shape our culture. If R.E.M. hadn’t made it big, we still would have been listening to Nirvana in the early nineties, but we might have been able to understand the lyrics. R.E.M. shaped an entire generation of musicians and transformed the industry model at the same time, a level of influence only a few musicians from the last 100 years can claim.

But I don’t listen to R.E.M. because they are important. I listen because of the music. It’s music that has shaped my life. I put in Green, and I can’t help remembering my first ever concert (that’s right!), with Michael Stipe banging the metal chair during World Leader Pretend. Just seeing the cover of Out Of Time puts me back in Mr. Konkle’s physics class, and listening to the album for the first time with Emily on our head phones. But the greatest R.E.M. albums don’t put me into a specific time. It’s because the music is timeless. Automatic For The People and New Adventures In Hi-Fi and Up are the essence of R.E.M. Not the college radio R.E.M. with southern rock undertones and political feedback. Nor the more recent R.E.M. either, the fading R.E.M., the R.E.M. that fails under the weight of comparison with itself. This is eternal R.E.M.

I know what people think. R.E.M. fans, the older ones, the ones who were there from the beginning, will mock me for daring to mention New Adventures and Up as classics. And I get it. I understand. There isn’t a single one of their first 10 albums that hasn’t at some point been my favorite. They are all classics in their way, and vastly different from their later stuff. But when you listen to Fables of the Reconstruction and Life’s Rich Pageant, you know that you are listening to 80’s college rock. When you’re listening to Automatic For The People, you’re just listening to great music.

I have a confession to make. Up isn’t just a classic to me, it will go down as my favorite R.E.M. album. Do me a favor. In the next week, listen to Up again at least three separate times. It deserves your appreciation, whether you are a hard core R.E.M. fan or not.

And so what’s next for R.E.M.? The cynical among us might point out that the band has probably made a load of cash in the last 48 hours, as interest as been generated unlike anything they’ve seen in the last decade. Break-ups (and deaths) have that affect. I’m sure we haven’t seen the last of R.E.M. There will be reunion shows. There will be another tour. There will probably even be more music. But nothing will ever top what they’ve already given us, and that’s the curse of the best artists, and exactly why they made the announcement that they made. Changing the world takes a perfect storm.

In any case, R.E.M.’s music will live on. Discovering R.E.M. was a rite of passage for me and my friends, and it will continue to be a rite of passage. In the same way that I discovered the Beatles and Neil Young and Mozart, kids twenty years in the future will discover R.E.M.

So when you think about it, it’s not really the end of anything.

Please Note, This blog is officially at a loss for words

*Oh wait

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