[LEMONS] 12.01.2001
We were little boys, we were little girls...
Did we miss anything?
When I was in junior high school, I discovered REM. For a weirdo kid in Montgomery, Ala., in the repressive 1980s, REM was more than just a band, they were hope. I was an instant fan, particularly when I heard they were from neighboring Georgia. I didn't know how to describe the music, all I knew was that it was different than the dreck most of my contemporaries listened to. At thirteen, I didn't have any clue where to pick up a music zine in Montgomery. Hell, I was in high school before I even knew such a thing existed.
So you learned about bands by what your friends were listening to. Or by walking into the record store and asking what kind of music they had that I might like "if I like REM." And then record store clerks with Ratt pins on their lapels and David Lee Roth or Duran Duran playing on the store's stereo would tell me that maybe I should check out the Butthole Surfers or Pylon or the Velvet Underground or the Replacements or Husker Du or even Black Flag, because the REM people also bought that stuff and maybe you might like it. This was, in fact, how I discovered Metallica, Bob Marley, and the Grateful Dead, via clueless clerks at Turtle's Records and Tapes who didn't know anything but Top 40 and "other stuff that people who dress funny listen to." (Not that there weren't plenty of great record-store music junkies who turned me on to great bands because they saw an inquisitive kid who reminded them of themselves; there were.) By high school, when REM was already huge, this tactic no longer worked and would only get you a Connells album, or possibly something by Dreams So Real, or one of the hundreds of other bands out there diligently working to put out another Fables of the Reconstruction.
I digress....
REM, upon first discovery, was like moving to San Francisco: it was freedom. REM made me realize that Southern kids could make art. And those glorious early albums make me think of drafty houses with peeling paint and hardwood floors in Athens where you could hear early strains of "7 Chinese Brothers" echoing through the still December air. And today, as I sit around the house on a rainy day, listening to Murmer, I'm so happy for those first several albums. I remember feeling jilted like a spurned lover when, on Green, REM began dramatically tinkering with their sound, sounding like An Entirely Other Band.
In retrospect this was a very good thing. They could have put out Driver 8 and Harborcoat and Fall on Me knock-offs indefinitely. But instead they chose to grow, kudos. By the time I graduated high school, they were no longer my favorite band. And although I decorated my walls in two countries, three states and six cities with the same ratty Chronic Town poster all the way up until 1995, they always played second or third fiddle to my favorite band(s) of the moment. And although I adored Up, and Automatic for the People, none of the albums they released in the 1990s (or even 1989's Green) did it for me the way Fables, Reckoning, Murmer, Life's Rich, and Document had. And for a while I sort of resented that.
But today, with seventeen years of fandom under my belt, mostly I just appreciate what they did for me, how they changed my life by way of introduction. And I listen to this music, made by young kids who are now middle-aged men, and I think, pushing thirty, how wonderful those mumbling verses with the jingle-jangle guitar were. The ones that launched a thousand bands, forcing them away from their original sound, and how the boys from Clarke country bear responsibility for much of the pop music made in the 1990s (which, although not good, pop music rarely is, was infinitely cooler than 80s pop). And I think how REM is in a large way responsible for who I am, for my politics, for my taste in music, for my interest in remaining independent. And for not being ashamed to be a Southerner; for trying to be a Southerner in my own weird way.
I read Rob's post on missing out on the E6 bands roots by way of laziness, and I kick myself for it too. But not so much as it makes me determined. Because REM, like Jeff Mangum, created their own scene, made their own art (and they did it in a backwater! REM's Athens was not the same one I inhabited. They created the one I lived in).
And that's the primary thing I took away from them: no art, no music, no movement is as good as that which you make yourself. Like Mike Watt says: make your own art. Most of the time it will be awful stuff that nobody likes but you. But that's exactly what it's all about. Tat's the fucking point: the only way to be happy is to make what you need to make. You don't get REMs and minutemen from anyone who's trying to do what's been done before, who's trying to perfect a craft. Art comes from striking out on your own. And so all these years later, even as th music no longer sounds very different, REM is still a call to arms for me, a message to wake up and get out and do it and make sure that it's my way. That's what I'm trying to do as a writer. That's why I chose unemployment over artiface. I don't want to spend myself writing things I have to, or editing other people's stuff: I want to make my own, and I want to do it my way.
I didn't do that when I was twenty, I was too busy being a drug-addled, drunken idiot. I've finally got it together, and I'm young enough to not have too many responsibilities, while old enough to appreciate the opportunity before me. This time, I'm not going to miss anything.
- l i n k -
