It's Michael Stipes birthday today so Happy 48th Birthday Mike.
REM have always been a bit of a strange band for me, they hung about for ages not doing very much then suddenly dashed out two great albums and a handful of barnstorming songs in the early nineties and then seemed to go back to being pretty average again.
I bought 'Out of Time' and 'Automatic for the people' and loved the singles on it including 'Losing My Religion', 'Everybody Hurts' and my favourite REM song 'Man on the Moon' but since those heady days, they seemed to have just dropped back into the plethora of so-so bands churning out nothing-to-get-excited-about music.
All this leads me nicely onto Nickelback who had a huge hit with 'How You Remind Me' about 6 years ago and then buggered off for a few years doing nothing very exciting and then suddenly, out of nowhere conjured up the brilliant 'Rockstar' which is sitting just outside the top 10 in the UK Charts.
I know it has been knocking about in North America for quite some time but they finally saw fit to release it here and i have replaced the iffy home burnt version with the proper CD and have been driving along for the past few weeks singing about how the girls come easy and the drugs come cheap and popping my pills from a Pez dispenser.
Brilliant song, great video but i just wish bands would either stay good or stay hopeless. Messes me about no end when they suddenly pull a gem out of a long line of duffers.
Now, where did i put that Pez dispenser.
3 comments:
Lucy, you might have been late to the party. Radio Free Europe, in 1982, was the most original thing I had ever heard, and I still get goosebumps listening to the original Hib tone single. R.E.M, IMHO, invented alternative music in 1982 with that song. There was NOTHING like it before. Plenty afterward, but they did invent a whole new genre of music. BTW, in honor of Falling on a Bruise, my word verification is OUCHY.
Me being late to the party is not unusual Cody, i do seem to be one step behind most people when it comes to music. I blame my parents and their Billy Joel brainwashing tactics.
I really did not take much notice of REM until those 2 huge albums at the start of the 90s but i do tend to be one song behind most other people, must take a while for a tune to penetrate my thick skull.
Ouchy, how apt.
I agree that REM have been a little lackluster in recent years, but I'm with Cody that they were relevant going all the way back to the 1980s.
Don't get me started on Nickelback. Unimaginative, formulaic "modern rock" at its lamest, IMHO.
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