Are you okay with the REM break up???
Asked by
Anonymous
For those of you who haven’t heard yet—and for those of you who’ve already sobbed into the fraying hems of your Chronic Town t-shirts—R.E.M. is no more. “As lifelong friends and co-conspirators, we have decided to call it a day as a band,” they wrote on their official website, REMHQ.com.
I am decidedly NOT okay with it, although over the past several years, the band members (especially Peter “I’m in every Scott McCaughey side project ever” Buck) have pursued other interests and produced other albums.
There are purists who say that the ‘real’ R.E.M. broke up when Bill Berry left; I appreciate what he brought to everything he bashed the drums on, but really liked the addition of Bill Rieflin, especially his contributions to Accelerate. That said, the fact that the nucleus of the group—Mike and Peter and Michael—won’t be wearing the R.E.M. name anymore is sad, although not entirely unexpected.
If anything, it will make me press my favorite R.E.M. releases even more tightly against my soul (get ready to make out, Murmur) since there really, literally, won’t be anything like them again.
Believe it or not, I never had the chance to see them in concert, so that will go down as one of my great regrets, right up there with failing to ask Nick Lowe to go out for a drink (after a D.C. area show in 2009) and that spiral perm I had in the 10th grade.
Sometimes I’m surprised that the band made it 31 years, especially because everything they did was compared to Murmur or Reckoning or Fables of the Reconstruction. How would you like your work at thirty to continually be judged against what you did at 23? They couldn’t keep going in the direction they pioneered; that meant they were being derivative. And when they reinvented themselves, well, that meant that they were abandoning their roots. Being Michael Stipe had to be hard sometimes.
Anyway, I wish them the best in whichever liner notes their individual names will appear in next. I’ll always be a fan and will be forever grateful that so many of their songs soundtracked my life.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be listening to “Perfect Circle” for the rest of the day and, after dinner, will raise a glass of bourbon toward a slowly sagging railway trestle somewhere on the outskirts of Athens, Georgia.
