Talk about the passion

R.E.M. announced that they were calling it quits today.  As a longtime fan I'm a little sad that they're hanging it up as a band, but they had a long, remarkably consistent run.  The last two albums have been a return to form after easily their weakest effort and thus make for as appropriate of a way for them to close the book as anything. 

Perhaps there will be the standard new album and reunion down the line, but I don't get the sense they'll take that path.  Whether they were a big underground band or a big (and somewhat unlikely) mainstream rock outfit, they didn't seem to be all that different.  I get the sense that the guys will continue to work on their own projects and be content to see where that takes them.

As best I can remember, the first time I heard R.E.M. was when "The One I Love" began getting radio play.  I was a freshman in high school and not particularly into "alternative" music.  In fact, I thought they and some of their peers were weird. 

For that matter, I didn't buy music then.  I listened to the radio but wasn't all that caught up in rock and roll.  Document produced some pop hits, as did their major label debut Green, and I had friends who were fans.  Still, I didn't get on board until Out of Time and "Losing My Religion", which I consider among my all-time favorite songs.

For me U2 and R.E.M.--the two were virtually inseparable as modern rock titans--became a gateway to another kind of music being made that was at least a bit off the beaten path and of my generation.  To like R.E.M. was to assert one's identity as quite distinctly different from the hair metal bands and classic rock vestiges that dominated the rock mainstream then.

For a time R.E.M. surely held the title as my favorite band.  I collected albums and singles and lusted for the imports I'd see at record stores but wouldn't buy due to their high price tags and sketchy origins.  I desperately wanted to see them live, but I became a fan right when they took an extended break from touring.

I finally got to see them two days before my college graduation in 1995.  Despite buying tickets in advance through the radio station where I was doing part-time work, I didn't have a great seat, but it didn't much matter.  I managed to see them two other times, in Cleveland in 1999 and in Cincinnati in 2004. 

That last time seeing them was fraught with my peril.  Originally the concert was scheduled for Akron.  I had a seat in the second or third row--fantastic!--and just happened to find out a few weeks before it that the concert was cancelled.  It was rescheduled for Cincinnati and put on sale with little notice where I live.  I was the first (and only) person in line at Ticketmaster when I plunked down the money to see them.  This time I ended up in the front row.  I could hardly believe my luck.  If that is to be my final memory of seeing the band, how can I complain?

R.E.M. hasn't been a huge band in commercial terms in a long time, certainly not what they were in the late '80s through mid '90s.  Whereas The Beatles and Led Zeppelin were still touchstones for my generation, does R.E.M. fill the same role for today's high school and college students?  I tend to doubt it, mainly because they were never THAT massive, but the music blogs have healthy respect for them that may sustain R.E.M. through younger listeners.

For those my age, though, it does feel like a shift.  My Twitter feed had plenty of comments and memories from fellow Generation Xers about the band's role in shaping what they listened to and what it was like to see them live.  I feel like they and U2 were on that last wave where being the biggest band in the world meant something.  As much as I love some of their inheritors--Arcade Fire, for instance--is it still possible for a rock group to penetrate mass consciousness like that? 

Although the mainstream was hip to them for awhile, R.E.M. was never a trendy band, and that may be a key reason why they will endure.  Listening to their songs and albums today, they don't sound especially dated.  Sure, I link them to specific periods in my life, and I suppose at some point I may listen to them out of nostalgia.  The workmanlike solidity of their music should still hold appeal, though, for future teenagers...or so I hope.  R.E.M. was never The Beatles, nor was that what they were meant to be.  Nevertheless, they are a defining band of the '80s and '90s, and it'd be nice to know that they have a deserved place in the canon in the years to come.

I just wasn't made for these times

I don't make a point of reading the comments on YouTube, but while I was digging through it for old music videos, I noticed two strains of thought emerging around the common theme "they don't make 'em like they used to".

Predictably, one set of commenters were reveling in nostalgia. They wrote how the music of that era was so much better and how these songs take them back to times when things were perfect in their own way. Keep in mind that I was mostly looking at music videos of the 1980s, although some were from the '90s. In other words, these are not people who are on the porch in the rocking chairs reflecting on the good ol' days...or they shouldn't be. (Also, the '80s wasn't exactly an easy, carefree decade.)

Clearly I'm not immune to the allure of nostalgia. What was I doing but clicking on videos for songs I haven't heard in ages. Granted, my interest was more in hearing with new ears what was once familiar. (The same idea is behind my current kick of watching pop cinema of the '80s and early '90s.) Nevertheless, it's impossible to do that without triggering memories. But people--and I'm speaking to my generation--must we already be resigning ourselves to cementing our cultural tastes and wistfully recalling high school?

The other set of commenters were teens wishing they were growing up during that time when the music was good, etc. What's funny to me is that '80s pop culture was not particularly well thought of at the time. I do feel like I can say it is not considered a rich time for rock music.

I suppose this way of thinking is common enough. I knew people in high school who pined for life in the '60s, which, you know, also had its share of social upheaval and other stuff that might take the shine off it.

For those who believe the pop culture of their youth was the last gasp of creative excellence, chances are they're reliving it through a rose-colored prism and forgetting about all the garbage or that they didn't like it quite as much as they recall. For those who believe the pop culture of a time before theirs is superior to anything done now, they can't see the forest for the trees. They're living through the sorting and canonization for their time rather than approaching it after it has been settled. People talk about the golden age of Hollywood or the early days of rock and roll. Guess what? There's plenty from those eras that no one gives a second thought to and for good reason.

Now excuse me while I go look up videos for pop songs I learned how to play on piano when I was in grade school.

Home box office

These days movies can be viewed practically anywhere at anytime. Smartphones, portable media devices, DVD players in minivans, and laptop computers have made it so that we can see almost whatever we want at the press of a button.

This is not how it used to be, obviously. The two biggest developments in my own moviewatching as a kid were when my parents subscribed to the Disney Channel and when we got a VCR. The Disney Channel used to be a premium channel, just like HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, and The Movie Channel. Now it's part of the regular cable packages, and the programming, from what I can tell, is substantially different.

The Disney Channel used to show a bunch of the old cartoons, episodes of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, and Disney features like The Apple Dumpling Gang, The Devil and Max Devlin, and Candleshoe. There were also the DTV music videos: mostly cartoon footage appropriately cut to pop songs, I suppose as an alternative to MTV. I loved these. (The one that sticks out the most in my memory is for Darryl Hall and John Oates' "Private Eyes".) After the cable bill arrived, I'd pore over the booklet that listed the channel's programming for the month. I can remember spending better portions of days watching whatever oldies happened to be scheduled.

Of course, there were also the premium channel previews and free weekends from time to time, which allowed me to catch up with non-Disney Channel movies. I can remember seeing some Mike Tyson fights this way, as HBO happened to be free at advantageous times. For whatever reason, Showtime tended to come in unscrambled regularly, especially at my grandmother's house. The picture had some graininess but was certainly very watchable.

Renting movies was always an exciting thing to do, as if it were a special occasion to pick something to watch. Examining the shelves at the small independent grocery store in town or at the larger ones nearby was a favorite thing of mine to do. Will the one I want be in?

It's with such memories that this summer I've decided to go back and watch films that I saw back then and probably haven't seen since. Catching up on the ones I didn't see is a little extra thrilling, even if the movies are junk. Within the last couple weeks I've watched The Last Starfighter, Summer School, Weird Science, and Big Trouble in Little China. Of those I had seen before, none have lived up to what I recalled them being, but they've been fun to see anyway. As with any art, there's what's in the text and what I bring to it, so even if the former is sometimes lacking, the latter more than makes up the difference.

Out of the past

Pretty much wiped out--23.65 miles on the stationary bicycle will do that--and feeling a touch nostalgic today, which is why you get the embedded music video. While driving around at lunchtime I landed on a radio station playing "the next generation of classic rock". (Translation: the music that was on AOR stations during my formative years.) I haven't heard these songs in a long time and own next to none of it, so I was sent on a bit of mental time traveling at the sound of Guns N' Roses, Tesla, and Def Leppard.

To add to that, seeing the new movie Super 8, opening Friday at a theater near you, pressed all the right buttons for me, not the least of which is it being set in a fictional town that's virtually where I grew up. Brookville, which is five miles from my hometown, is name dropped. Greenville, which is twenty miles away, hosts some scenes, although it's at a fictional Air Force base. I suppose they avoided having the characters go to Wright-Patterson because that's more urban.

Of course, there are a couple of major slip-ups, not that anyone is going to notice or care about them. (These are nitpicks for me to make because I know where they're talking about.) Belmont County is referenced, which is on the other side of the state rather than being adjacent to Montgomery County. Much of the film was shot in West Virginia, so maybe it's a nod to the area where production took place. The hilly landscape is not at all like the flat part of Ohio that I'm from.

The houses, inside and outside, all felt very familiar, though. The main characters are about twice as old as I would have been in 1979, but I confess to watching hungrily for props, production design, and anything else that I'd recognize. But there I go, getting all sentimental.

On the radio

While on the road yesterday I came across a station playing '80s pop and decided to listen for a bit. Part of my reason for sticking with it was that it played a couple songs I haven't heard in ages. For instance, I remember liking this Wham! song, but I had forgotten it even existed. "Everything She Wants" isn't the go-to Wham! hit to signify the decade, but it was a #1 Billboard single.



Soon after that they played a Survivor hit that wasn't from a Rocky movie. Again, I forgot about it until it hit my ears, yet "High On You" got as high as #8 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart.



See, programmers, you don't have to play only the same 200 hits of yesteryear. It's fun to hear the ones we've forgotten too.

Throwback

While walking to the arena for tonight's hockey game, I heard Survivor's "Burning Heart" from Rocky IV playing outside a restaurant/bar. I LOVED this song in junior high. It feels like it's been about that long since I heard it. (It truly may be 15-20 years since it has caught my ears.)

In college I hosted an '80s pop showcase--The '80s Fallout Shelter--on the school's radio station. None of that stuff was getting played on the radio at the time, so it was fun to dig up the one-hit wonders, lesser remembered singles, and big hits to play over the airwaves. It wasn't nostalgia exactly, and even if it were, how can you really understand that at 20?

Honestly, I'm still too young to feel that shock of time's passage and exclusive fondness for something from my youth, but hearing this song in passing tonight, it had the strange effect of cutting through the years and taking me back even though I wasn't in that mindset when the tune hit me. Such things are called throwbacks for a reason.

NO BIG HAIR!

Having observed the march of reunion concerts and annual Broadway show-like tours for another generation's bands--hey, it's REO Speedwagon and Fleetwood Mac in some iteration again--I've viewed them from a mostly negative perspective. Look at the cheap cash-in efforts and uninspired playing of the same old hits every summer.

I actually saw some of these shows the summer I worked part-time at an amphitheater and simply didn't get the appeal even if you liked the artists. Granted, all of them hadn't done anything of note in ages, which made it seem all the more pointless. This was driven home by seeing Poison in consecutive years. (You better believe I didn't pay either time. For what it's worth, Cinderella impressed me with their chops.)

So there I was tonight at the Pavement reunion concert. I purchased a ticket as soon as they went on sale, and I was looking forward to this show quite a bit. I never saw them during the '90s when they were one of the most influential band in the lo-fi and indie realms, and this was a reunion that I don't think many anticipated. Of course, that tends to be the way it goes with these things. It'll never happen...until the financial rewards are calculated.

Granted, we're talking different levels here. Pavement is a seminal act, and like such groups, their popularity was basically confined to the musical underground. And no wonder. With ambiguous but verbally witty lyrics, guitars and vocals that sometimes sounded like they were out of tune, and a generally offhanded vibe verging on sloppy, they were too rough around the edges to breakthrough. I suspect they are playing the biggest rooms in their career on this reunion tour, which is testament to their influence and the regard with which their albums still have, but we're still talking about venues that can pack in 1500-2000 people.

Anyway, to get back to my point, I gave in to nostalgia and made sure that I'd be at this concert. I'll be doing the same thing in a month when the reunited "classic lineup" of Guided by Voices comes to town. I justify it because, well, I really wanted to see them and because these are bands that never were that big beyond a small but dedicated audience. It may seem pathetic if they keep coming through year after year with nothing new to offer or nothing new that's any good, but for groups whose shadows have only become longer in the intervening years, it seems respectable and right that they take victory laps now.

Pavement has a mixed reputation as a live act, but they were pretty terrific tonight. They played many of their most beloved songs--it's hard to call them hits--and plenty of other unconventional choices. It didn't feel like a performance meant to resuscitate their former days as indie rock heroes but a genuinely worthy and engaged playing of their catalog. Pavement didn't appear to be going through the motions of yesteryear, and I didn't feel like I was reliving my time in college. Nevertheless, hearing "Range Life" gave me the chills. Other favorites--"Stereo", "Cut Your Hair", and "Summer Babe (Winter Version)", among others--sounded as fresh as they did during my twenties. Undoubtedly nostalgia colored my enjoyment, but I'd prefer to think that is was merely an enhancement than the primary object.