We Must Say So

Covering this for Paste marked not the first time I ever saw R.E.M., but it was the most recent and, now that they’re done forever, the last (until the Central Park reunion concert?) I guess. I suppose it’s fitting that the popular wisdom around the band’s close-out is that they began feeling like they could no longer adhere — as they always had — to that line of “World Leader Pretend,” the Leonard Cohen tribute on 1988’s Green: “I have been given the freedom to do as I see fit.” 

Having come of musical age in the 1990s and early 2000s, I’m sad to say the first R.E.M. album I ever bought was Reveal, and, while I spent a good week’s worth of headphone hours trying to get myself into a band that I already understood to be pretty seminal, I just didn’t like it that much. What I came to know eight years later while living and befriending UGA grads in Georgia, where R.E.M. looms just so monstrously large, was that the band was somehow too seminal to the music I had been exploring as a fourteen-year-old. What I could manage to devote my oncoming tinnitus to was this gut-hittingly visceral, ear-punchingly overdriven drivel. Too many manipulations of R.E.M.’s sound had been cycled through and bowdlerized by college and alternative rock for an honest original like R.E.M. to make a lot of sense. It was only after crate-digging for ’70s punk and ’80s indie pop in college and passing through a requisite Velvet Underground understanding that the wit and edge and verve and cunning and force of R.E.M. made a fuller sort of sense. That they were much, much more than “Stand” and “Losing My Religion.” I guess what I’m saying is that I came at it all loopy backward-like. I think I tend to do that with a lot of taste-related matters. Others probably walked more directly into the band’s arms. I’m just glad I got there eventually.

By the way, if I’ve ever been on the phone with you and have said “I can hear you, can you hear me?” I’m quoting “Sitting Still.” Ah, that feels good to get off my chest.