in the beginning, there was mush. It was good mush—vocals mixed way, way down, a wooly bass line, drumming that cranked faster than disco. R.E.M.’s first musical gestures were fathered by the buzzy American garage rock of the 1960s, mothered by the pointy angles of Britain’s post-punk, and then attached to lyrics that lead singer Michael Stipe once referred to as “complete babbling.” The band’s first release, a quick and picky track called “Radio Free Europe,” was born in a college record store, and though the spirit of any genius may be fugitive, R.E.M.’s sprouted in a nursery of bohemian super-creativity in Athens, Georgia.

Ninety minutes from Atlanta on I-85, the kudzu-smothered Southern college town had something extraordinary worming through its soil at the tail end of the 1970s, when Stipe, an eighteen-year-old army brat, arrived at the University of Georgia. Stipe was expecting miles of cornfields and Jed Clampett types when he reluctantly enrolled, but a tranche of “freaky Georgians,” as Carlin puts it, made arriving in Athens more “like discovering a utopia.” A virtuosic and kitschy troupe called the B-52’s had thrown drag parties all over town and recently cannonballed onto the Billboard charts; a wiry little outfit called Pylon was being billed as post-punk’s new American promise; and critics from The Village Voice and Rolling Stone were paying close attention to the smaller, tweakier Athenian bands that seemed to spring up weekly. The Patti Smith–worshipping Stipe proposed to Peter Buck, a record-store clerk—later joined by two new friends, the drummer Bill Berry and the bassist Mike Mills—that they larkishly cover some tracks and maybe lay down a few of their own.

One clinching gig at a disused Episcopalian church planted the seed, and shows thereafter were packed with hordes from every species of the college ecosystem. “The place filled up with people nobody had ever seen at an Athens art-rock band show,” Carlin writes fondly. “Jocks, preppies, guys in T-shirts branded with the Greek characters from fraternity row. All of them dancing and cheering and pumping their fists in the air.” The band was so totalizing in its strange and sweeping appeal, Carlin argues, that the typical boulders in the way of any band’s rise seemed to crumble before them.

Miracles and good decisions followed, in that order. Agents started materializing out of nowhere. A huge label wanted to back the band in full, but it went with a tinier, rootsier label called I.R.S. to keep creative control and split earnings evenly. R.E.M. started touring manically, playing shows in smaller venues “where no one else would have played,” as Buck put it. By the end of 1981, The New York Times crowned the silvery “Radio Free Europe” one of the year’s best releases, putting it on a list alongside work from Prince, Yoko Ono, and the Rolling Stones.

Murmur, its jittery, ambitious gargoyle of a debut album—released two years later and led by “Radio Free Europe”—made those early rumbles of fame turn seismic. Producer Don Dixon called R.E.M.’s sound the “perfect amalgam of The Velvet Underground and The Doors.” I hear it more as a smoothie of tightly wound, twitchy fretwork in the mode of Gang of Four’s Andy Gill, plus a bunch of fast folkie strumming (what Byrds front man Roger McGuinn once called “the jingle-jangle thing”). R.E.M. not only offered a new vision of what independently released rock could plausibly sound like but also showed how it could explode without big-label backing. To wit: Rolling Stone hailed Murmur as the best album of 1983—and this was the same year that Michael Jackson’s Thriller
became the world’s best-selling album.

R.E.M. was a band that felt—at least at first—like it was colliding with the American music landscape, which, at that hour, was dominated by a craggy vista of big pop, stadium-size guitar rock, and, in the subterrain, punk. When “Radio Free Europe” came out, the top-charting albums were genuine sonic mammoths—Styx, Van Halen, Ozzy, Rush, AC/DC—alongside even louder work from Black Flag, the Cramps, X, and the Dead Kennedys (all while an ice storm of synthy New Wave songs was blowing in from Europe). It is hard to overstate how little R.E.M. had in common with this terrain. It was stranger, more lyrically distant, profoundly murky. A power-poppier post-punk but smothered with Southern weirdness. Not interested in punk’s barbed political aggressions, or in the arena readiness of big-money rock, or in messing around with computers and synthesizers. Art-school to the bone but preternaturally and ridiculously capable of mass appeal.

As Carlin makes clear, R.E.M. was both sonically sui generis and abnormally normal, a gleaming novelty in a world of high-strung rockists and Reagan-era American excess. “They never got stupid drunk or stupid high. . . . They were kind to people,” one musician who used to share a bill with R.E.M. told him. Carlin—who writes at one remove, never speaking with any of the four band members themselves—takes enormous care to stress R.E.M.’s principled approach to bandhood as a project. Humane and down to earth, almost to the point of banality, the band’s stubborn tally of dos and don’ts formed something like a stern, spiritually focused mission statement: Don’t lip-synch in music videos, don’t do stadium shows, don’t open for big-ticket bands (when possible), and don’t take corporate cash. Do work, deathlessly.

The golden lustrum of R.E.M.’s inhumanly prolific early streak, spanning 1983–1987, used that commerce-defying humility and the band’s hallmark “strum ’n’ whine” (as Greil Marcus once called it) to readjust the national psyche. R.E.M. pumped out and toured a new album every year, each one slowly deepening its gift for pop formalism in sideways directions—with juts of horns and steam-locomotive bass lines, spirals of hard-to-understand vocals that didn’t get above the instruments, and varying levels of pep surrounded by quasi-literary lyrics. When one could finally figure out what Stipe was saying, there was a curiously austral motif: character studies that felt like they came from Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away, glossolalic preachers, two-headed cows, ruminations on the Civil War. “The Southerner is a terminal outsider,” Buck noted in an early interview. “And we’re like the quintessential outsiders in this business.” Close to familiarity but just enough to thwart it, non-Southern music sung in slantly Southern tongues—these were songs that spoke like messages delivered from a missing tract on American otherness.

Once you’ve heard Reckoning (1984) and Fables of the Reconstruction (1985) enough times, you can identify the sound of R.E.M.’s early I.R.S. era in a snap—there will be somewhat pastoral, major/minor chord changes, barnstorming choruses, and the tension between a rickety lo-fi swag and the pursuit of finding a greater audience. Document, released in 1987, was certainly still a little country-fried, certainly still weird, but it marked the moment the band earned its first sheen of glossy studio glaze. Punchy, tight, warm, big on drums, the album sounds heavily worked on, more expensively produced. Stipe’s vocals, now shockingly higher up in the mix, made him a hero among his young fans, who liked their icons anti-yuppie, anti-Reagan, and generally pissed off. A darkish, sneaky ballad of betrayal called “The One I Love” announced the band’s debut on the mainstream charts.

The four were cresting a tide: by the late 1980s, it seemed there were indie bands everywhere that felt, toured, sounded like R.E.M. As Mills put it in the Rolling Stone cover story that hailed the group “America’s Best Rock & Roll Band,” R.E.M. was totemic, or “the most visible sign that something else was going on. It doesn’t mean that we were the best, and we certainly weren’t the first. But perhaps we were the most accessible and the most visible.”

to be even passingly familiar with the late 1980s and early 1990s is to recognize the word sellout, a now near-useless term that was not so much a snipe as a slur, and not so much a kind of occasional ideological concern as a pan-cultural, near-religious one for artists of all stripes. Not selling out meant never compromising your creative vision in exchange for a check—a commitment to noncommitment. R.E.M., just as sensitive to the idea as any of its contemporaries, remained protected under the shield of its indie bona fides. The band’s overwhelmingly young college-student fandom—who adored its avant la lettre emo melancholia, the anarchist-lite outsiderness of Stipe’s verse, and Buck’s oblique approach to pop chords—cherished the music as if it were a secret.

Ironic, then—the second-favorite bit of 1990s phraseology—that it would be college students who catapulted indie rock into the mass market. Up until 1987, college radio stations enabled coeds to spin whatever, whenever, on their allotted sets of FM airwaves. In this sonic Wild West, R.E.M. was king, logging number one hit after number one hit on the college radio charts kept by a small trade report called the College Media Journal, or CMJ. But on September 10, 1988, Billboard, profit-eyed, snuck a new chart in the back of its magazine. The newly minted Modern Rock Tracks chart (later renamed Alternative Songs) tabulated any song that received spins from a selection of some of the nation’s largest college radio stations. College students’ alternative culture was suddenly commercially visible and viable. Now it wasn’t just that non-pop alternative music competed with pop—the alternative could simply be pop.

The iron was hot, and R.E.M. was poised to strike. The boys had just bid goodbye to the hospitality of I.R.S. and scored a five-record, $10 million deal with major label Warner Bros. a few months earlier. Their first album with Warner, Green, arrived in November of that same year. Not only were they now majorly moneyed, but they were also serendipitously able to parlay their CMJ
prestige into a place at the top of the Modern Rock Tracks chart and its attendant FM radio airwaves. R.E.M. went nuclear. Soon its songs were playing out the windows of not just dorm rooms and beater sedans but single-family homes, family cars, and the whole of the fearsome mainstream. The four were now, as Carlin writes, “projecting their weird vision in such a powerful way that they couldn’t be ignored.” What had been considered “left of the dial” quickly turned into just left of the dial, then center of it.

R.E.M.’s albums for Warner inflated the pop bubble that had always lurked under the surface of that jangle. Its earlier credos slowly evaporated. Gone were its doctrines of resistance to big-label backing or opening for huge bands—even R.E.M.’s clearest denunciations of playing arenas dried up when the band indeed played stadiums, arenas, and monster-size megavenues for Green’s exhausting world tour. After three years (a rare pause for a band used to churning out an album a year), the massive, mandolin-forward, single-packed, alter-the-course-of-pop-history record Out of Time (1991) earned the band its first number one album in the U.S., and would go on to win a new kind of Grammy incidentally introduced that very year: Best Alternative Music Album.

Automatic for the People (1992), a melancholic, massive affair of the heart, extended R.E.M.’s mass-cultural reach even further. The band kept some of its old perambulations through Southernness in the steel pedals and mandolins it applied liberally to each track, but its melodramatic meditations on loss—as meditated through piano paeans to being dumb and young (“Nightswimming”), country-Western ballads against suicide (“Everybody Hurts”), and acoustic tracks saluting misunderstood heroes (“Man on the Moon”)—turned the album into a superhit, both critically and commercially, selling about as many copies as a late-period Beatles record.

At that point, R.E.M was everywhere, and not just on the radio. The band’s yen for pop-cultural flotsam, generally lefty politics, and broad pronouncements went hi-fi on supersize stages. It undertook righteous crusades for the health of the rainforest, for AIDS awareness, for Tibetan freedom. During the band’s 1991 MTV Video of the Year acceptance speech for Out of Time’s “Losing my Religion,” Stipe wore a stack of T-shirts layered over one another, each bearing a slogan: wear a condom, alternative energy now, the right to vote, handgun control, and love knows no gender. One simply read choice.

That same year, 1992, Douglas Coupland published Generation X, the era-defining jeremiad of an entire generation’s conflicting ideals: postmodern rootlessness, nihilism, suspicion toward corporate success. It was also the year Nirvana’s Nevermind, the Smashing Pumpkins’ Gish, and Pearl Jam’s Ten appeared. R.E.M.’s unironic utopianism and seemingly untroubled dive into the mainstream had these bands, which were warring with the Gen X quandary of wanting major-label backing without selling out, looking toward it as a model. They wanted to emulate R.E.M.’s DIY-on-a-major-label approach, keep writing moody guitar songs, and maintain control over that slippery idea that R.E.M. seemed to have mastered—holding on to the truth or something like it. Automatic for the People was reportedly lodged inside Kurt Cobain’s CD player at the time of his death, and in a January 1994 interview, Cobain made clear that his respect for the band was not just for its songcraft. “They’ve dealt with their success like saints,” he said, “and they keep delivering great music.”

Cobain would have been gone for five months when the band released Monster (1994), a scuzzy, decently performing, and vaguely glamorous wild card of an album that met grunge on the genre’s battlefield. He would have been gone for two years when R.E.M. signed a new $80 million contract with Warner in 1996—at the time, the largest recording contract ever granted to a band. These were salad days: Janet Jackson got an $80 million megadeal the same year; ZZ Top had earned a $35 million one from Sony a few years before; $60 million went to Madonna.

Now at the zenith of “the acceptable edge of the unacceptable stuff,” as Buck described it, the Warner deal was supposed to announce R.E.M.’s supremacy. It’s a shame that it marked the beginning of R.E.M.’s grinding cultural descent. In 1997, Berry suddenly decided to retire, and in the post-Berry years—Stipe once referred to R.E.M. as a “three-legged dog” during this period—the band, despite putting out five albums, would never put out one that even scraped platinum status. Though past hits loomed on airwaves, by 2000, Stipe, in a moment of exasperation, said that they were writing new songs “for a radio market that doesn’t exist anymore. We are just completely out of step with what’s happening.”

a shared and sane decision to quit came in 2011. There was no infinite farewell tour, no enduring drama—just a merciful, dignified exit signaled by a couple paragraphs on the band’s website. But public mourning came with a greater-than-usual procession of dark clouds. “R.E.M.’s break-up is classy, and a decade late—but who cares?” The New Yorker said with a shrug. “The cynicism isn’t surprising, given the way R.E.M.’s image has decayed in the 21st century,” hedged The Atlantic. My high school English teacher—at that hour wearing a T-shirt featuring the art for Automatic for the People—slammed his laptop shut after reading the band’s retirement announcement to a silent classroom. “Finally,” he said, frowning into the distance.

The sheer volume of public prickliness underscores the provisional relationship that so many fans of R.E.M. seem to keep with the band. Depending on your personal connection to the group, there are a litany of R.E.M.s to choose from. As for those who pledge their allegiance strictly to 1980s R.E.M, Carlin calls them “Murmurers.” Legions of fans elect not to acknowledge the existence of the band’s body of work after Berry’s departure. Buck himself, regarding R.E.M.’s gassy 2004 LP, Around the Sun, once called it an effort by “a bunch of people that are so bored with the material that they can’t stand it anymore.”

But if R.E.M.’s world gradually disappeared, its presence in ours persists. You’ll sense its genetic makeup in its progeny: in Radiohead’s vulnerable warble, Pavement’s Ginsberg-meets-Stipean poetry, and Guided by Voices’ lo-fi noodlings. In his final interview with Rolling Stone, Cobain managed to make his praise for the band sound like prayer. “If I could write just a couple of songs as good as what they’ve written . . . I don’t know how that band does what they do,” he said. “God, they’re the greatest.”

Oddly, though, for a band once so lauded, so adored, and so universally held up as a paragon of feral, savvy art, its inheritors seem to resonate more with the present than R.E.M. itself does. Your Nirvanas and Pavements and Radioheads—behemoth alt-rock bands that seem to be endlessly rediscovered by newer generations as a source of credibility—have kept their cultural capital, while R.E.M. remains marooned in Alternative Muzak-land. This mismatch between how large the band loomed and how little attention it gets today suggests not only how powerfully R.E.M. offered a foundation for rock to build from, but also how industry can so quickly seize transgressors and push their work into masscult middlebrow.

If Carlin’s adulation is anything to learn from, the attitude of R.E.M.’s original members made them mavericks at any point in their timeline. “What could be artier, freakier, and weirder than injecting their outsider ideas into the heart of the mainstream?” he asks. To him, R.E.M. was a foursome of lucky and amenable rock craftsmen, coasting manfully along topography that moved around in concert with their growth and whims. “They worked hard to be a good band,” he writes, “and when that work began to pay off, they worked even harder and got even better.”

Underemphasis can certainly be its own kind of emphasis—R.E.M. was very good at it. But if, as Carlin writes, their “sound and vision became . . . the sound of mainstream culture,” for new nonfans, it might require more than usual force to heave R.E.M. out of the past, to defamiliarize a band that once defamiliarized, to redignify its music as not just the pablum accompanying your grocery run but as a phenomenon that inspired enduring apostles you probably already revere. Maybe one of those TikTok-related miracles can make it feel strange again. Maybe it demands more time and critical distance. Or it may require—as Mike Mills recently said when asked what it would take to get the band back together—“a comet.”

In some ways, R.E.M. was definitely far in advance of this world. In most ways, the band was exactly of it. Shifting when time and forces demanded, it granted the industry a commercially acceptable version of counterculture; it was, at one point, part of that deep and old American fantasy: to be free-floating, of its own terra. Over time, its line to Earth slackened, tightened, then slackened again. But for all its tension between mundanity and extramundanity, how strange and cosmic that its dominant quality—this pushing and pulling—so cleanly defines the infinitive to rock.