R.E.M. Cool, Again?

Andrew Leonard writes the “How The World Works” blog for Salon.com. His writings are generally about economics and globalization. His most recent post is a meditation on the evanescence of hipster street cred, as demonstrated by the career of R.E.M.

Andrew Leonard is obviously around my age, able to remember the amazing impact that the albums Murmur and Reckoning had on fans (and the Chronic Town EP for the really plugged in.) The band became a huge international success, selling boatloads of albums and playing concerts at the Enormo-domes. But their hipster street cred was lost relatively quickly. Mr. Andrews points to the ubiquity of the “Losing My Religion” single. I think the Top 40 breakthrough of “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” probably sealed the deal for the cool kids and moved them off of college radio.

Hey, Microsoft offered them bazillions to use “End of the World” to launch the advertising campaign for Windows (to their credit they refused–and the Rolling Whores added to their bottom line by selling out “Start Me Up”. A lousy song for a lousy product.) But even though they produced several more very fine albums: “Green”, “Out Of Time” “Automatic For The People”, the band was not the same.

For fans, the fun of discovering and championing a new band ends in one of two ways–in the immortal duality posed by Neil Young in Rust Never Sleeps: burn out or fade away. Burn out spectacularly and you can remain an indie cult icon forever (Jeff Buckley, Elliott Smith). R.E.M. is still plugging along, but they are fading away in terms of relevance. If everyone knows the band, it’s no fun spending your time discussing their music with your friends. It doesn’t seem as compelling.

In his post, Andrew Leonard pointed out that the new R.E.M. album was being played on his local college radio station, and they have made the full circle from hip to hype and back again. I hope so, but I’m not so sure. As Bill Wyman definitively shows on this post from his blog Hitsville, rock critics have been writing ad nauseam that the “new” R.E.M. album is the return to form and former glory that their fans are desperately hoping for. I have the feeling that we’ll never feel the same about R.E.M. as we did back in the day. But we’ll still have our memories.