Just when I proclaimed that Slate’s getting its act together on its music reviews, along comes a middling R.E.M. review by Chris Suellentrop (who’s usually on the political beat). Besides some outrageously broad claims (R.E.M. is the best band of the last two decades?! How and according to whom?) it’s not a bad piece of writing: Suellentrop manages to take the new R.E.M. tour and Warner Brothers singles comp as an occasion to ask which direction the band can take, given the weight of nostalgia around their necks. But in the end, his effort to analyze the band gets sidetrack by his own relation to the nostalgia. To wit,
From almost the beginning, there’s been something backward-looking about R.E.M. fandom, a secret wish that R.E.M. never become more than a heralded but middling-selling college band from Athens, Ga.-even though such obscurity would mean that the vast majority of R.E.M. fans engaged in this Edenic pining would never have discovered them. Band friend Natalie Merchant has succumbed, saying in 1995, “I don’t know if I’m being nostalgic, but when they do a song like ‘So. Central Rain’ or ‘Fall on Me,’ I get a feeling that I don’t get with a lot of the newer material.” For a considerable subset of fans, the band’s concerts are largely exercises in subtle, cooler-than-thou boasting. When I went to a show during the 1995 Monster tour, I tried to distinguish myself from the throngs of teenage girls by wearing my ratty T-shirt from the 1989 Green tour. Mere moments after entering the gate, I was outclassed and shamed by a man in a pristine shirt-it must have been kept vacuum-sealed on a closet shelf- from the band’s 1987 Work Tour.
Yes that petty I-was-there-first mentality is easy to make fun of. But it seems that Suellentrop was more upset that someone beat him in that game, rather than the fact that the game existed. Also, it’s hard not to agree with Natalie Merchant on this one - the first records in their catalog are rich, understated and wonderful in a way that their 90s period or after has not been. (UPDATE: as if to prove my point, their new single “Bad Day” came on the radio. Not a bad song, the sort of song that would have been fun to have discovered on a single’s B side in 1990 in fact. But as an A-side rocker?…) Does that mean the band should crawl under a rock? No, but it does mean that not all of the nostalgia boils down to hipster posturing. Besides, the hipsters don’t care about R.E.M. these days, they’re too busy buying vintage Gary Numan T-shirts, digging up forgotten 12″ dance singles and reclaiming AOR rock and style.
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