Stipe
Young people don’t understand the effect Michael Stipe’s voice has on people of my generation. I can feel my blood pressure drop whenever an REM song comes on - suddenly a sense of calm washes over me and I feel like everything is going to be okay. It is a complete mental cleanse.
REM was a constant presence in my life from 1985 – 1995. I was a little late to the party, but you’ll have to excuse me, I was still emerging from my hard rock/heavy metal stage in the early eighties. I received three albums for my high school graduation. They were as follows; Wang Chung – Points On a Curve, The Hooters – Nervous Night, and REM’s Reckoning. My friends and I listened to Reckoning in the car one day and they deemed it boring. “This is putting me to sleep”, might have been the exact quote. I can pinpoint this event as the moment when our musical tastes started to diverge.
College was beginning for me after these summer months and I was ready to try new things. Fresh music seemed a good place to start. REM felt like the perfect soundtrack to freshman year. They were thoughtful, emotional, and fun. The school must have been handing out their albums at freshman orientation or something because everyone there seemed to know who they were. It was a band we could call our own.
A couple of years later in my junior year, their popularity exploded. Document came out and set them on a path to become the most popular band in America. They didn’t feel like mine anymore, but I still enjoyed their albums well into the nineties. Although 2001's Reveal is one of my favorites, it seemed like when the new millennium began, they stopped setting trends and started following them. It was then that I just lost interest.
For such a huge band with a catalog of high quality material, REM’s legacy seems sadly diminished. My kids only have a vague knowledge of their existence, just the occasional song that Mom and Dad sing along to on the radio. They are probably thinking, “This is putting me to sleep.” They’re not the only ones who are dismissive. In the 2012 Rolling Stone list of the 500 best albums of all time, REM doesn’t make an appearance until #197 with Murmur. That is a ranking lower than albums by Linda Ronstadt, Aerosmith, The Carpenters, and Kiss. Now granted, Rolling Stone is a bit lame, but still…197? I suppose it doesn’t matter where REM places on some dumb list as long as I still appreciate what they did and continue to get enjoyment from their music, but The Carpenters?! What the shit?! That pisses me off! By the way, in a more recent list, Document was moved from #462 up to #39. I’m not sure why that happened, but at least it’s a step in the right direction. I’d rather it was Life’s Rich Pageant, but I’ll take it.
So that’s it. My tirade is over. Listen to REM again or try it for the first time, just listen.
P.S. As much as I enjoy the comfort of his singing, the sound of Michael Stipe’s speaking voice, coupled with his preachy nature, makes me want to lay down and die.
