13 ms·

What happened when REM went mainstream

69 points by johnshades 2y ago

fsckboy 2y ago
[flagged]
- micromacrofoot 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - seba_dos1 2y ago
    Since everybody says what they thought it would be and not what it actually is: it's about R.E.M. the music band.
    - croisillon 2y ago
      everyone seems to be losing their religion
      - fsckboy 2y ago
        you've said too much you've said enough
  - frostyel 2y ago
    [dead]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
autoexec 2y ago
> 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=1IqH3uliwJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JkIs37a2JE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JkIs37a2JE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wt5EHAqhR1c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wt5EHAqhR1c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAdLskQtWo8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAdLskQtWo8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PDlGUdDF8Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PDlGUdDF8Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPjPb3nNprg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPjPb3nNprg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBFXFzqIjHM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBFXFzqIjHM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GCrzjVdmSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GCrzjVdmSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzUnqr1t7yI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzUnqr1t7yI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m39DWVFK-Bw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m39DWVFK-Bw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDK-wsdEhNE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDK-wsdEhNE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ejga4kJUts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ejga4kJUts
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- bmurphy1976 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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.
      - smackeyacky 2y ago
        OMG they nearly played one show and then broke up. I’m not surprised you’re not cool enough to have heard of them. I heard of them before they formed. They were going to write a song but decided it was too commercial so they decided to never actually form a band to avoid selling out. You sound like a casual music listener.
  - 2y ago
relaxing 2y ago
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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- smcin 2y ago
  Sounds like 'spurious correlations', a la Tyler Vigen [https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations 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?
  - relaxing 2y ago
    Where did you get the idea that Microsoft caused REM? All I said was they followed similar trajectories. You think the radio, tv, live concert and record industry made billions selling a product people were only pretending to like? There’s a lot to be explored in the social currents of the 80s-90s and the business of the music industry but you’re not going to get there from that angle.
    - smcin 2y ago
      Noone suggested Microsoft caused REM. I agreed with you that their separate rises happened to have similar trajectories, your observation was interesting, and I suggested there's not much to it beyond a loose correlation.
fallinditch 2y ago
"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-gap/ https://www.treblezine.com/out-of-time-r-e-m-s-generation-ga...
- 4ndrewl 2y ago
  We can be frenz.
- jzb 2y ago
  "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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- tptacek 2y ago
  I will never understand Pavement. I was born without the nervous system structure required to understand Pavement.
- The_Blade 2y ago
  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!
JohnnyLarue 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
back7co 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
ithkuil 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    If we’re going down that route, here’s an actual definition: serendipity /ˌsɛrənˈdɪpɪti/ noun - the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way. Seems like parent’s use is Ok.
    - sosogroovy 2y ago
      In the modern sense. I'm a bit of a stickler. Kinda like how many feel about Morrisette's use of Irony.
    - ithkuil 2y ago
      TIL it comes from: "1754: coined by Horace Walpole, suggested by The Three Princes of Serendip, the title of a fairy tale in which the heroes ‘were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of’." Btw thanks for picking nits. New things can be learned no matter what
- usrusr 2y ago
  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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    >> 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 2y ago
      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.
tptacek 2y ago
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 2y ago
  All credibility is gone if you, in 2025, still have Murmur over Reckoning in your REM rankings.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    Silence, Out Of Time-liker.
    - kasey_junk 2y ago
      There is one song on that album that is problematic and that’s because it was played _too much by everyone_.
      - tptacek 2y ago
        A single album ruining both Kate Pierson and KRS-One is a special accomplishment.
        kasey_junk 2y ago
        If all that album did was introduce a bunch of c&c music factory fans to the B52s and juice the sales of criminal minded it would be worth the price of hearing the Losing My Religion Muzak at the dentists office.
freetime2 2y ago
> 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 2y ago
  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.
- qgin 2y ago
  It's an incredibly jerk line to start the article with and completely untrue. I'm not saying that I've never heard an REM song in a store, but the idea that REM is somehow the soundtrack of capitalism seems entirely made up.
harry8 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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.
  - harry8 2y ago
    Plausibly, sure. Almost any decision is given people sometimes make terrible commercial decisions. We should acknowledge that the Windows 95 international saturation marketing blitz to the sound of "Start Me Up" failed to end the Stones. Sometime after that they did a concert film directed by Martin Scorsese, a movie featuring hanging out with Bill & Hillary Clinton and they also still seem to sell out 80,000 seat arenas playing their octogenarian loud blues. It seems slightly more plausible to me that the Stones made a commercial decision but again, maybe it was purely artistic or ethical because people also sometimes make terrible decisions on the basis of those motivations. In the end we can't prove we exist and we deal in probabilities given evidence.
    - tptacek 2y ago
      The Stones are also cultural giants in a way REM isn't and never will be.

69 points by johnshades 2y ago

fsckboy 2y ago

[flagged]

micromacrofoot 2y ago
[flagged]
- seba_dos1 2y ago
  Since everybody says what they thought it would be and not what it actually is: it's about R.E.M. the music band.
  - croisillon 2y ago
    everyone seems to be losing their religion
    - fsckboy 2y ago
      you've said too much you've said enough
- frostyel 2y ago
  [dead]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

autoexec 2y ago

> 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=1IqH3uliwJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JkIs37a2JE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JkIs37a2JE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wt5EHAqhR1c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wt5EHAqhR1c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAdLskQtWo8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAdLskQtWo8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PDlGUdDF8Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PDlGUdDF8Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPjPb3nNprg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPjPb3nNprg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBFXFzqIjHM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBFXFzqIjHM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GCrzjVdmSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GCrzjVdmSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzUnqr1t7yI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzUnqr1t7yI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m39DWVFK-Bw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m39DWVFK-Bw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDK-wsdEhNE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDK-wsdEhNE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ejga4kJUts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ejga4kJUts

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
bmurphy1976 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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.
    - smackeyacky 2y ago
      OMG they nearly played one show and then broke up. I’m not surprised you’re not cool enough to have heard of them. I heard of them before they formed. They were going to write a song but decided it was too commercial so they decided to never actually form a band to avoid selling out. You sound like a casual music listener.
- 2y ago

relaxing 2y ago

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.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
smcin 2y ago
Sounds like 'spurious correlations', a la Tyler Vigen [https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations 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?
- relaxing 2y ago
  Where did you get the idea that Microsoft caused REM? All I said was they followed similar trajectories. You think the radio, tv, live concert and record industry made billions selling a product people were only pretending to like? There’s a lot to be explored in the social currents of the 80s-90s and the business of the music industry but you’re not going to get there from that angle.
  - smcin 2y ago
    Noone suggested Microsoft caused REM. I agreed with you that their separate rises happened to have similar trajectories, your observation was interesting, and I suggested there's not much to it beyond a loose correlation.

fallinditch 2y ago

"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-gap/ https://www.treblezine.com/out-of-time-r-e-m-s-generation-ga...

4ndrewl 2y ago
We can be frenz.
jzb 2y ago
"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 2y ago
  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 2y ago

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.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tptacek 2y ago
I will never understand Pavement. I was born without the nervous system structure required to understand Pavement.
The_Blade 2y ago
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!

JohnnyLarue 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

back7co 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

ithkuil 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  If we’re going down that route, here’s an actual definition: serendipity /ˌsɛrənˈdɪpɪti/ noun - the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way. Seems like parent’s use is Ok.
  - sosogroovy 2y ago
    In the modern sense. I'm a bit of a stickler. Kinda like how many feel about Morrisette's use of Irony.
  - ithkuil 2y ago
    TIL it comes from: "1754: coined by Horace Walpole, suggested by The Three Princes of Serendip, the title of a fairy tale in which the heroes ‘were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of’." Btw thanks for picking nits. New things can be learned no matter what
usrusr 2y ago
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 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  >> 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 2y ago
    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.

tptacek 2y ago

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 2y ago
All credibility is gone if you, in 2025, still have Murmur over Reckoning in your REM rankings.
- tptacek 2y ago
  Silence, Out Of Time-liker.
  - kasey_junk 2y ago
    There is one song on that album that is problematic and that’s because it was played _too much by everyone_.
    - tptacek 2y ago
      A single album ruining both Kate Pierson and KRS-One is a special accomplishment.
      - kasey_junk 2y ago
        If all that album did was introduce a bunch of c&c music factory fans to the B52s and juice the sales of criminal minded it would be worth the price of hearing the Losing My Religion Muzak at the dentists office.

freetime2 2y ago

> 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 2y ago
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.
qgin 2y ago
It's an incredibly jerk line to start the article with and completely untrue. I'm not saying that I've never heard an REM song in a store, but the idea that REM is somehow the soundtrack of capitalism seems entirely made up.

harry8 2y ago

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 2y ago
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.
- harry8 2y ago
  Plausibly, sure. Almost any decision is given people sometimes make terrible commercial decisions. We should acknowledge that the Windows 95 international saturation marketing blitz to the sound of "Start Me Up" failed to end the Stones. Sometime after that they did a concert film directed by Martin Scorsese, a movie featuring hanging out with Bill & Hillary Clinton and they also still seem to sell out 80,000 seat arenas playing their octogenarian loud blues. It seems slightly more plausible to me that the Stones made a commercial decision but again, maybe it was purely artistic or ethical because people also sometimes make terrible decisions on the basis of those motivations. In the end we can't prove we exist and we deal in probabilities given evidence.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    The Stones are also cultural giants in a way REM isn't and never will be.