Trying to identify the most personally-significant event of 2011 is a tough one. After all, 2011 was the year I moved to a great new place, proposed to my girlfriend of three years, got paid to write and host a TV show, and finally bade farewell to my childhood by – despite all protestations on my part – turning thirty.
But hitting the big three-urghhh was not the childhood-concluding moment I thought it would be. No, my childhood actually ended a few months later when my favourite band of all time, REM, broke up. When I say “my favourite band”, I don’t just mean I own all of their albums; I mean that I almost had them retroactively listed on my birth certificate as a third parent, given how much their albums raised me during Those Difficult Teenage Years.
The news of their break-up came on September 22 (AEST), the very same day my TV show – itself a week away from its debut – started getting very positive national press coverage, so I woke up to some very mixed emotions. And, months later, I’m still sort-of in shock. But I really shouldn’t be: I predicted this back in 1999.
When I say I predicted this, I don’t mean it in a vague “Oh, they’re going to break up one day,” manner, but in a very specific “They will break up after the release of their fifteenth studio album.” I was that specific. Earlier this year, Collapse Into Now, their fifteenth album, was released, and I started to get nervous.
How did I predict this event, twelve years before it happened?
It all started, as these things usually do, with my mother getting me the wrong CD for Christmas.
I was starting to discover my own musical tastes, and I was pretty sure REM was one of them, even though in the early days I was pretty bad at discerning what was REM and what wasn’t. (On more than one occasion, I would have the following exchange with my friend Tim: “Hey, you know what REM song I really like? Original Sin.” “That’s INXS.” “Oh. Really? Okay. But Holy Grail is pretty good!” “Yeah, that’s Hunters and Collectors.” “Huh.”)
But still, I was a fan of their music. I hadn’t been listening to the radio long enough to get sick of its endless Losing My Religion plays, so its unconventional use of the mandolin, mildly obfuscating lyrics, and addictive hooks turned me into a massive fan overnight (even if my ability to guess which songs were or were not made by them was way off base). I asked my mother for their Best Of album, which is exactly what I was given. Except it was put out by IRS, the label that they’d been on before Warner Bros catapulted them to the mainstream, so all of the tunes were completely unfamiliar. There was no Losing My Religion, no Everybody Hurts, just a lot of prog-rock my ears were completely untrained for.
That Christmas day, listening to the album start to finish, gradually realising that this was not the band I thought it was, I was disappointed. It was too rough, too raw, and my limited musical knowledge left me unable to grasp a context with which to appreciate it.
But my ears soon trained, and I was shocked to discover the album I’d struggled with on its first listen was filled with some of the greatest hooks and stings I’d ever heard. Lyrics with meanings that, after multiple listens and a lot of serious thinking, revealed themselves with the sort of soul-shattering thunder that turns so many unbelievers religious.
Everyone has those moments of musical revelation throughout their life. Mine came with the deceptive simplicity of Driver 8, the evocative Cuyahoga, the heartbreaking So. Central Rain.
I devoured their albums, catching up on early works like Fables of the Reconstruction and Document, finally getting Losing My Religion on Out of Time and Everybody Hurts on Automatic For The People, then discovering those albums featured bigger delights from Low to Nightswimming to Find The River.
I rejoiced when their first new album since I’d become a disciple – New Adventures In Hi-Fi – was released. I followed them loyally through their unfairly-maligned electronic period, finding so much to love in music that was clearly passing many others by. But as this new stage of their career guided me from teenagehood to adulthood, I began to see strong parallels with another group; one that had guided my childhood: the Marx Bros.
(Bear with me on this. If Monty Python is widely accepted to be the spiritual successors to The Beatles, then this seemingly-ridiculous analogy at least deserves an airing.)
Whilst the deeper comparisons are certainly there – both groups reinvented their fields, became the best at what they did, and proved innovative and engaging even in their worst products – it’s actually the superficial ones that interest me more. There is a symmetry to the way these groups behaved.
The career of the Marx Bros can be divided into three clear categories. First, there was the Paramount years, in which the four brothers did what is considered by fans to be some of their best work. Then, after Zeppo left and reduced them to a threesome, the dynamic changed. They signed with MGM and made some of their biggest hits. In later years, they made films that are considered in the press to be a nadir, yet many fans (myself included) regard them highly.
Contrast this with REM’s three phases: first, there was the IRS years, in which the four band members did what is considered by fans to be some of their best work. Then they signed with Warner Bros and made some of their biggest hits, truly propelled into the mainstream. Then, after drummer Bill Berry left and reduced them to a threesome, the dynamic changed, and they made albums that are considered in the press to be a nadir, yet many fans (myself included) regard them highly.
Aware I was the only person on the planet using the Marx Bros as a career template for REM, I had a distinct feeling that the contract REM signed in the late 90s with Warner Bros for a further five albums would be their last. It seemed too symmetrical to ignore.
It wasn’t just the number of albums that tipped me off. Blue, the final track on 2011’s Collapse Into Now, is the closest they’d come to anything that could be seen as a career epilogue, breaking tradition and engaging in the sort of self-reflexive encore they habitually avoided.
The first time I heard Blue – March 5 of this year, hours after I’d bought it – was a strange experience. Patti Smith, the legendary singer whose album Horses first inspired REM singer Michael Stipe to become a singer in the first place, was guesting once again. She’d already appeared on their album New Adventures In Hi-Fi (my favourite album), singing with Stipe on E-Bow the Letter (my favourite song). Years later, I would discover it was Stipe’s favourite song as well. Clearly, we both responded to that sort of free-associating, almost plain-spoken song that the band had only attempted once before with Out of Time’s extraordinary Country Feedback.
But Blue was not merely a continuation of this spoken word style, a third entry in a style of indie pop you could imagine Rex Harrison singing if he was an 80s prog-rocker. It was a direct homage to E-Bow The Letter, a sequel of sorts.
A sequel.
Was this really the same band who had followed up their best-selling Automatic For the People with the loud rock-star anthems in Monster? Who had been told they could make all the money in the world by “doing another Automatic,” and so responded by doing the exact opposite? Who, after being told their 1991 single Shiny Happy People was a dead-cert chart-topper, inserted a couple of waltzes into the middle of the song to – unsuccessfully – prevent this? The band that had eschewed easy money for artistic integrity, making album after album that was not guaranteed to hit with the general public, let alone their large and loyal fanbase? For a group that was always looking forward, Blue was a shock to the system. A great song, but more worrying for what it represented: REM was done moving forward.
There had been clues leading up to this, though. Back in 2008, the song Houston (from Accelerate) opened with the morose “If the storm doesn’t kill me, the government will,” sung by a character seemingly searching for a new city to settle down in after his home town was destroyed in the wake of a storm. The song evoked both the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina and the ineptness of the government response. One album later, the song Oh My Heart opens with the response: “The storm didn’t kill me, the government changed.” It was time, they were telling us, to reflect.
There were more clues: Accelerate’s Sing For The Submarine, you find deliberate lyrical references to Feeling Gravity’s Pull (from Fables of the Reconstruction) and [It’s The End of] the World As We Know It (from Document) and Electron Blue & High Speed Train (both from Around The Sun). The song itself is as original as anything else on that penultimate album – certainly not as much a stone-set sequel as Blue would eventually be – but the hints were there. These guys were starting to take stock. They were winding down.
And that was okay. There was a proper coda to a career that had spanned three decades. There was no falling out, no sudden and acrimonious split, no controversy. It was a conclusion that felt natural, even amidst the album’s impossible fun of Alligator_Aviator_Autopilot_Antimatter and extraordinary ballad Oh My Heart and the ethereal Überlin. Despite the criticisms of the third stage of their career, the tyres were still full of air.
I resisted the temptation to be upset that they’d quit in the midst of being so damn good, instead celebrating that they’d quit in the midst of being so damn good. They’d gone out on a high, with a perfectly-formed body of work in their wake.
As I write this, I’m listening to their Live At the Olympia In Dublin album, recorded in 2007. Astonishingly, a second ago their 1984 song Little America began, opening with the line: “I can’t see myself at thirty…” When I first heard the song, I couldn’t either. Now, half a year into thirty, I’m tipping my hat to a band that made it to thirty-one.
I have never had a year more defined by new beginnings and opportunities than 2011, so it’s fitting that this should be the year that the most important band of my formative years finally called it a day. Farewell, guys; and thank you.
Image credit: Kathryn Sprigg
