R.E.M.

▪ American rock group

Introduction

      American rock group, the quintessential college rock band of the 1980s. The members were Michael Stipe (b. January 4, 1960, Decatur, Georgia, U.S.), Peter Buck (b. December 6, 1956, Berkeley, California), Mike Mills (b. December 17, 1958, Orange, California), and Bill Berry (b. July 31, 1958, Duluth, Minnesota).

      R.E.M., named for a dream-state condition (rapid eye movement), formed in 1980 in Athens, Georgia, a university town about 65 miles (105 km) northeast of Atlanta that was already internationally noted for its local pop scene by the time R.E.M. released Chronic Town, its 1982 debut extended-play recording. Stipe, obsessed with his own passions and hatreds, was a rounded tenor who draped vague words in sonically reassuring cadences, and Buck, with a wider-ranging view of rock, was a guitarist drawn to fun and ideas; they met at the record store where Buck worked and Stipe shopped. Their band was more melodic than earlier groups in Athens, such as Pylon, yet never as lighthearted as the B-52's. R.E.M. answered only to themselves.

      This quality explains the unmatched regard that would accrue to this romantic band—the American equivalent of Irish rockers U2 and British alternative rock groups such as the Smiths (Smiths, the), bands also interested in stretching the rock-band guitar tradition into something newly personal. Beginning with the shifting sonic tapestry of “Radio Free Europe” (first released in 1981), R.E.M. drew on influences as various as the Byrds (Byrds, the), the Velvet Underground (Velvet Underground, the), Big Star, Patti Smith (Smith, Patti), the Rolling Stones (Rolling Stones, the), and the New York Dolls (New York Dolls, the) to regale fans with albums fashioned from unpredictable blends of nonmetal rock and impressionistic folk. Especially ambitious was the band's 1985 release, Fables of the Reconstruction, a tense blend of R.E.M.'s ideas about folk rock and those of Joe Boyd, an American expatriate who worked in the 1960s with British artists such as Nick Drake and Fairport Convention. R.E.M. also offered singles such as “Fall on Me” and “The One I Love,” which broadened its audience. The tack was completed in 1991 when Out of Time reached number one on the British and American album charts and the single “Losing My Religion” became an enormous hit.

 R.E.M. taught successive generations of American rockers how to be vague and specific at the same time; by juxtaposing evocative phrases to create poetic collages, they involved listeners in the creation of the meaning of their songs. The group spent the 1990s making balladic albums such as Automatic for the People (1992) and rowdier, noisier collections such as Monster (1994).

      Soon after the release of New Adventures in Hi-Fi in 1996, drummer Berry, who had suffered health problems, left the band. With his departure R.E.M. again reinvented its sound with Up (1998), an adventurous album of sonic experimentation. The band continued to perform and record together into the 2000s—releasing Reveal (2001) and Around the Sun (2004)—but also branched out individually to work with other performers. In 2007 R.E.M. was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and released the group's first live album, titled R.E.M. Live, later that year. Accelerate (2008), which followed and received great notices, emphasized electric guitars and Stipe's lustrous baritone while aiming allusive broadsides at the administration of Pres. George W. Bush. R.E.M. seemed unpleased with the course U.S. politics had taken in the four years since the band had last recorded a studio album; however, the group must have taken solace in its old revved-up folk-rock sound because the new music emerged iconic.

James Hunter

Representative Works

● Murmur (1983)

● Fables of the Reconstruction (1985)

● Out of Time (1991)

● Automatic for the People (1992)

● Monster (1994)

Additional Reading

Robert Christgau, Christgau's Record Guide: The '80s (1990), provides provocative discussions of R.E.M.'s albums from Chronic Town (“every so often a chaotic undertow suggests there's more to their romanticism than Spanish moss”) to Green. Christgau struggles with the lack of literary specificity in the band's lyrics, promotes some understanding of their Southern origins, slightly underrates Fables of the Reconstruction while noting that the album “clinches it: their formal frame of reference is folk-rock,” and uses the crucial word to explain R.E.M.'s appeal for a certain sort of rock-based fan and commentator: “reassuring.” Patricia Romanowski, Holly George-Warren, and Jon Pareles (eds.), The New Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll, revised and updated ed. (1995), pp. 826–827, presents a focused and informed narrative of the band's formation, development, and recording history through the Monster album. Mike Mills, “Our Town,” in Clinton Heylin (ed.), The Penguin Book of Rock & Roll Writing (1992), pp. 401–408, is an essay about Athens written in 1985 by R.E.M.'s bassist. The first sentence—“When you mention ‘the Athens scene' to anyone who's been here for four or five years, they get weird”—accurately establishes both the tone and ambition of the piece.

* * *