REM: Classic or dud?

i might be wrong, but it feels like the world needs a stipe solo record with an allstar cast of producer and / or helping hands.

no former bandmates allowed, though.

I'd love to see them play in a chill small venue but not in an arena again (even though KC stadium in a monsoon was actually great :I'll Take The Rain followed by Have You Ever Seen The Rain)

I think Bill's only recent shows have been local fundraising events, I can't imagine him wanting to leave the farm for a reunion tour

For sure.

the whole band being based around a couple who separate acrimoniously aspect is important there, i feel.

But hey, Stereolab just reunited, I never expected that!

FWIW, Stipey's been doing solo stuff too: https://www.stereogum.com/2042301/michael-stipe-new-solo-song-your-capricious-soul/video/

I could see them all coming together for a special occasion but I don't anticipate these guys are going to do another world tour.

I would like to see a Mike Mills solo album, maybe with involvement from Berry. Don't care if there's a tour or not - Bill can stay on the farm! But I'd like to hear what a Mike Mills album sounds like.

you know after reading the Lurie book and reading about Stipe's side projects in the early days, that's the one I would want to hear.

I miss them. In the minority and I've said it a million times, but I think they were always really good. They had a very rich musical background and, at their best, were able to create a very American kind of music in a way that I don't really see happening again.

what is a very American kind of music

i am not american but i think i know what tim means. wilco would be another example i think. or bruce springsteen.

Mike Mills did make a solo-album

I would contribute money to hoping they stay retired: I love the good albums too much. Then again, streaming revenue from a catalog is so pathetic that bands don't sully their legacies anymore with reunion tours and what-not.

This is not a band where financial pressures would force them back into a reunion tour. When the band renewed their Warner contract in the mid 1990s for tens of millions of dollars, they are said to have invested the money well. If I recall correctly, in a post-<i>Collapse into Now</i> interview Mike Mils scoffed at the idea of a reunion tour because "it's not like he would have difficulties putting his kid through college".

That was my sense too.

Yeah I mean if they do reform it's because they actually want to and, fantastic as the live shows were, they gave every impression of hating touring. So I just don't think it's going to happen and that's fine.

My affection for REM embraces every twist and turn of their story. I don't NEED them to reunite or record or do anything in particular. Dayenu; it would have been enough if they'd all vanished after Monster or Up or Around the Sun or, heck, Automatic FTP. The essential music is there and always will be.

If they want to do more things, good for them; if they don't, cool. Everything I truly need from them is within my memory and can always be called to mind when I want it.

They totally seem like the sort of band that would secretly reunite, record a few songs, then release them as previously unreleased tracks. Like when Camper Van Beethoven released its track by track cover of "Tusk" they claimed was from the vaults, even though it was really an experiment to see if they could all get along together before reuniting for real. I want to say the same was true for another CVB "rarities" comp ("Camper Van Beethoven Is Dead. Long Live Camper Van Beethoven").

I saw Mike and Pete with The Baseball Project back in July in a venue that held maybe around 150, and it was terrific. I saw the band once, live, on the GREEN tour, and wish I could have seen them again. But as of now I can easily just rest on the existing discography.

what is a very American kind of music

Well, obviously, not one thing or one hundred things, but I’m interested in music that is evocative of its actual versus its conceptual environment. Growing up in California, that was a huge part of what was so mind-blowing about R.E.M. Their southern qualities were very palpable and I don’t think it was a put-on in the slightest. As they got farther away, living and recording outside the south, I think they did lose some of that, but on Collapse Into Now, there’s still things like “Walk It Back,” “take the leading chair at the fairground,” etc.

re: very kind of American music...there seem to be a lot of takes wondering where their legacy will end up, and increasingly I think The Band is the most likely outcome. Deified in their lifetime, but ultimately just a really good (American) band that moved the needle, perhaps less musically, and more as inspiration.

There was an article written around the time of Reveal where the author had interviewed band members, and he noted that they were spending most of their time in perfectly air-conditioned, posh five-star hotels around the world, "about as far as one could get from actual rock 'n' roll inspiration". At that time and ever since, there has seemed to be little distinctly American about them – so much of the buzz around Reveal happened in the UK or on the continent. At best, the band could represent New York City thanks to Stipe’s fondness for it, but anywhere provincial like Athens was already left far behind them.

in further news, U2 and The Thrills now represent Southern California exclusively

sometimes the UK like bands *because* they sound American?

https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/haim-and-the-uk-success-of-quintessentially-california-bands/?&cf=1

makes you think

the reason i mentioned it is just that it kind of raises an eyebrow in the same way that describing someone as "all american kind of guy" does - invariably, they're talking about white people. not calling out tim or anyone else (until relatively recently i would have agreed that REM or The Band sounds like platonic "american music" - i realize it's a kind of accepted musical genre term, for better or worse), just calling attention to it to make sure the term actually makes sense to use. i mean...would you describe something like Son House or Miles Davis as very American kind of music? it would be accurate to do so, but usually what we mean is that there are white guys with guitars playing it

Uncut magazine had the biggest boner for a certain kind of American music.

didn't realize uncircumcised music was back on the up and up

xpost It was kind of fascinating how big of an impact the Band apparently made on UK stars. George Harrison called them "the best band in the history of the universe.” There's a quote from Clapton: “I used to put it on as soon as I checked into my hotel room, do the gig and be utterly miserable, then rush back and put the tape on and go to sleep contented until I woke up the next morning and remembered who I was and what I was doing. (Music from Big Pink] was that potent)." The Band was supposedly the impetus for him leaving Cream, and also iirc the birth of Derek and the Dominos.

not quite sure i buy the dominance of the "American=white" trope, in this particular case. i'm thinking of e.g. greil marcus - whatever his other faults, his 'america' in music (the major theme in mystery train) is defined by sly stone and robert johnson as much as anybody else. and people are fond of namechecking jazz, hip-hop and rock as american contributions to the history of music writ large, though i'll admit that probably a lot of those people picture white people when they think of rock.

There's definitely a ton of references to what I'd call Americana and US history in their lyrics as well as many references to less familiar US towns.

I agree that R.E.M. falls into a continuum of bands that engaged with the concept of Americana (e.g., the Band, the Dead, the Beach Boys, 10,000 Maniacs, etc.), in a way that's not so true of the Replacements or Black Flag or Husker Du, etc.

(actually I don't know a lot about Husker Du, so forget that example; just namechecking some roughly contemporaneous & celebrated acts)

Josh - Perhaps an even bigger impact was on Fairport Convention, I think it helped kick off folk rock.

Think they said, we'd love to be like The Band, but we cant, so we'll dig into Britain's past and do something spiritually similar.

And here's a forthcoming box set next month about just that:

https://www.cherryred.co.uk/product/across-the-great-divide-getting-it-together-in-the-country-1968-74-various-artists-3cd-boxset/

Another thing about R.E.M. is they did what I described without getting too much into working in "traditional" American musical idioms (with some exceptions). They were the "new, weird Americana"...

Josh - Perhaps an even bigger impact was on Fairport Convention, I think it helped kick off folk rock.

Oh, absolutely, totally forgot about the Band's (and "Americana"'s) influence on them. I mean, look at the songs that what was more or less Fairport covered as the Bunch. Buddy Holly, Ray Price, Elvis, Johnny Otis, Chuck Berry, Everly Brothers ...And then there's the cover of "Million Dollar Bash" on "Unhalfbricking."

The lyrical references are all American, aren't they? Which could seem ordinary to American ears but overseas would have that same allure that Jarmusch and Paris, Texas and such have.

I'd say that many of them sound exotic to American ears as well, at least to mine. As a kid growing up in Boston, REM sounded like they were from another world entirely.

REM never sounded particularly weird or exotic to me, neither did the Band. (Of course, for the longest time the Eno solo albums didn't sound exotic to me, either, but a year or two ago they suddenly reverse-clicked after a couple of decades of listening and I thought, huh, this shit is pretty weird.) But now that it's been brought up, Fairport always sounded exotic to me.

Most of R.E.M.'s early lyrics were obviously pretty unintelligible and/or elliptical in the first place -- but when you could understand them, some of the lyrics (particularly on Fables)obv. engaged with specifically Southern/regional topix. There was also "Little America" (a road/tour song), etc.

When Out of Time came out, Stipe was going around saying that the phrase "losing my religion" was a Southern idiom, but I don't know if that was really true or not.

It is. Synonymous with 'at my wit's end' and things of that nature.

it was really true then and it still is

re: very kind of American music...there seem to be a lot of takes wondering where their legacy will end up, and increasingly I think The Band is the most likely outcome. Deified in their lifetime, but ultimately just a really good (American) band that moved the needle, perhaps less musically, and more as inspiration.

― campreverb, Friday, September 13, 2019 1:42 PM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

aside from the southern gothic thing and I guess drafting in mandolins (?) comparisons btw REM and The Band are totally lost on me...The Band were shambolic and shaggy, even at their most "country" REM was was tight as shit with pop hooks, punk ethos, new wave sensibilty

but esp w/r/t legacy...I mean the Band charted 2 top 50 songs. REM had six #1 singles! For a moment they were the biggest band in the world. I doubt they'll be remembered more as an "inspiration" than as a singular band with great albums.

Deified in their lifetime, but ultimately just a really good (American) band that moved the needle, perhaps less musically, and more as inspiration.

Absolutely moved the needle for me musically. I'm a musician, born in 1968, and in 1984 they were, for me, the number one model of what I wanted to find my way to being ten years down the road.

would you describe something like Son House or Miles Davis as very American kind of music?

Thanks for elaborating on this topic when I didn't. Yes of course on Son House. My immediate reaction to that question re. jazz is that I absolutely see early jazz, big band, and bebop as very American kinds of music.

I don't know enough about Miles Davis.

Another thing about R.E.M. is they did what I described without getting too much into working in "traditional" American musical idioms (with some exceptions). They were the "new, weird Americana"...

Yes!!!!

Their talent in the early days does strike me in retrospect as having been a revival of some sort of perception of what a rock band unit could be. I've always related the old story about Bertis Downs first seeing them play and thinking, "It's like seeing the Who in 1964" (or whatever he said, exactly) to this.

George Harrison called them "the best band in the history of the universe.”
precisely my point-the contemporaneous accounts of The Band suggests that the praise/influence in their lifetime hasn't really matched their subsequent critical stature.

That seems to be occurring with REM as well. don't get me wrong, I love them both, but it would be naive to think their stature has held up to anywhere near the level of the peak adulation during their IRS run. In the back of my mind are Soto's posts on his blog about how his students barely know who they are.

Strictly chronologically speaking, that is like wondering in 1984 what college students knew about music from 1949, though.

> REM had six #1 singles!

Nah...even "Losing My Religion" wasn't a #1 song. Are you thinking Modern Rock/Alternative/whatever charts?

Four top ten US singles, nine top ten US albums.