Being a rock star must be a tough gig. Achieving success, the lodestar guiding your energy, anger and muse, instantaneously puts you in the realm of the very elitism against which you’ve been rebelling – an existential pickle for sure. That irony has rarely been more pronounced than in the case of R.E.M., one of the most articulate, self-consciously progressive bands to find themselves subject to mainstream rock glory.
While a lot of their contemporaries (most obviously U2) embraced the outer extremes of their success with a due sense of entitlement – as The Name of This Band Is R.E.M. explains – the group not only wrestled with the contradictions of stardom, but to some degree made them part of their identity.
This new biography by Peter Ames Carlin, while tracking the American band’s long and storied history from 1980 to their amicable break-up in 2011, expresses that contradictoriness well, subverting – to a degree – the usual standards of a rock history.
It’s mostly an intelligent, accessible read – stylistically reflecting the thoughtful, literate melodicism of much of their musical output, while allowing space for quirkier, empathetic passages that shape our impressions of these unlikely rockstars.
In particular, its structure helps to form a coherent sense of how this most collegiate and democratic of bands functioned, judiciously staggering its focus on each member throughout the book in a way that feels organic and measured.
The exploration of the contradictions inherent in the R.E.M. phenomenon is where the book is most engaging, from the earliest sections where it’s explained how lead singer Michael Stipe, icon of alt-rock, grew up – not rebelling against conservative restrictions, as one may expect – but within a loving, supportive family.
As the band takes off, so do the push-pull imperatives of success come to the fore. This is, of course, represented most prominently by Stipe’s enigmatic yet powerful performances, public persona and the ambiguities found in seminal lyrics such as “follow me, don’t follow me” from the 1984 song ‘Orange Crush’.
Even when R.E.M. is at its most banal, most infamously in the 1991 song ‘Shiny Happy People’, the book is smart enough to identify the contradictions of ‘dumb lyrics’ themselves within the context of their oeuvre, asking us: “Had they cracked the code of the dominant paradigm or simply surrendered to it? … Or was it a simply a very good (and extremely catchy) joke?”
Carlin’s missteps are primarily down to a tendency to take the rock mythologising a little too far – without necessarily contextualising the band within its time all that insightfully or with a sufficient degree of self-awareness that befits this band.
Not that a little rock worshipping isn’t justified. After all, the band’s astonishing run of quality albums and successful performances – starting from their famous 1980 gig in a dilapidated church (evocatively described in the book) – puts them on a rarefied pedestal.
But the emphasis at times on cultivating the rock fable can come across as a bit gauche, in particular, when it takes liberties with the experiences of the chief protagonists – which implies a depth of personal insight on behalf of the author that is not always entirely convincing, even if can be charming.
For example, presumably we’re not expected to take literally that Carlin knows that, upon meeting the rest of the band, bassist Mike Mills “slurred a hello, belched alcohol, laughed at a joke nobody else heard, and nearly toppled over with the effort” or that prior to their famous gig at the church, guitarist Peter Buck “drained his cup, stepped to the keg for a refill, took a big swallow, nodded at whoever he was talking to and strode toward the entryway”.
Sure, we can see how Carlin’s use of ironic juxtaposition feeds the popular mythology of R.E.M. as accidental, beguilingly ordinary, heroes – but it still feels a little strained here, even if he’s apparently gone to lengths with his research to establish historical context (although to be clear, the members of R.E.M. didn’t consent to be interviewed for the book).
That being said, the tendency toward trying to elaborate on these more intimate moments and lowkey gestures reflects the way the band was never about outsized, tabloid displays of emotional trauma and decadence that comes with your run-of-the-mill rock gods. For the most part they got along incredibly (almost supernaturally) well; the most dramatic moments arise from the brain aneurysm of drummer Bill Berry that seems to have set him on a path to retirement.
Otherwise, the rock ‘n’ roll exploits generally don’t stray too far from a little overindulgence – and those insights are often informatively charming rather than salacious, including their behaviour during the recording of 1987’s Document album in Nashville as “young guys on the town with plenty of cash and a healthy appetite for fun”. This means, it turns out, buying some avocados, tortilla chips, a few cases of beer – and inviting “everyone in for a competitive guac-off”. Mötley Crüe these guys are not – and it’s telling that the one sexual misdemeanour (the kind of thing that would’ve been par for the course, if not tacitly endorsed in other parts of the mainstream rock world at the time) is enacted not by the band, but by their manager, and the very thing that finally splits them with that individual, decades before #MeToo came along.
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These moments say something more profound about R.E.M., the anti-rockstars who became massive rockstars anyway, than the book’s sometimes clumsy attempts to tell us how amazing they were. Nevertheless, The Name Of The Band Is R.E.M. does a pretty good job of explaining the apparently contradictory impulse of being nice guys while also, at the same time, wanting to be one of the biggest bands in the world.
The Name of This Band Is R.E.M, Peter Ames Carlin
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 9781460718377
Format: Hardback
Pages: 464pp
Publication date: 4 December 2024
RRP: $36.99
