![](\"http:\/\/radiobeta.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/10\/rem.jpg\")
<\/p>\nYeah, yeah, I know – most important American band of the last twenty years, bla bla bla.<\/p>\n
Save it.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
REM – Michael Stipe, Pete Buck, Mike Mills and the long-departed Bill Berry – have been critical darlings and, for the most part, commercial powerhouses for a generation now (it used to really bug my stepson that after a jag of feeling hip that he’d gotten the new REM record, I pulled out my copy of Murmur<\/em> from my sophomore year of college. Psych).<\/p>\n Well, good for them. Here’s the maddening thing about REM; I can scarcely listen to a single one of their albums all the way through.\u00a0 Pete Buck once <\/a>described the band’s is-it-a-stereotype-or-is-it-a-cliche style:”Minor key, mid-tempo, enigmatic, semi-folk-rock-balladish things. That’s what everyone thinks and to a certain degree, that’s true.”\u00a0 REM’s music is all oblique this and badly-enunciated enigmatic reference that and sophomore poetry-class the other thing, and always, always Michael Stipe prancing around going “hreydee-yo hree murrup” and “and nuh freyn konnukter fez, ryever ape, pake a mape”…<\/p>\n Mind you, I don’t mind <\/em>oblique, enigmatic and sophomoric per se. And I can’t knock the band itself; Mills and Berry were an excellent Watts ‘n Wyman-style rhythm section; Mills has a distinctive yet perfect backing vocal style; Pete Buck is…well, perfectly functional given his chosen limits. And Michael Stipe is a good singer with an excellent (albeit not Bono-like) and distinctive voice. But most of REM’s music invariably bores me stiff…<\/p>\n …except that every album (that I bothered listening to, which hasn’t happened since 1998’s Up<\/em>, includes one, and only one<\/em>, song that I just absolutely love, love love – which always comes out after\u00a0 <\/em>the dreary, minor-key mid-tempo southern-mythology-sodden ballad.<\/p>\n But as with most of these “things I should love but don’t” pieces, it’s not so much the artist as the artist’s fans. And it’s not just that REM fans are just this side of Grateful Dead fans in terms of worshipping.\u00a0 No, it’s the damage they did.<\/p>\n An alt-rock radio program director I once knew summed up alt-rock in the late eighties: “There are two types of music”, said the learned sage; “Noisy rock, and Jangly rock”.\u00a0 The poles of his universe were Dinosaur Junior on the one hand, and REM on the other.\u00a0 And this program director was hardly alone.<\/p>\n So for a couple of years in the late eighties and early nineties, alt-rock diverged into two miserable paths: sludgy, mopey glop that eventually morphed into grunge, and jangly, folky music in a zillion nearly-identical permutations (The Connells, Wednesday Week, Aztec Camera, Let’s Active!) that eventually morphed into…<\/p>\n …well, landfill.\u00a0 Nobody remembers any of it.\u00a0 Not even – be honest! – most of what REM did.<\/p>\n Well, some of it, we do.\u00a0 Only we can’t make out the damn words.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yeah, yeah, I know – most important American band of the last twenty years, bla bla bla. Save it. REM – Michael Stipe, Pete Buck, Mike Mills and the long-departed Bill Berry – have been critical darlings and, for the most part, commercial powerhouses for a generation now (it used to really bug my stepson […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,14],"tags":[211],"class_list":["post-4691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mitch","category-music","tag-love-and-hate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4691"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4691\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26893,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4691\/revisions\/26893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n![](\"http:\/\/img160.imageshack.us\/img160\/7220\/januaryzz4.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/krishk.files.wordpress.com\/2008\/03\/rem_1024.jpg\")
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\n![](\"http:\/\/botany.csdl.tamu.edu\/FLORA\/wob\/elisa\/auditory\/rem.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/globalmajority.org\/gm\/images\/stories\/rem.jpg\")
\nAlbum by album:<\/p>\n\n
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