The Semiconscious Capitalism of the Counterculture
Michael Stipe performing with R.E.M. at South by Southwest in 2008. Photo by Kris Krug.
Reading The Name of This Band is R.E.M. — the remarkably incurious biography of the alternative icons written by Peter Ames Carlin and released late last year, I was transported back to ‘90s MTV, where lead singer Michael Stipe was omnipresent, encouraging viewers to Rock the Vote, or support a woman’s right to choose or to demand action on gun control or global warming.
These were halcyon days for the network, a time when its programmers landed on the perfect content mix — shows like Beavis & Butthead and The Real World were generating headlines for the network, music videos were arguably at their creative apex, Kurt Loder anchored MTV News and artists like Stipe and Beastie Boys were injecting the enterprise with an air of socially conscious cool that reflected a retreat from the hedonistic-yet-conservative ‘80s to the thoughtful and pragmatic new decade.
R.E.M. bridged the two eras. Their rise from college radio and critical darlings to modern rock radio superstars got some wind under its sails at the end of the ‘80s and took flight just before Nirvana’s seminal album Nevermind kicked the door wide open in 1991.
Their earliest records — the ones that are still the most endlessly replayable — were purposefully inscrutable. The vocals never above the guitars in the mix. The album covers obtuse. The lyrics indecipherable. Their ‘90s albums, by contrast, were marked by a new sense of clarity. The mixes boomed out of the car radio. The lyrics were direct to the point of simplicity (See, “Hurts, Everybody”).
Carlin covers all of this in typical rock bio fashion. He traces the early roots of the band. Stipe — along with guitarist Peter Buck, drummer Bill Berry and bassist Mike Mills — emerged from Athens, Ga., which was home to a flourishing arts and music scene that had already delivered The B-52s and Pylon to national notoriety when R.E.M. came along — and would soon follow up with bands like Bar-B-Q-Killers and Flat Duo Jets, not to mention later bands like of Montreal and Drive-By Truckers.
The Athens scene was captured beautifully by the 1986 documentary Athens, Ga.: Inside/Out, which also played on MTV’s The Cutting Edge that same year and featured performances and creative input by the band. R.E.M. were steeped in myth from the outset, creatively and commercially, and they would use it to their advantage on both fronts throughout their career.
Grace Elizabeth Hale, who was intimately involved in the Athens scene, drew a vivid portrait of that world in her 2020 book Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture — a book I would recommend you read before diving into Carlin’s book, which relies heavily on Hale’s book to set the scene for R.E.M.’s rise to fame and fortune. Hale also touches on the careerism of the band and some of the (light) ambivalence it engendered among the Athens scene. Her book is more vital and important and is worth a read if you like these topics.
R.E.M., while part of this scene, were also apart from it from the beginning. While the members all had roots in Georgia — they all bounced around the country (and sometimes abroad) with their families before landing in school at the University of Georgia. Each, in his own way, was more worldly and experienced than the average Georgia local. Stipe, a military brat, had been involved in St. Louis’s burgeoning music and art scenes. Both Buck and Berry had entry-level jobs in the music business. Mills and Berry had played in high school bands in their hometown of Macon, where they rubbed elbows with Allman Brothers roadies and record executives (the band and their label, Capricorn, was based in Macon). They were in no way nepo babies, but they did have a bit of a head start in the music business. When it came time to get a record deal, it was nearly as easy as a phone call to I.R.S. Records, a label that Mills and Berry had an existing relationship with.
And, therein lies some interesting truths about R.E.M. First, its members, who are so widely identified with Gen X, are themselves children at the tail end of the Baby Boom who were able to surf through the absolute peak of American youth culture. They were too young for Vietnam and the economic malaise of Ford and Carter’s America. They were able to profit from the economic boom of the Reagan years without having to fully embrace its braindead patriotism. And they were able to cash out before Silicon Valley started “disrupting” industries like music and television.
Second, that they were at least somewhat wiser to the ways and whims of the music business than the average band before they ever played a note together. These guys, in short, had a business plan and it was a good one.
And, third, that their intent from the beginning was to use that plan to make it as successful, full-time musicians. That’s not to say it was easy for R.E.M. — they had to work for it. But it was considerably easier than it was for The Allman Brothers (brother Gregg Allman shot himself in the foot to avoid the draft) before them or Georgia artists that followed like Outkast.
Not that there's anything wrong with any of this — there isn’t — but it’s important to consider in light of the band’s unrelenting ability to control their own narrative. In 30 years of interviews the band repeatedly states that they never took their careers too seriously, that they never wanted to be famous and that they just wanted to, like, play music, man.
To that end, much is made of the band’s anti-commercial decisions in its earliest days. They split songwriting credits equally. They didn’t publish a lyrics sheet. They eschewed making traditional music videos — Stipe refused to lip sync through much of the ‘80s.
These decisions, except perhaps splitting publishing, are largely aesthetic. While making these “stands,” the band also toured relentlessly, helping set up a circuit of hippie and college town venues that many independent bands still follow to this day. While most Athens bands could barely be bothered to get out of bed, R.E.M. was already on the road, building their business.
By the ‘90s the band had jettisoned most of those principled decisions. They gladly lip-synced for classic videos like “Losing My Religion” and “Shiny Happy People.” They signed with Warner Brothers, a major label that was also home to The Grateful Dead’s classic era. And, prickly as they might have been, the band regularly did interviews — especially on MTV, where they were fixtures. The few times Carlin pulls the curtain back on the band’s decision making, we see its members again and again choosing the option that makes them bigger and richer. They were, in a word, savvy.
These decisions, executed at just the right time, paid off handsomely for the band. Their albums Green, Out of Time, and Automatic for the People were smash hits that sold millions and millions of copies. Their singles topped the charts. And, thanks to their pioneering use of television and media, the band was able to do it while taking a five-year break from the relentless touring they spent most of the ‘80s doing. When they did return to the road after 1994’s Monster, it was their biggest tour as a major arena act — even though they said in the ‘80s they would never play arenas, either.
Did R.E.M. sell out? You’re damn right they did. That was the plan all along — maximize value and get acquired with the best terms possible. They were, like most alternative culture, a start up, and a damn good one.
I mention The Grateful Dead because even though the two bands are separated by the chasm of punk rock, they have more in common than might meet the eye. Both signed to Warner Brothers. Both bands toured aggressively. Both bands built sizable audiences in the Reagan ‘80s that carried them to sustained riches in the Clinton ‘90s and beyond.
And both bands did so while maintaining their reputation as the countercultural icons of their respective spaces — all while reaching larger and larger audiences as early adopters of new media from cable to the Internet. The counterculture, it would seem, is not so much anti-commercial and anti-capitalist so much as capitalist pioneers. They are less concerned with the mechanics of capitalism than they are with the aesthetics of capitalism.
But they did it for a good cause, no? Who can forget Stipe at the podium for the MTV VMAs, removing t-shirt after t-shirt with sayings like HANDGUN CONTROL and WEAR A CONDOM and THE RIGHT TO VOTE? As the kids say these days, iconic.
I remember those days, hazily, since I was a kid, but I remember them well enough to tell you how they felt. With Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop” thumping in the cultural arena, we watched as a new generation of Southern Boomers awkwardly clapped and mugged and gave thumbs ups to the crowd. It was a new era, after all. Or at least it sure looked like a new era.
Bill Clinton and Al Gore were keenly aware of how to use media, too, and they would enlist MTV, The Dead and R.E.M. to make their case to an American people weary of George H.W. Bush’s visionless adherence to the postwar order. The Democrats, and especially Southern Democrats, were cool.
And yet, just a few years later, we were largely right back where we started, and perhaps much, much worse. Clinton was gone, popular but tarnished by scandal. Bush’s dipshit son was in the Oval Office. Then 9/11. The Dead was just that and R.E.M. were making some of the most boring and tepid alternative music imaginable. They made a couple of decent tracks in the early years of the Obama era, but by 2011, the band was done.
As a jaded elder millennial it’s hard not to look back on that era in hindsight with anything other than cynicism. Clinton did some good things — the budget, etc. — but he also bungled healthcare and helped pass laws that would incarcerate Black Americans like never before. The Federal Assault Weapons Ban expired in 2004. Women have less reproductive rights now than anytime since the ‘60s.
More than anything else, it was the beginning of the substance-lite, PR-heavy era of The Democratic Party we just saw get absolutely walloped on Election Day 2024 — just a few days before Carlin’s book was released. It is an era and an idea Carlin and so many in his generation seem happy to venerate and mythologize in the same way their elder Boomer brethren did The Dead, Woodstock, antiwar protests and all of that feel good activism that, ultimately, decisively, failed.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. As a friend of mine once said, “The ‘60s are over — we lost.”
That anarchic countercultural icon Hunter S. Thompson seems almost prophetic now. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, he wrote in his ESPN column that “the 22 babies born in New York City while the World Trade Center burned will never know what they missed. The last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids, compared to what’s coming now. The party’s over.”
The ‘90s are over. We lost.
But, for a brief shining moment — what a party it was. Everything looked like everyone had it all under control through MTV’s camera lens. And perhaps no image symbolizes that party quite like Stipe and 10,000 Maniacs singer Natalie Merchant onstage at the 1993 MTV Inaugural Ball, singing “Candy Everybody Wants.”
In the ecstatic glow of Clinton’s installation to power, Merchant and Stipe sing: Hey, hey give ‘em what they want. They twirl in delight, totally unaware that the party will never be this good again.
Carlin said in a podcast interview he was inspired to write about R.E.M. because of their political significance — what they stood for in the “Don’t Stop” ‘90s — and that’s ultimately what he’s done here. He’s written a book about the idea of R.E.M., which, of course, is what R.E.M. has always been so good at selling. The Grateful Dead, themselves energetic Clinton donors, knew the drill, too. The counterculture is an aesthetic.
To me, writing about music is at its worst when it reinforces the myth. The myths keep us returning to noble ideals and failed ideas. As another Athens band once sang, “rock and roll means well but it can’t help telling young boys lies.”
30 years on from Clinton’s inaugural address, I’m not so sure that what’s wrong with America can be cured by what’s right with America. Are you? How did that hopey changey stuff work out for ya? I’m not sure Stipe’s t-shirts did much of anything.
Because behind the scenes were all the excesses and egos evident in every other band, in every other corporation, and every other political party. Clinton, of course, used his power to manipulate and coerce women. The Dead ended up ensnared in drugs, greed and their own hubris. The alternative, it turns out, wasn’t really much of an alternative at all.
R.E.M., in their defense, knew when to leave the party. You can find a lot of rock cliches lightly touched on in this book — Berry’s drinking, Mills and Stipe’s promiscuity, and egos all around. They work in separate studios and chase after famous friends and all tomorrow’s parties. But there is a sense of restraint that precludes R.E.M. Inc. from the harsh judgment I’d reserve for a corporation like The Dead.
R.E.M. got rich, but not too rich. They promoted themselves, but they didn’t overexpose themselves. They broke up and didn’t reunite.
They knew when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em. They danced along the tightrope of Boomer power with grace and a devotion to message discipline. It wasn’t so much that they changed the game as they played the game well. And, for that, I think R.E.M. does deserve praise.
You see, that’s something Carlin touches on in the book. First, that R.E.M. generally treated the people around them pretty well. Second, that perhaps because of this, the loyalty of their inner circle resembles a well-run PR machine. Everyone, he notes without much exploration, seems to be speaking from the same script. Topics for deeper research, I guess.
But to me, to examine R.E.M.’s political significance uncritically is to glorify perhaps their greatest failure — that when art and ideals are reduced to political tools they fail to produce meaningful results.
I am reminded of a book about another Georgia music icon, Duane Allman, written by his daughter, Galadrielle. Galadrielle barely remembers her famous father, who died at 24 years old, and Please Be With Me: A Song for My Father, Duane Allman, is an examination of the myth and the man she so desperately wished to know. What she finds, however, is complicated. He is a man of ideals — of love and brotherhood and togetherness — who fails to actually live up to those ideals. Her mother and others tell her to listen to the music — that was the best part of him, that was, ultimately, who he was. Elsewhere she finds violence, infidelity and addiction.
She records a scene that sticks out in my mind: As the band practices the classic “Revival” in the Big House (in Macon not far from Berry and Mills), their wives and girlfriends answer the chorus — “People can you feel it? Love is everywhere” — with their own refrain — “Practice what you preach. Practice what you preach.”
Did R.E.M. do this? Maybe to an extent. They practiced capitalism with a sense of egalitarianism. They split their profits. They treated people well. They didn’t get greedy. But was that enough? And, in light of their position as New Democrat icons, did it justify their idealistic preachiness on the MTV airwaves whilst profiting off the same marketplace they critiqued so freely? Or did it just give an air of credibility to the dirty business of American marketing, moneymaking and its related bullshit? I am not sure and Carlin is not brave enough to ask.
So, what is R.E.M.’s legacy? To me, overall, it’s those first three albums — Murmur, Reckoning and Fables of the Reconstruction — plus Automatic for the People, the mandolin breakdown near the end of “Losing My Religion,” and the millions of copies of Monster that once lived in used CD bins and now are probably buried in landfills across the global supply chain.
But for me, R.E.M.’s single greatest legacy is perhaps one song that I love, “Nightswimming,” which a friend of mine called “painfully good” and I think he’s nailed it. The song is a bittersweet slice of nostalgia — the singer remembers a youthful skinny dip with friends — with a gorgeous piano riff and lyrics that perfectly blend Stipe’s more abstract early writing with his clearer, later work:
You I thought I knew you
You I cannot judge
You I thought you knew me
That moment is gone. The party is over. These things, they go away, replaced by every day.
