There’s Dave and Trey and Tori and Ani and Jerry. Most of us are diehard fans of some band or artist, whose music we know so intimately that we feel that we can be on a first name basis with them.
But fandom is a strange state. We want our favorite artists to succeed and achieve mainstream success, but we are also very possessive of music that we consider our own – music that we eventually have to sacrifice to the ears of a million others. I have friends who boast about special ordering the White Stripes album four years ago, before their music was even being sold in this country.
I have friends who say their worship of Dave Matthews began years before Dave himself was dreaming up his band’s first mainstream success, Under the Table and Dreaming. We want to continue loving them, even if we have to share them with millions of others, but we sacrifice our indie-credibility, and in turn, a little bit of pride.
For me, this band is R.E.M. I don’t remember how old I was when I first loved them. I remember sneaking an episode of “Beverly Hills, 90210,” with Brenda and Dylan making out in his Porsche, parked on a California bluff, listening to “Losing My Religion.” I remember sneaking MTV and catching the music video for “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” and being drawn in by the frenzy of the song.
Mainstream pop music, however, provides an avenue to social acceptance that is too tempting to reject. Sure, I’ll admit it: I know every repetitive, generic word to Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Outta My Head.” Beyonc warms my heart just a little bit with “Crazy in Love,” and I think back to the summer with my friends and I dancing and sweaty, shouting how much we love Beyonc. Okay, it may have been just me who was shouting that.
When I was in the second and third grades, I “loved” New Kids on the Block, more for the access they provided to social acceptance than for their puppy-love inspirations and droning and monotonous “Oh oh oh oh ohs” and “Oh oh oh ohs.” I didn’t like the simplicity of their lyrics, and I was sick of this girl they were serenading who had “The Right Stuff.” I knew I liked the harmonies of The Beach Boys, the sleepy, lilting falsetto of Roy Orbison, the twang of John Denver and the lyrics of Don MacLean – it was the soundtrack of our car and of our living room on Saturday mornings, when my father would vacuum to make my mother happy, and I would jump and tumble from cushion to cushion of our maroon, velour couches.
In the early days of my relationship with R.E.M., I was attempting my final efforts to listen to the music that the other fourth graders were listening to, which was broadcast on the local rap and hip-hop station (back in the day, when “Jam’n” 94.5 was “Zoo” 94.5). I made an honest effort, but one afternoon in the car with my mother, our ears were assaulted by Salt-n-Pepa’s “Let’s Talk About Sex.”
“Let’s talk about sex baby / let’s talk about you and me / let’s talk about all the good things and the bad things that may be / let’s talk abouuuut sssex.”
Our cheeks were red, but Roy Orbison was soothing us with “Blue Bayou” within seconds after my mother had jammed the cassette into the stereo.
Soon after that incident, I devoted an entire afternoon to memorizing all the lyrics to “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” which was followed by successive purchases of most R.E.M. albums.
R.E.M. is my band. Like many couples, I can remember the moment when I knew that I was committed to them. I was in seventh grade and I had caught a rerun of their performance on MTV’s Unplugged. Whenever he sang the chorus of “Fall on Me,” Michael Stipe closed his eyes – but not the squeezed-shut, eking-out-the-vocals facial contortions of rock stars. His eyes rolled back and his eyelids fluttered, like he was singing himself to sleep.
I love Michael Stipe and the rest of the band because they write lyrics like “The only thing to fear is fearlessness,” and “Hang your collar up inside/hang your freedom higher.” On stage, Michael Stipe dances like your dad at a wedding meeting the shoop-shoop shuffle of Diana Ross and the Supremes.
Mostly, I am devoted to Michael Stipe and R.E.M. because I’ve never felt that I’ve had to make this sacrifice regardless of their mainstream success. They are the best representation of a band that has retained its integrity since the early 1980s, through New Kids on the Block and through today’s pop landscape. I have not always been entirely faithful. I own quite a few “Ani” and “Tori” albums, and there were a few years where I was rockin’ the studded belt and the cuffed jeans. For each memory, however, there is an R.E.M. song behind it.
Because that’s the thing – I hope that everyone understands the artistic integrity that can be maintained with or without mainstream success; with or without the “cheating” that each fan may commit.
I recently saw R.E.M. live for the first time and I sang along with 22 years of the band’s history, and 12 years of my own. I danced and Michael Stipe danced, and they sang and I sang, and I was in love.
Allison Keiley, a senior in the College of Communication, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press.