R.I.P. R.E.M.

I was standing in my backyard, looking at the clouds above the edge of autumn leaves that is mid-September in New England, when I heard Sirius/XM DJ Franny Thomas explain how after thirty-one years, REM was calling it quits: the End of the World As We Knew It, As It Contained REM. She then played “Country Feedback” from the 1991 Out of Time album, a song whose balladeering was a new kind of wistful and expressive in its time, and back in my day. I was eleven or twelve years old when I picked REM’s Out of Time from a mail-order-music gimmick in a comic book (alongside Clapton’s Unplugged); that compact disc shined in its gray digital glory, all through the metamorphoses of junior high and high school and off to college, wailing out along with “Near Wild Heaven” and resiliently in the choruses of “Shiny Happy People” across all those trickier years. I remember watching frontman Michael Stipe’s erratic dance of lost religion on MTV, on a television in a living room in an age that seems such a distant place now: “I thought that I heard you sing/I think I thought I saw you try/But that was just a dream,” and doing that dance in dark corners of cafeterias and gymnasiums, beneath the balloons and streamers of a school dance, and all of us there, in rented formal wear, danced and shook and did continue our transformation, in time to the stoic beat of Bill Berry. We grew up and graduated from those transitional places, and may have carried with us some of the music. I also had a cassette tape of Out of Time—perhaps discovered in a free pile, or picked up for cheap, knowing it was worth passing to someone who hadn’t discovered the lament and melancholy that was the postmodern vision and gateway to grunge on which we’d ride out the century: “these barricades can only for so long/her world collapsed early Sunday morning” (“Belong” from Out of Time).

I dodged in and out of the REM catalog in college, until someone turned me on to their 1998 Up. This electronic experiment came after Bill Berry’s departure from the band and the dumping of their longtime producer Scott Litt. Up may have been the turning point in their career—I won’t profess to know my detailed REM history, but have had a deep experience with two of their works. I do know they didn’t tour in support of Out of Time, and were hesitant to do so in support of Up: I never saw REM live, but the long drives I took thumping “Lotus” and “At My Most Beautiful” from massive speakers buckled into the back seat of my old Buick may have brought me closer to understanding the creative and spiritual vision of Michael Stipe: “the bull and the bear are marking/their territories/they’re leading the blind with/their international glories/I’m the screen, the blinding light/I’m the screen, I work at night” (“Daysleeper,” from Up). If Stipe was concerned with the stock market’s pissing ground in 1998, no wonder the last decade of the band’s output has been musically and lyrically dour: “I don’t think it’s that easy, we’re lost in regret/now I’m trying to remember the feeling when the music stopped” (“Outsiders,” from 2004’s Around the Sun). I’m glad Michael Stipe, an individual who has publically and privately emerged through his life, emerges now a liberated, neo-postmodern poet with a trademark bald gaze, one who was keen enough to see that we and Madonna were Losing Our Religion in 1991; it remains his democratic and participatory task to make sense of what we’re losing, or gaining, these days. One may hope that Stipe, Peter Buck, and Mike Mills each do not fade into their own artistic obscurity and become consumed by the raw awesomeness of their last-century legacy (see Beck). I am grateful for having been Out of Time for decades; for having been embraced the space-cadet synths and melodies of Up. Stealing from Blake as elegy: if it truly is the “End of the World (As We Know It),” as the pop culture anthem resonates, what we know of this world that is ending will be due in part to REM’s songs of innocence and songs of experience.