Eat Some Cake, Driver 8

Since I discovered them back in high school, R.E.M. has been my favorite band. My first exposure was on their IRS compilation Eponymous and then through their 1988 album Green. It should be stated right now that I just turned 27 and that the high school experience I speak of was all of eleven years ago. I'm not one of those few who can claim that I saw Buck, Berry, Mills, and Stipe perform under the Negro Eyes moniker at a birthday party in Athens, Georgia back before the Chronic Town EP was released. Nor can I claim that the band sold out when they signed to Warner Brothers, recorded "It's the End of the World As We Know It," or started enunciating the lyrics.*

No, Bill Berry was long gone when I joined this party and their best years were all ready behind them according to most critics, fans, and men on the street. Hell, the first album of theirs I bought brand new was Reveal.** I bought the CD the week before I graduated from high school (in the summer of 2001) and it felt like a right of passage.

You see, in the months leading up to Reveal's release, every major music magazine - Rolling Stone, Q, Uncut, Mojo, etc. - ran huge retrospectives on R.E.M. and their career. R.E.M.'s previous effort - 1998's Up - was ... well, uneven at best. It was expansive, pensive, and felt listless without Bill Berry's drums. It was a new R.E.M. and it split the market. I still consider Up one of the band's best efforts and - in light of what the band was going through at the time - far more interesting and complex than most of its detractors will admit. But time heals all wounds and three years later everyone was ready to forgive R.E.M.'s trespasses and embrace whatever Reveal turned out to be. I remember hearing "Imitation of Life" on the radio over and over. I remember the excitement of finding remixes on Napster (remember Napster??) and puzzling over the album artwork. It was the first album I really got into the release of, and my own excitement was fueled by those aforementioned retrospectives.

Every critic in every music magazine must've been about 30-something in 2001 and R.E.M. was the soundtrack to their college years. Glowing articles outlined how Michael Stipe was singing about their pain - albeit cryptically. I was about to enter my college years in 2001 and I was hellbent that Reveal would be the soundtrack to my college years, too, goddamnit!

In hindsight, Reveal wasn't really the soundtrack to college (I'll tell you about that later***), but it was the soundtrack to the month after I bought it. A few years later I got the chance to see R.E.M. in concert at the Fox Theater in St. Louis (supporting the very disappointing Around the Sun) and was impressed by the energy of the then-45 year old Stipe. Of course, I didn't know his age at the time and when I found out that he turned 50 today, I was surprised. After all, he was the lead singer of the sound of my college years (or, at least one of the sounds of my college years). Hearing he's 50 just makes me feel old. I can't imagine how old the rock critics who wrote those 2001 articles feel.

* Frankly, this last criticism baffles me. My favorite song from the IRS years is "We Walk" off of their very first album and I can sing along to it just fine.
** This may not be true, depending on whether or not you count their soundtrack to the Milos Foreman film, Man On the Moon.
*** Ooo ... foreshadowing! It's like the music-blog version of How I Met Your Mother!


"We Walk" by R.E.M. from the album Murmur
"Driver 8" by R.E.M. from the album Fables of the Reconstruction
"You Are the Everything" by R.E.M. from the album Green
"Find the River" by R.E.M. from the album Automatic for the People
"Bang and Blame" by R.E.M. from the album Monster

(NOTE: I realize that after defending Up and Reveal, I didn't feature a single song from either album. All in due time, though. I promise I'll have more R.E.M. soon enough.)

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