I have always felt a little let down by the group REM. In the early 90s they produced two great albums, Automatic for the People and Out of Time.
Songs like Drive, Everybody Hurts, Man on the Moon, Losing My Religion and Shiny Happy People were everywhere in the early 90s and added to what i think of as the golden age of music in my lifetime.
Then it all seemed to go pear shaped with the Monster album in 1994 and they have just been bobbling along not doing very much exciting ever since.
Now they have another album out 'Collapse into Now' but i have long given up on expecting anything as barnstorming as their earlier efforts.
I'm not really sure what to put down the rise and fall of REM to. They did their best work at the same time as the likes of Nirvana and Pearl Jam were producing the Grunge sound which is a million miles away from what REM were putting out but somehow REM were associated with that era, possibly because of the close friendship between Michael Stipe and Kurt Cobain.
I see plenty of young students wearing Nirvana, Guns n Roses and Pearl Jam T shirts and listening to the those bands music but R.E.M. and their music is not ageing very well. I have had conversations about Pearl Jam's and Nirvana's MTV Unplugged sessions but never R.E.M.'s Unplugged.
R.E.M. it seems, are regarded as an old band, much like how i always saw the Rolling Stones, living on past glories and not really noticed. Just hanging about bothering the charts occasionally.
I certainly won't buy their new album and won't go out of my way to listen to it. It seems that REM have turned into 'oldies music' who only really appeal to people of my generation and they stopped appealing to me around 1994.
2 comments:
I’ve been through a bit of a journey with REM too, but a slightly different one to you… So… “contrarian alert!”… I thought REM were fantastic too, but mainly for their first five or six years. Each of their few albums managed to sound like absolutely nobody else on earth, but also very distinct from one another. I must have played Reckoning, Document and Green many hundreds of times.
Maybe it’s because I heard them too often, or perhaps it’s because the sound had gotten a bit ‘pastoral’, but I wasn’t as keen on either Out of Time or Automatic. Or maybe (even more likely) I was a pretentious little geek and didn’t like a band I liked when they were ‘underground’ getting too popular. Anyway, for whatever reason, at the time I thought that Monster and New Adventures in Hi-Fi were both something of a return to form.
Then I abruptly turned off, and although I realise REM have kept on releasing albums, I haven’t heard any of them. I haven’t really liked the singles I’ve heard… but probably more importantly, by the mid 90s I’d started listening to mainly electronic music.
Anyway, brilliant live band – I saw them touring Green in 88 and Monster in 94 and both gigs are probably in my top 20, ever.
I had the same sort of experience as Cheezy where i found there move into 'mainstream' is where i jumped off. I never associated them with Grunge though, they just happened to be around at the same time as Nirvana and Pearl Jam.
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