R.E.M. grew out of the vibrant music scene of Athens, Georgia, in 1980. Lead singer Michael Stipe, a recent transplant from the St. Louis suburbs, was taking art classes at the University of Georgia and singing in a kitschy cover band when he met record store clerk and guitarist Peter Buck. Sharing an interest in the New York music scene and a frustration with conventional pop, they started playing together. Before long, a friend connected Buck with a drummer named Bill Berry, who introduced him to a bass player he knew from high school, Mike Mills. This alliteratively named rhythm section was the more musically experienced half of the quartet, having played in bands together growing up in Macon, Georgia.
Fellow Athenians the B-52’s had released a successful debut album shortly before R.E.M. formed, and a group named Pylon was about to experience some success of its own. Locals could tell there was something special about R.E.M., too. They were energetic and confident, but their sound omitted the polished synthesizers and guitar pyrotechnics. They sought to challenge the conventions of rock, which ironically meant establishing a firm set of rules for themselves. They would not produce glitzy videos for MTV, they would not become an arena band, they would not sacrifice their style to reach a broader audience, Stipe would not lip sync for television, and they would share songwriting credits.
The band signed with the independent record label I.R.S. in 1982 and released a five-song EP later that year. Their debut LP, Murmur, earned the nickname Mumble because of Stipe’s subdued voice and frequently indecipherable lyrics. But the Byrdsy jangle of Buck’s Rickenbacker, along with Mills’s high harmonies, gave the songs clear pop appeal. It was an enormous critical success, and Rolling Stone named it the best album of 1983 — beating a handful of other classics including Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
A certain kind of R.E.M. fan saw everything after Murmur not just as inferior, but as an act of selling out, a move toward the mainstream by a band that had started, in the words of biographer Peter Ames Carlin in his new book, The Name of This Band is R.E.M.: A Biography, as “defiantly anti-commercial.” This is the central paradox of R.E.M., the definitive college radio act of the 1980s that went on to become one of the biggest bands in the world in the 1990s and to sell more than 90 million albums. They’ve always been celebrated for their artistic integrity. But, like Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy,” there was a load of compromisin’ on the road to their horizon. Does that make them hypocrites and sellouts or just savvy artists who understood that, to continue performing, they needed to continue adapting?
R.E.M. released an album every year between 1983 and 1988, gradually earning more acclaim and college radio airplay. These twangy early records featured influences that ranged from the Velvet Underground and Patti Smith to fellow Georgians Flannery O’Connor and the outsider artist Howard Finster. Stipe’s vocals became more prominent and coherent and the lyrics, though still cryptic, became more directly political. It’s hard for even the most conservative fans to dislike progressive anthems such as “Exhuming McCarthy” and “Fall On Me.” Then, in 1987, they expanded beyond college radio and into the mainstream top 10 with “The One I Love.” Even with the generic title, the song rejected convention: It’s not a love song at all, but a sneer at “a simple prop to occupy my time.”
Having proven that their distinctive sound could appeal to a broad audience, R.E.M. drew the attention of major labels and signed a lucrative contract with Warner Bros. in 1988. In 1991, they landed their biggest mainstream hit ever with the mandolin-driven mid-tempo ballad “Losing My Religion.” The video was a smash, too, fusing homoerotic and Christian imagery. Pushing boundaries, defying expectations, challenging the mainstream — classic R.E.M.
Then again, the follow-up single “Shiny Happy People” was one of the corniest songs of the decade. In the music video, featuring old friend Kate Pierson of the B-52’s, the band performs choreographed dances with a crowd of extras. Stipe wears a sideways baseball cap that matches his oversized sports coat, looking like an overgrown child in a J.C. Penney catalog as he lip-syncs. Berry, banging a marching drum, looks like a Christmas toy. Mills spins an upright bass. As Carlin points out, only the dour Buck seems aware of how far they’ve strayed from their initial mission. But I dare you to listen to that song without singing along.
So R.E.M. was full of surprises as they became the biggest American rock band of the decade. They inspired groups such as Gin Blossoms and Hootie and the Blowfish. But when louder grunge acts such as Nirvana and Pearl Jam arrived, R.E.M. moved from the beautiful acoustic, string-heavy Automatic for the People (1992) to the crunchier, glam-inflected Monster (1994). In my own mental biography of R.E.M., the latter is when the band, too desperate to keep up with their younger competition, sold out.
And, as the old joke goes, sell out they did — stadiums around the world. The world tour for Monster was enormous, but also the source of the band’s first major crisis, when Berry suffered a brain aneurysm during a concert. He’d record one more album with the band before deciding he’d had enough of rock-star life in 1997. Compared to how Keith Moon left The Who and John Bonham exited Led Zeppelin, this was an undramatic departure for a drummer.
From here, Carlin’s book is mostly a denouement. The band continued to record, garner accolades, and tour. They continued releasing albums in the 21st century, though they were greeted more warmly by critics than by fans. The band rarely embarrassed itself — Carlin singles out only one bad album — but they were no longer alternative rock vanguards. They broke up, without teasing fans with a farewell tour, in 2011.
Carlin’s history of R.E.M. is enormously satisfying, though it’s not without fault. Readers may dispute some of Carlin’s musical categorizations — fellow college-rock band the Feelies were nobody’s definition of “punk” — and too often he presents unconvincing readings of Stipe’s cryptic lyrics. But broadly, Carlin’s quick pace and insightful writing convey the excitement of R.E.M. during its rise and prime, a particular feat because a book about a consistent and stable band, comprising kind people who actually like one another, runs the risk of being dull. Although the band members didn’t grant him interviews, he had access to many friends and associates who provide a colorful picture of the world around R.E.M. He pays due attention to the band’s political activism, even if he probably overstates R.E.M.’s role in sending Bill Clinton to the White House, as well as to the significance of Stipe’s coming out of the closet in the mid-’90s.
In June, after Carlin’s book went to press, the full band reunited to perform “Losing My Religion” for their induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. “We are R.E.M.,” Stipe said, dusting off the matter-of-fact way he used to start shows, “and this is what we did.” It was a poignant performance, in part because their physical appearances and Stipe’s unsteady vocals testified to how long it had been since they’d been together. Like Carlin’s book, it also conveyed what made them so special for so long.
Christopher J. Scalia is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the host of The Back of the Book, an arts and culture podcast.
