R.E.M. was one of those bands that was definitely very divisive. If you weren’t talking sh** about them in general [1], you were a huge fan who was talking noise about New Adventures in Hi-Fi, a perfectly good rock album from ’97 which was recorded entirely at sound checks and sort of aptly achieved, in my opinion, what Monster tried to achieve and failed miserably, which was bona fide arena rock.
Anyway, they stand today as a group that still achieved five top-five albums in the ’90s, with very little help from, or mind to, radio convention or their label’s stipulations, and for this they should be noticed, if nothing else. I chose to focus on their “indie” days, their days on I.R.S. label. As for why, I’m not sure… I guess I’m still attracted to the purity of indie rock, which would be an ingenuous rubric for absorbing these legends in popular music who have given us, by this point, a laundry list of grocery store anthems, as well as bedroom dirges and open-road calls-to-booty-shaking, as is also essential.
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[1] I have this trusty ol’ impression of dudes who hate R.E.M. I do, when duty calls: “Is there gonna be some pu**y at that Fenway Bowl?”, the Fenway Bowl of course an event held to about a 30-degree gametime temperature.
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