R.E.M.

R.E.M. American rock group, the gold standard of do-it-yourself college rock during the 1980s and of pop stardom accomplished with an idiosyncratic approach in the 1990s. The members were Michael Stipe (b. Jan. 4, 1960, Decatur, Ga., U.S.), Peter Buck (b. Dec. 6, 1956, Berkeley, Calif.), Mike Mills (b. Dec. 17, 1958, Orange, Calif.), and Bill Berry (b. July 31, 1958, Duluth, Minn.). R.E.M., named for a dream-state condition (rapid eye movement), formed in 1980 in Athens, Georgia, a university town about 65 miles northeast of Atlanta that was already internationally noted for its local pop scene by the time R.E.M. released Chronic Town, their 1982 debut extended-play recording. Stipe, obsessed with his own passions and hatreds, was a rounded tenor who draped vague words in sonically reassuring cadences, and Buck, with his wider-ranging yet unconventional collector's view of rock, was a guitarist drawn to fun and ideas; they met at the record store where Buck worked and Stipe shopped. Their band was more melodic than earlier groups in Athens, such as Pylon, yet never as lighthearted as the B-52's. R.E.M. answered only to themselves. That quality explains the unmatched regard that would accrue to this romantic bandthe American equivalent of Irish rockers U2 and British alternative rock groups such as the Smiths, outfits also interested in stretching the rock-band guitar tradition into something newly personal. Beginning with the shifting sonic tapestry of Radio Free Europe (first released in 1981), R.E.M. drew on influences as various as the Byrds, the Velvet Underground, Big Star, Patti Smith, the Rolling Stones, and the New York Dolls to regale fans with albums fashioned from unpredictable blends of nonmetal rock and impressionistic folk. Especially ambitious was the band's 1985 release, Fables of the Reconstruction, a tense blend of R.E.M.'s ideas about folk rock and those of Joe Boyd, an American expatriate who worked in the 1960s with British artists such as Nick Drake and Fairport Convention. R.E.M. also offered singles such as Fall on Me and The One I Love, which broadened its audience. The tack was completed in 1991 when Out of Time reached number one on the British and American album charts and the single Losing My Religion became an enormous hit. Not at all suddenly, these purveyors of the immediately accessible and the oblique were quadruple-platinum superstars. R.E.M. taught successive generations of American rockers how to be vague and specific at the same time; by juxtaposing evocative phrases to create poetic collages, they involved listeners in the creation of the meaning of their songs. The group spent the 1990s making gorgeously balladic albums such as Automatic for the People (1992) and rowdier, noisier collections such as Monster (1994). Soon after the release of New Adventures in Hi-Fi in 1996, drummer Berry, who had suffered health problems, left the band. With his departure R.E.M. again reinvented its sound with Up (1998), an adventurous album of sonic experimentation. James Hunter