R.E.M. In The End As In The Beginning
It’s the End of R.E.M. As We Know It and I Feel Fine by Rick McGinnis
It was a musical movement that was easy to ignore, mostly because its fans – people my age, most of whom were part of the post-Boomer “Baby Bust” that gave us the dismal common experience of being children in the ‘70s – were a small demographic, of no practical value to marketers. Our bands were a diverse bunch, with a stew of influences that we excavated in used record stores. “There was no stylistic bandwagon for the media to latch on to,” recalls Michael Azerrad in Our Band Could Be Your Life, his history of American ‘80s indie rock, “so the record-buying public had to find things there on a band-to-band basis, rather than buying into a bunch of talk about a ‘new sound.’”
