Icon: R.E.M.
Conventional wisdom about R.E.M. holds that the group’s best records were made in their early, indie years and that their work for Warner Brothers, though commercially successful, was creatively fallow. And, like much conventional wisdom, this is patently false. Though it provides a convenient dividing line for the group’s sprawling discography and serves to reaffirm shopworn assertions that major labels ruin vital indie bands, even a cursory run through eight of the nine studio records R.E.M. recorded for the W.B. finds that shorthand lacking.
It is instead important to remember just what kinds of things R.E.M. brought to mainstream consciousness. They were the rare major-label rock band – especially in the 1980s – that made a virtue of counterintuitiveness, projecting the appearance that if you merely followed your own impulses, the system would bend to your will. At a time when commercial rock was all crotch and machismo – even post-punk messiah Bono was stridently, undeniably Male – R.E.M. had a frontman who was proudly effeminate, a frontman who would give himself indefensible haircuts, lard his eyes with mascara and twitch around on stage like an electrocuted marionette. They proved that a band could be commercially successful despite their best efforts to be anything but: their biggest mainstream hits contain no elements connecting them to the songs that surrounded them on the airwaves – they’re oddities held together by snaking guitars or twinkling mandolin. Years before Nirvana, they provided a beacon for isolated, left-out teenagers and offered hope that, in a landscape laid to waste by Motley Crues and Def Leppards, the misfits and the art students and the queers and the bookworms and the drama nerds still had a shot. And while they are guilty of the same sins as many of their alt-rock peers – namely, relentless political hectoring and an exhausting tendency toward self-righteousness – they counterbalance those peripheral issues by providing some of the finest pop music of the last 30 years and, for a brief moment in the late 80s and the early 90s, making it cool to read, and to care that the world was going to hell in a Republican handbasket. Like the Smiths, they are a band you start out loving because of the singer and continue loving because of the guitarist. For poor, sad, unsaveable lifelong fans like this writer, they are a source of joy, inspiration, frustration, bewilderment, belief, annoyance, jubliation and defensiveness. (Oh, the defensiveness). They are not the type of dogs that will keep you waiting. They are R.E.M., and this is what they do.
