[HN Gopher] What happened when REM went mainstream
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What happened when REM went mainstream
Author : johnshades
Score : 57 points
Date : 2025-02-17 18:36 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (yalereview.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (yalereview.org)
| autoexec wrote:
| > But if it once was (or still is) alternative, one might then
| ask: Alternative to what?
|
| One might ask that, but not if one were very smart. "Alternative"
| was the dumping ground for anything not playing on the weekly
| top-40, rap, country, or oldies channels. It's a useless genre
|
| On any given day you could turn the radio to the "alternative"
| channel and have almost no expectation at all as to what kind of
| music you'd hear. In that sense REM is perfect for the genre,
| because their sound changed so much from album to album.
|
| These are all alternative songs, all of which played on the
| alternative radio stations alongside REM, but good luck finding
| any kind of common thread beyond "there's usually a guitar
| involved":
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IqH3uliwJY
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JkIs37a2JE
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wt5EHAqhR1c
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAdLskQtWo8
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PDlGUdDF8Y
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPjPb3nNprg
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBFXFzqIjHM
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GCrzjVdmSg
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzUnqr1t7yI
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m39DWVFK-Bw
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDK-wsdEhNE
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ejga4kJUts
| bmurphy1976 wrote:
| For those who don't want to watch:
|
| 1. Cherry Poppin' Daddies - "Zoot Suit Riot"
|
| 2. Jamiroquai - Virtual Insanity
|
| 3. Ben Folds Five - Brick
|
| 4. Tangerine Speedo - Caviar? I don't know, never heard this
| band.
|
| 5. Tori Amos - Winter
|
| 6. Ween - Push Th' Little Daisies
|
| 7. NIN - Mr. Self Destruct
|
| 8. The Presidents of the United States of America - Peaches
|
| 9. Jane's Addiction - Been Caught Stealing
|
| 10. 10,000 Maniacs - What's the Matter Here?
|
| 11. Pearl Jam - Better Man
|
| 12. The Cranberries - Zombie
| bluedino wrote:
| 1. Ska
|
| 2. Wikipedia says acid funk/jazz
|
| 3. Alternative
|
| 4. ?
|
| 5. Piano light rock
|
| 6. Alternative ish, kind of phish-ish?
|
| 7. Industrial
|
| 8. Alternative rock
|
| 9. Alternative rock
|
| 10. Alternative rock
|
| 11. Grunge
|
| 12. Grunge
| tptacek wrote:
| I don't know what "Tangerine Speedo" is, but that aside,
| but all of these are alt acts. I have a weird thing about
| mid-90s alt rock radio (I very good memories with that
| soundtrack), and a bunch of playlists pulled from actual
| alt radio playlists, and all these acts were prominent.
| "Grunge" is a pure subset of alt; mainstream ska (C.P.D.'s
| one ill-advised high-rotation song was swing, not ska) and
| industrial were both offshoots of alt.
| havblue wrote:
| So it's music that 89x played in Windsor/ Detroit in the
| nineties.
| tclancy wrote:
| As Joshua Ray Walker might ask, "What even is this?" The first
| few links are from a decade and a half after REM and others
| started making lovely music that we called "college" at the
| time before it got lumped into alternative. Genre names tend to
| be decided by publishers, not fans, thus Billboard's slow move
| to "R&B" once they realized "race records" was a little too on
| the nose. Any genre not deemed "pop(ular)" by publishers tended
| to be for a certain "special interest", country, soul, race,
| college. There is power in having a name for things and knowing
| there are others out there like you, especially in the days
| when that statement only came from distant FM bands.
| eikenberry wrote:
| I always thought of alternative radio/music happening due to
| college radio becoming popular. College radio was always much
| more eclectic and avoided main stream music. At least it seemed
| to follow that path where I grew up as the alternative radio
| stations popping up all seemed to lift their playlists from the
| local college station's most popular and pop-oriented music.
| francisofascii wrote:
| Fair question. I kind of agree. The term "alternative" is more
| about what it isn't rather than what it is. During the early
| 90's that meant, not traditional rock and roll, not pop, not
| R&B. So not Van Halen, Def Leppard, Bon Jovi, not Michael
| Jackson, Madonna, Celine Dion, TLC, etc.
| svachalek wrote:
| Ah, these were my college years. IIRC the charts were very
| heavy on hiphop and country at the time (as they still are) so
| alternative was pretty much where all the other genres went.
| Not so much the songs that didn't make the charts, as entire
| genres that were niche.
| jzb wrote:
| "It's a useless genre"
|
| Today, sure. It wasn't always. Alternative in the 80s was
| pretty much "rock, but too weird and smart to be played on the
| AOR/classic rock stations, and not on a major label". That
| might sound like "dumping ground" as you described, but it
| wasn't really -- it was a fairly coherent genre for a while,
| until everything started being called alternative if it wasn't
| pop or mainstream hard rock, etc.
|
| Classic rock stations would play Guns 'n Roses, Def Leppard,
| but not R.E.M. or Concrete Blonde, and certainly not Rollins
| Band, for instance. There were no alternative rock stations, at
| least in/around St. Louis, excepting the college station (KDHX,
| 88.1).
|
| Legit alternative: R.E.M., Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians, The
| Replacements, The Smithereens, The Smiths, B52s, XTC, Concrete
| Blonde, Echo & The Bunnymen, Pixies, Dinosaur Jr, plenty of
| others. In the late 80s and early 90s, after R.E.M. and others
| had commercial breakouts, the genre was muddied beyond
| recognition. Especially with the advent of grunge and more
| accessible industrial music like NIN.
| tptacek wrote:
| I mean, Ben Folds Five and Jamiroquai are hard to stick up
| for, but they're "legit" in the sense that neither would have
| fit on AOR radio or on the AOR charts.
| jzb wrote:
| BFF's first album was in 1993, and Jamiroquai was formed in
| 1992, I think. Both of those were well after the term was
| muddied beyond recognition. I'm skeptical of the claim that
| Jamiroquai was being tagged "alternative", same with Cherry
| Poppin' Daddies (also 90s, IIRC).
|
| Note that by the mid-90s, if not sooner, a lot of 80s alt-
| rock was seeping into AOR / classic rock / hard rock
| playlists. (Source: was a DJ on a classic rock station from
| 1995 through 1998. Played R.E.M., Pearl Jam, bunch of other
| alternative/grunge stuff alongside 60s/70s/80s classic
| rock. And a little bit that wasn't _technically_ on the
| approved list since I was usually working midnight to 6
| a.m., but that 's another story.)
| tptacek wrote:
| Right, I'm just saying that "alternative" never had a
| pure meaning to begin with. Punk had a DIY ethos. Art
| rock had formal experimentation and also lyrics that
| don't mean anything. Hard rock had codpieces. Alternative
| was just a relabeling of a "misc" category, and genre
| rock was so stultified by the time the label happened
| that anything good was naturally going to sprout inside
| that "misc".
| gopher_space wrote:
| > There were no alternative rock stations, at least in/around
| St. Louis, excepting the college station (KDHX, 88.1).
|
| In the Seattle area around that time "alternative" was just
| whatever CKMU (also a college station) happened to be
| playing.
|
| "Alternative to what, being popular?"
|
| Yes. Exactly the point.
| mbostleman wrote:
| In the 80s, college stations were all I listened to other than
| WXRT when I was visiting friends in Chicago.
| tptacek wrote:
| "Alternative" makes more sense when you remember:
|
| * The name "Alternative" is a rebrand of "Modern Rock" (modern
| wasn't superseded by alternative; it became known as
| alternative).
|
| * "Alternative" is an alternative to AOR and hard rock/metal.
| You can dunk on it by pointing to bands like Alice in Chains,
| which is basically a drop-tuned Motley Crue with harder-to-
| understand lyrics, but really the whole point of it as a
| "genre" was as a catch-all for acts that sounded neither like
| Guns n' Roses nor Fleetwood Mac.
|
| Cherry Poppin' Daddies is unforgivable, though. I'll give you
| that. But without a playlist like yours, you never could have
| gotten the BNL bit on Community:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfdTnpV03p8
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I picked up a few years worth of _Rolling Stone_ from the late
| 1970s which chronicle dissatisfaction with Rock as a genre. It
| started out with classically trained musicians who went into
| directions such as progressive rock and arena rock that
| eventually drifted away from critics and audiences.
|
| You got a new generation of people who learned to strum the
| guitar because they liked rock music and they gave us punk and
| other simplifications of rock. Punk had no commercial potential
| and thus gave rise to post-punk and new wave which, after a few
| years that everybody (even Barry Manilow) had to make disco
| records if they wanted to get play, had a backlash. First
| synths became a "new sound" (even Neil Young!) but soon they
| became mandatory as they were the basis for "music word
| processors" and once the old musicians switched to them people
| quit caring about their new albums.
|
| Alternative came out in the 1980s as a reaction to that whole
| mess.
| miunau wrote:
| I agree- the label was always about marketing more than
| anything. If you were under 30 and your songs were in any way
| vaguely different from the status quo of pop and rock, you too
| could be "alternative".
| relaxing wrote:
| Can't comment on the Microsoft comment below since it's dead,
| but... I wonder if there's parallels to be drawn...
|
| Gates and Allen went from Harvard to being founders in
| Albuquerque in '75 to Seattle '79 and becoming a corporate
| behemoth. Berry, Buck, Mills and Stipe went from the University
| of Georgia in '80, bootstrapping their first record then signing
| with IRS records in '82, to being a corporate behemoth under
| Warner in '88. And if their first ~$10M Warner deal was a seed
| round, their next $80M deal was an exit.
| smcin wrote:
| Sounds like 'spurious correlations', a la Tyler Vigen
| [https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations] - compare to
| the cost of butter or the number of pirates in Maine, et al.
|
| Anyway there's going to be co-causation: did Gen-X college-grad
| hipsters fuel the rise of alt-rock, or did the boom in alt-rock
| bands conform to the tastes of Gen-X college-grad hipsters and
| their increasing wealth (via the boomm in tech companies), and
| how much of that was mere social signalling about trying to be
| cool, vs musical tastes and intentional curation?
| fallinditch wrote:
| "My father gave me Monster a week after buying it, calling it
| "the most pretentious piece of shit I've ever heard." This is
| funny because the whole point of Monster was a shot at
| unpretentiousness." [1]
|
| I never got into REM, I preferred The Fall, The The, The Smiths,
| Pixies, Pavement.
|
| [1] https://www.treblezine.com/out-of-time-r-e-m-s-generation-
| ga...
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| We can be frenz.
| jzb wrote:
| "Monster" is the only R.E.M. album from the Bill Berry era that
| I never listen to. Not quite sure why, but I gave it the
| requisite three listens when it came out and shelved it. Nearly
| wrote R.E.M. off at that point, but "New Adventures in Hi-Fi"
| brought me back. Was disappointed when Berry left and they
| didn't break up then as they had always said they would.
| (They'd said many times that if anybody left, it wouldn't be
| R.E.M. any more and they wouldn't carry on... but then they did
| anyway.)
|
| Got to see them live on the Green tour in 1989. Still one of my
| top-five concerts of all time, and I've been to more shows than
| I can count since.
| LastTrain wrote:
| It has an extremely grating guitar tone. Love REM. Love all
| kinds noisy guitar rock, that album just hurts my ears.
| [edit] Also saw them on the Green tour Oct '89 :-))
| fumar wrote:
| As an elder millennial, I like early REM. I can place them on the
| alt indie history timeline. Yet unlike sonic youth or pavement or
| my bloody valentine, REM made it well into top 40 territory. I
| don't have a strong attachment to the band. Compared to Radiohead
| or Interpol who seem to be engrained in my core memories. I don't
| know if college aged people today have major exposure to music
| from 98-2008.
| tptacek wrote:
| I will never understand Pavement. I was born without the
| nervous system structure required to understand Pavement.
| The_Blade wrote:
| i just remember MTv being seismic in 91. Smells Like Teen
| Spirit, that video of Even Flow live in Seattle, Magic has HIV
| and Kurt Loder is wearing a CON-DOM shirt before spinning Ain't
| Too Proud to Beg where Left Eye is wearing a condom in her
| right eye. 120 Minutes was the best, Matt Pinfield got me
| through some crappy papers about Ethan Frome and any one of
| those books that uses red on the body as a symbol of whatever
|
| there was that day the video for Losing My Religion came out
| and it seemed like a harbinger of both the beginning and end of
| the dual pillars of 80s college / grunge. bless you Murmur,
| bless you Meat Puppets, bless you MTv. touch me i'm sick,
| everybody, i wanna dip my balls in it!
| ithkuil wrote:
| A few minutes ago I picked up a dusty CD at random, after
| possibly multiple years of not listening to my CD collection. It
| was a REM album.
|
| Then I open HN and I see this title. Serendipity
| sosogroovy wrote:
| That's a "Coincidence". "Serendipity" refers to learning new
| unexpected knowledge while searching for some other knowledge.
| _pushes glasses back up nose, makes nerd snort_
| jgilias wrote:
| If we're going down that route, here's an actual definition:
|
| serendipity /,ser@n'dIpIti/ noun
|
| - the occurrence and development of events by chance in a
| happy or beneficial way.
|
| Seems like parent's use is Ok.
| sosogroovy wrote:
| In the modern sense. I'm a bit of a stickler. Kinda like
| how many feel about Morrisette's use of Irony.
| usrusr wrote:
| Similar here, long time R.E.M. listener/collector who had just
| listened to some last week, then surprisingly heard Stand
| played quietly at a bar on the weekend (even misidentified it
| as Nirvana at first, it was really barely hearable, the kind of
| happy bar where people are louder than music, not the reverse)
| and now "Then I open HN and I see this title".
|
| I do start to wonder if there's some sub-threshold attention
| wave going on.
| sosogroovy wrote:
| This is a really good synopsys, not too fawning, not too
| critical. REM was an early college band that was sincere and
| handled pop fame with tact and restraint (counterpoint: U2, of
| the same era). They sort of did exactly what a "normal" band
| should do: write music, find fans, expose people to a new style
| of music, become very popular, don't try to push it past the
| cultural shifts, and gracefully exit without any scandal are
| smarminess. Who does that anymore, or even gets the chance? I
| think the only bummer is that they influenced so many alt
| musicians that their style is in everything non-pop these days.
|
| Of course, I'm pretty biased, though: I was a senior in
| highschool when the day after REM played my city half my
| graduating class was wearing the concert shirt.
| tptacek wrote:
| Were they all that restrained? I'm thinking about Stipe's
| cringe-y activism, and the starfucker galaxy of Stipe, Courtney
| Love, and Billy Corgan; even the idea of "meeting [grunge] on
| its own turf" is a reframing of the band not as an authentic
| artistic endeavor but as a pop culture trend artifact.
|
| How much influence did REM have? What's a well-regarded indie
| musician you'd say was prompted largely by REM itself, rather
| than Patti Smith and Big Star?
| sosogroovy wrote:
| >> cringe-y activism,
|
| That subjectivity depends on what side of the political
| spectrum you fall.
|
| >> starfucker galaxy
|
| _eyeroll_
|
| Love/Corgan are still trying to ride their 15-mintues TO THIS
| DAY. Love is like a venereal disease, she just keeps coming
| back. And Corgan groomed some teen-aged fan to be his bride
| and is currently performing 7 hour meditation synthloop
| pieces to select audiences.
|
| Where's Stipe? Off being a normal human.
|
| >> meeting [grunge] on its own turf"
|
| Uh, when did REM say this?
| tptacek wrote:
| I'm on REM's side of the political spectrum, and have
| always found Stipe's activism to be performative; in fact,
| a lot like Morrissey's activism, except Morrissey put his
| money where his mouth was (more's the pity for all the rest
| of us). I think of REM and immediately flash back to a high
| school friend that had "DIRECT" "PEACE" "NOW" "REM" buttons
| on her coat, and presumably no idea what those words
| actually meant (except for the REM bit) --- much like Stipe
| himself.
|
| I'm not saying Stipe is morally equivalent to Corgan
| (though: be careful how much research you do here). I'm
| saying that, in the grim span from "Out of Time" to
| "Monster", Stipe was approximately as authentic as Corgan,
| and was a social scenester in the same way. It alarms me to
| realize that Corgan was a more formally interesting
| songwriter in that period than Stipe was.
|
| REM didn't say they met grunge on its own turf; the article
| did. But I vividly remember the launch of Monster, and it
| was in fact an answer to grunge. The author of this piece
| is not making that up.
|
| I think REM's first couple records (and, probably,
| Automatic) are basically unimpeachable. I'm not cynically
| dunking on REM.
| bsder wrote:
| > I'm on REM's side of the political spectrum, and have
| always found Stipe's activism to be performative
|
| I don't think it's performative, but it was definitely a
| later-stage add-on. The blame for that (positive or
| negative) falls squarely on Natalie Merchant.
| sosogroovy wrote:
| >> It alarms me to realize that Corgan was a more
| formally interesting songwriter in that period than Stipe
| was.
|
| "formally interesting". I'm a native English speaker and
| composer and don't understand your phrasing.
|
| >> I'm on REM's side of the political spectrum, and have
| always found Stipe's activism to be performative;
|
| I disagree, but it entirely rests on what one person's
| definition of "cringey" is. I think your awkward attempts
| at sounding intellectual are alarmingly cringey and less
| formally interesting.
| AntiRush wrote:
| I think you're underestimating the influence of R.E.M. on
| their peers and those that follow. The first 3 that come to
| mind:
|
| Nirvana - Cobain famously said "If I could write just a
| couple of songs as good as what they've written".
|
| The National - Toured with, worked with, still bring Michael
| Stipe onstage every once in a while.
|
| Radiohead - Thom Yorke: "I've ripped them off left, right and
| centre for years and years and years and years."
| tptacek wrote:
| I concede Radiohead (though, of course, not Nirvana). First
| time I saw Radiohead was at an REM show (Patti Smith made a
| surprise appearance). I'd still go to bat for the argument
| that REM's influences are more influential than REM itself
| is.
| cglace wrote:
| Some other bands that list them as an influence are
| Pavement, Pearl Jam, Live, Collective Soul, Alice in
| Chains, Better Than Ezra, Liz Phair, The Decemberists,
| Wilco.
| tptacek wrote:
| You hear Pearl Jam in that list the way you hear Nirvana,
| but I think that has more to do with the chronology and
| with REM's unofficial role as the bellwether/popularizer
| of alt radio (which I think is overblown) than any actual
| artistic influence. Whatever Liz Phair wants to say about
| Exile, her real influences (besides the Stones) are
| simply REM's influences.
|
| I concede The Decemberists. Basically a band that blended
| the Athens Elephant 6 sound with 80s college rock. Sure:
| the Decemberists were more influenced by REM than by
| Patti Smith or the Velvets or Television.
|
| Wilco is a weird one. I have a suspicion that Wilco, or
| at least Jay Bennett-era Wilco, is more influenced by
| mainstream early-90s alt rock than anybody is comfortable
| admitting. Heavy Metal Band is basically 1979 off Mellon
| Collie, which: what Chicago band is going to admit that
| influence?
|
| Collective Soul, Better Than Ezra, Live: these are bands
| that kind of prove my point. The lead guy from Live once
| wrote Stipe a letter asking for advice on how to become a
| rock star.
| tptacek wrote:
| _Your Nirvanas and Pavements and Radioheads--behemoth alt-rock
| bands that seem to be endlessly rediscovered by newer generations
| as a source of credibility--have kept their cultural capital,
| while R.E.M. remains marooned in Alternative Muzak-land._
|
| The irony of this being published in The Yale Review is too much
| for me. If REM had stopped after Reckoning the way Television did
| after Adventure, the only way anyone would be able to talk about
| them would be in hushed reverential tones. The article scoffs at
| the notion of "selling out", but then tells a story of an
| esteemed band doing exactly that, and the inevitable outcome, of
| "Losing My Religion" playing in the background at every
| supermarket.
|
| (For calibration purposes: Murmur is a top 5 album for me, and my
| top 5 REM albums would include Automatic).
| kasey_junk wrote:
| All credibility is gone if you, in 2025, still have Murmur over
| Reckoning in your REM rankings.
| tptacek wrote:
| Silence, Out Of Time-liker.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| There is one song on that album that is problematic and
| that's because it was played _too much by everyone_.
| freetime2 wrote:
| > Not since the Muzak corporation has there been an institution
| that soundtracks drugstores, supermarkets, and shopping malls
| more readily than R.E.M.
|
| Wondering if other people agree with this? Because it doesn't
| really match my experience at all. I wouldn't say I've heard REM
| in stores often enough for them to be noteworthy in that regard,
| much less infamous.
| UtopiaPunk wrote:
| I've definitely heard REM in grocery stores and stuff, but not
| considerably more than other rock bands. I think popular older
| rock music of almost any genre is kind of the go-to background
| music these days. People are nostalgic for the old tunes they
| grew up with, so 30-40 year olds shopping for milk kind of like
| it, or at least find it inoffensive. That's my sense for it
| anyway.
|
| Heck, I remember once stopping in my tracks in a grocery aisle
| because I heard War Pigs by Black Sabbath playing over the
| sound system. No one else in the store seemed to be paying
| attention, though.
| harry8 wrote:
| Way back when, the big story about REM was that the world's
| richest man, Bill Gates, wanted "It's the end of the world" for
| his advertising blitz for windows 95. REM, they said, told him to
| take a hike so he had to settle for the Rolling Stones "Start Me
| Up" instead. Windows 95 was culturally pretty big.
|
| Turning down a very large sum of money suggests you believe
| something in a way that simply lecturing others doesn't.
|
| I don't know what the members of REM believe, probably not all
| the same thing. But whatever it is, maybe they do really believe
| it. That counts for something. Contrast Mick Jagger & Keith
| Richards.
| tptacek wrote:
| That was plausibly a commercial decision as much as anything
| else. I mean, Tom Petty famously refused to license his music,
| too. You can read in this article a good description of why a
| band might not want to dilute themselves that way: once you
| hear a band playing in the background at a department store,
| you can't un-hear that.
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