Has Murmurs Run Its Course?

Free Floating Honesty
41

I think if Michael had, god forbid, left us prematurely around the release of automatic, he would have been elevated to icon levels way beyond Kurt. Their body of work was impeccable at that point and Automatic being a final album would still be breaking hearts with it’s poignancy. I think they’d be elevated further by a myth of what could’ve come next and how music was “robbed” of the greatest albums never made.

I don’t think that’s the same with Nirvana. They had a no more than decent debut, one defining masterpiece and a great final album that was essentially designed to piss fairweather fans off. Also, anyone who knows even a small amount about Nirvana know they were imploding by the end and likely would’ve not lasted much longer than the mid 90s at best. Unplugged in New York kind of became the poignant mythic album linked with Kurts death more so than Nevermind and with Automatic being a genre spanning original album about death, think it would’ve been way more powerful.

Kurt will always be an icon and appeal to a disillusioned youth with his tragic story truly immortalising everything. I think Michael in your scenario would have been immortalised in a higher echelon, closer to John Lennon.

Thank god that scenario didn’t happen and the above’s all opinion but I’ll stick by it.

2 Likes
42

I’d rather they they grow into old age and unpopular, enjoying the fruits of their labour, than die young and be icons again.

8 Likes
43

I didn’t like Nirvana at the time, and I don’t like them now. But dying young is a good career move, as we see from Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison to Ian Curtis and Kurt Cobain. If Cobain had endured the inevitable long slow decline into mediocrity of the Foo Fighters, would the cult of Nirvana be the same today? Of course they would still be popular, but not to the degree that the myth of St. Kurt has created today.

When someone dies young (or a band breaks up early, as in the case of the Smiths), there is always the fantasy of, “Wow, music was robbed of a great talent, imagine what would have come next …”. And if R.E.M. had broken up in 1992, or it had been Michael Stipe who died young instead of Kurt Cobain or River Phoenix, yes, that fantasy and mythology would have built up around R.E.M. In reality, they followed up Automatic with Monster, their worst album to date, and, with the exception of New Adventures, which was a great album that didn’t sell, their career was a long slow downhill slide after that. I know most people here see the merit of Up and Reveal, and I do, too, but the wider world largely didn’t. That was my original point, that their legacy would arguably be greater if they didn’t suffer the long slow decline of the second half of their career. If their career had ended with Automatic or Document, they would have left behind a more “perfect” discography, and, crucially, one that would be easier for new listeners to digest. I’m glad they kept going, but the post-Berry years didn’t do them any favors with casual fans and listeners. No need to point out the the post-Berry years had a lot of buried gems, or it’s good that Michael Stipe didn’t go the way of Kurt Cobain, I get all that and I agree, and I’m glad that they lasted for 30 years, but their longevity after Berry left didn’t do their “legacy” with the general public any good, in my opinion. As I noted above, there’s always a chance that some viral Tik Tok video or placement of an R.E.M. song in a movie, TV show, or commercial will ignite a revival of interest in the band akin to what we’ve seen with the Kate Bush “Running Up That Hill” miracle or the Fleetwood Mac “Dreams” viral Tik Tok video. And sooner or later I suspect something like that will happen to reignite general interest in the band.

1 Like
44

R.E.M. were a great band. After R.E.M , they’ve been, and still are playing and creating music, that tells me they still enjoy it, even without all the attention of the heydays. Not sure if they started as a band to gain some kind of huge legacy.

2 Likes
45

I expect I’m one of the younger people on this forum and while I get your point about R.E.M. taking a bit of effort to “get”, I think that’s something that’s true for every generation. There has always been accessible pop music that has been more palatable to people who weren’t willing to put a lot of effort in to appreciate music, and likewise there are still plenty of die-hard music fans my age who listen to stuff way less accessible than R.E.M. What’s interesting is that even among music fans my age, R.E.M. are not a common topic of discussion. As someone who is active in a lot of places for online music discourse among my age group, I’ve always wondered why R.E.M. are never talked about while there is constant discussion about the likes of Bowie, Nirvana, The Smiths, The Cure, and other artists who I feel like had a comparable level of contemporary popularity and influence to R.E.M. The way I started listening to R.E.M. was that a lot of my favorite bands like Pavement and Radiohead often cited them as one of their favorite artists growing up, so I wondered why more people my age didn’t go down the same pipeline. I see Murmur brought up as an “/mu/ core” album sometimes but outside of that I rarely see them talked about. It’s not like people have never heard of R.E.M. or anything, but they’re a band that people are aware of rather than really listening to.

My theory is that for people my age, if you’re looking at R.E.M at a surface level it’s easy to see them as just a “dad rock” band with a few hits that everyone knows. I think most people my age have heard Everybody Hurts and LMR, and maybe Shiny Happy People and It’s The End Of The World, and just think they’re one of those old bands that you know a few songs from and their whole discography isn’t really worth checking out. It’s a shame because there are very few bands that made 10 consecutive great, unique, and influential records like R.E.M. I will say it’s not like NO ONE my age listens to R.E.M., there’s a pretty active R.E.M. discord server that I’m a part of with 200+ members where most of the people are around my age.

5 Likes
46

Popular legacy doesn’t interest or affect me. Their music speaks to my soul. It speaks to my children because they heard it all the time growing up. I now have grandchildren but they are toddlers and it’s anybody’s guess what kind of music they’ll listen to. I’m more worried about the planet they’ll inherit. I’m glad R.E.M. aren’t a t-shirt slogan band. Those might mean something to the person wearing the shirt, or it could be an empty attempt at looking cool. R.E.M. were that kind of cool for maybe 10 years, but they are part of my heart and soul. As long as I live. Now I have tattoos immortalising them very visibly on my arms and hand, I hear them. I don’t want to share R.E.M. with shallow trend chasers who don’t love their music. Sooner or later, the right people will hear a song by this band from the 90s or whatever (yes, I know they did some of their best stuff in the 80s but their time capsule of fame was the 90s and a little later.) I’m more than happy to be in this exclusive club whose life was enhanced and maybe even saved, without some fake cliche used for retro advertising. I just love them.It’s all love for me.

4 Likes
47

Funny about The Ramones. I lived in the East Village NYC in the heyday of the Ramones. CBGBs was a 10 minute walk from my apartment. I saw Blondie, Tom Petty& Heartbreakers, The Boss, Talking Heads and plenty other great bands that sadly fizzled out there. The Ramones were the house band though. You could pretty much count on seeing them every time you went to CBs. They weren’t that good. They were ok, but I got bored of their repertoire pretty quickly. The NY Dolls were overkill too, but they weren’t there every fucking night. In hindsight, Ramones were kinda fun but musically meh. How their legend is still so huge is a mystery to me.

2 Likes
48

I’ve given copies of Reckoning to younger people who only vaguely knew R.E.M. as the dad-rock band of “Losing My Religion” and “Everybody Hurts,” and of course they all loved it. But I think a lot of people in their teens or twenties today have little or no idea what R.E.M. did during the ’80s, nor do they really have any reason to know. Once again, perhaps someday there will be some sort of placement of “Driver 8” or another I.R.S.-era classic in a movie or TV show on the model of “Running Up the Hill” being placed on Stranger Things and reigniting interest in Kate Bush.

1 Like
49

In my experience, you’re right. Here in the U.K., go to any store that’s mainstream but has a “youth” section full of t-shirts high school and college kids are buying them. My first experience of this was watching a kind of geeky teenage boy picking up a BRONX NY hoody. I grew up in the Bronx. I almost wanted to ask him what it meant to him, but really I knew. They were trendy.
Then there were all the popular US cities. Chicago. Los Angeles. Yanno. This year, shopping with my niece who’s off to Uni herself had the choice of Harvard, Yale,Cornell, etc. I made no comment. Niece passed them all up family pride moment and bought the one of the Uni she actually goes to. It’s the same with bands. Brand names and band names, now American anything names.I’ve seen them on adults too. I haven’t thrown out my Tom Petty t shirt or my R.E.M. clothes and I wear them. I can’t bring myself to bin the ones that don’t fit anymore. They’re retro and cool, dontcha know. :disguised_face::sunglasses:

50

What? Monster their worst album? Sacrilege! :wink: It’s my second favorite.

Just on Nirvana, I don’t think there’s alternate reality where kurt survives and the band still flourishes like it did. The music is too dependent on Kurts demons. If Kurt had been able to soldier on, there was talk of the introspective “Automatic FtP” influenced album and the double header tour with REM next but I personally think they still wouldn’t have happened. They were imploding big time. Kurt had sacked Dave twice behind the scenes and Dave had quit to make it a 3rd time IIRC. All times with management intervening. Even Krist was barely on speaking terms by the end. They touch upon this in the incredible “When Nirvana Came To Britain” BBC doc, which is a must watch for any alternative music fan.

https://youtu.be/N5LPeXuZMVo

It was a point of difference to say Amy Winehouse, another “27 Club” member and icon. She was on the up, just had sadly done too much damage to her body but could very easily have been still with us had the coin flip landed differently. Now I think her career would have petered out purely because I think the popular interest she created in Jazz and Swing music was fleeting and she’d stated she was happier with her musical roots rather than the polished Mark Ronson trumpet pop that Back to Black ultimately was behind the dark lyrics.

I always think “what if” discussions on immortalised artists are really interesting but when you really think about it, the most likely outcome is rarely “we were robbed of their best work” in my opinion.

2 Likes
51

This is all a side note from the main topic of “Has Murmurs run its course”, but I’m gonna add something to the whole discussion so far by using an example.

I have always known that Bowie was big “for some reason”. Like, you are not born in the know, so you need time to really absorb those things. So everyone just mentioned Bowie and I didn’t know his career very well. Then I set to listen to his music, and I kinda liked some of what I heard. Given time, I grew more and more interested in pop music in general and rock in particular, so, as an absolute autistic nerd, I started watching documentaries on EVERYTHING music-related. I saw docs on glam from the 70s, and Bowie was firmly there. New Romantic: Bowie was firmly there. Pistol, the miniseries about the rise and fall of the Sex Pistols (highly recommend that): Bowie is mentioned all the time in the beginning. Britpop: Bowie influenced it both directly and indirectly because of the many movements he had already influenced by that point, like new wave, 80s glam, madchester. The more I watched about different things, fashion, experimental sounds, design, media, whatever, the more it came down to one point: Bowie was likely more influential in broad terms than the Beatles themselves, and you could see where everybody was coming from.

That said, R.E.M. has been for a long time now a musician’s band. The people who do know they had (at least) 10 consecutive brilliant albums belong in just three groups: music journalists, indie musicians and hardcore fans. The general audience doesn’t know them much. And, to link to all I’ve said above, R.E.M. didn’t exactly start and directly influence 5 or 6 or 7 different (yet connected) mainstream movements, and I think that’s the main reason why they’re not taken as feverishly as some other acts. People don’t want to know about the jangle, or that Mills had his bass as complete second lines apart from the guitar, or that Berry also wrote and contributed really well, because they barely know the name of most drummers anyway. They only really last within those albums they did. If one doesn’t listen to those albums directly and intently, they’ll rarely hear some scattered R.E.M. mention, and possibly among other bands that were not remotely as great, influential and big as R.E.M., like Pavement, Replacements, Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth and the likes. They’ll be just another name in the bunch.

Only if you’re curious enough you’ll delve deeply into their catalogue, that’s what I mean. They’re not as apparent as some others.

2 Likes
52

I’m popping in now and than. I almost wish social media never became a thing.

3 Likes
53

I agree with you here. I’ve seen a lot of bands & musicians covering R.E.M. on the net, members of R.E.M. continue to get interviewed & articles written about them.

I’m not sure how influential these bands were/are. I would add the Velvet Underground & Patti Smith here as well. I do know they influenced R.E.M. & other bands. They were kind of obscure if that’s the right word or a bit under the radar of commercial radio. Almost none of my friends, if any, 30 - 60 y.o.s, would know who these bands were. They would be familiar with R.E.M. big selling songs & an album or two & maybe familiar with a Lou Reed solo or Patti Smith song. Some may have observed differently, but I’ll say when you see someone wearing a T-shirt of bands mentioned here, you can bet they are either a musician or a hardcore fan.

1 Like
54

My totally unscientific anecdotal observation is that Pavement and Sonic Youth are better known by (some) kids today than are R.E.M., the Replacements, or Hüsker Dü, all of whom are now ancient history. When Murmur came out, the Beatles had been an active band only 13 years before: it’s now been almost 40 years since Murmur came out.

1 Like
55

And may I ask the size of your unscientific, anecdotal sample?

Is greater than or less than Twelvty? :grin:

56

I see a pretty cool new band like Horsegirl have Lee Ranaldo and Steve Shelley guest star on their new album, but I don’t see any up and coming indie artist like that rushing to have Peter or Mike play on their album. Soccer Mommy did recently cover Losing My Religion, but one doesn’t get the sense that she’s a huge fan or is really aware of the I.R.S. era. Just my two cents. Maybe the kids are down with Murmur and I just am not aware of it.

57

Few thoughts from me.

The first thing I’d say is that you don’t know what they’ve turned down.

Secondly, how does an up and coming band get Peter Buck to collaborate? Do they write to REMHQ? Have a producer that knows him? Bump into him in the studio? Is he available? Will he suddenly want to fly in from somewhere to lay down some chords for an up and coming band? Bear in mind Peter doesn’t even leave what he’s doing for REM (it’s all Michael and Mike). It’s not simple at all, particularly for an up and coming band.

Thirdly, why do bands want a collab? Reverence is one thing and addressed above. Clout is another, but that’s more prominent outside rock music and not really what Peter and Mike would be any good for. Then you have them acting as a session musician. Getting someone on board because you want something they can offer on a record. I’m not sure why you’d want Peter for that tbh. Lee Rinaldo’s an auteur, usually ranking well in greatest guitarist lists. I haven’t heard the song you mention, but is his contribution some sort of distorted avant garde playing? If so, he’s the best in the world at that. I’m not sure why you’d specifically want Peter to lay down some chords unless he was a hero or he was there at the studio. If you wanted some mandolin say, you just get a pro mandolin player.

Just my thoughts but there is some basis in that I am (now just a bedroom) musician but used to play in bands and did some session work.

I expect Michaels been asked quite a lot but it was years until he wanted to sing again and it’s unlikely to ever be his main passion again.

It’s not like they’ve been completely shunned and forgotten. First Aid Kit did a pretty famous cover of Walk Unafraid and they’re young and hip with the kids. They’re only 30 now and released this when they were 22.

https://youtu.be/uDOIq21o40E

Wouldn’t surprise me if Mike turns up at some point to do a “John Paul Jones” on someone’s album now he’s making a name for himself with orchestral arrangements.

1 Like
58

Oh, something a forgot to mention. This doesn’t quite fit in with what we’re chatting about because it happened when REM were at their peak, but it highlights often the main reason why collabs happen.

When Mike Mills recorded the unforgettable piano on Soma (smashing pumpkins, Siamese Dream), it was because they were recording in Georgia near where he lives and he happened to be at home.

Just an example because it’s easy to imagine in 1993, Billy Corgan saying “We have to get a piano collab with Mike Mills from the biggest band in the world after his seminal work on Nightswimming”.

What really happened was “I’d like some piano and I can’t play piano” so someone at the recoding studio said they knew a guy down the road, see if he’s home.

2 Likes
59

Jeff Martin from The Tea Party 2018 -
"…when I was young, around 13 years old, my drummer Jeff Burrows introduced me to early R.E.M. music.”
"The people performing alongside Martin on this tribute tour, musicians such as Even’s Ashley Naylor, Crow’s Peter Fenton, and The Church’s Steve Kilbey, are equally as inspired by R.E.M. and Martin says he looks forward to playing with them all in a mutual appreciation of this music. "

3 Likes
60

By no means an up and coming band but the Decemberists did call on Buck for The King is Dead. I’d read about them here for quite some time but hearing “Calamity Song” on KEXP one morning is finally what piqued my interest in them. They’ve also collaborated in concert on more than one occasion.

3 Likes