Hot Take/ Musical Confession Thread!

Sanders said:
They were the bridge between the teenage rage of grunge, and... Well, whatever the hell else was going on in rock in the 90s. R.E.M. is only there for the sake of an example. Put in Radiohead or Creed or something, it's the same statement.
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Ok so I listened to Siamese Dream and Automatic For the People.

Siamese Dream: I can see why this would be a point of entry for people who were into harder side of popular music. However the lyrics have not aged well. I found them rather simple and dealt with simple problems. The teenage rage, yea it’s there. There also the teenage self absorption. It matches the popular picture of Billy.

Automatic for the People: sonically it’s a lot more varied, which makes it more interesting to listen to. Their lyrics have aged a lot better. They are more varied in subject, empathetic, and show a bigger world view.

I’ll listen to some songs from SD, but AFTP I’d probably spin a lot more and want to listen to the whole album.
 
Lee Newman said:
This also shows my age but I think REM was important in the 80’s and just massively popular in the 90’s.
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I was there for the massively popular bit but having dug back agree with you. R.E.M. in the US and The Smiths this side are really the two bands that made indie music into a substantial thing. R.E.M. survived to become big, The Smiths spit up and got to have the mystique around bands that split up in their prime.
 
Dtknuckles said:
it makes me wonder about the relationships he had with the people in the stories. Were they really as intimate as the lyrics portray? Who knows maybe he made them up from images he saw or things he just observed someplace.
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I've always heard that, in many cases, Stipe was pretty "in the moment" with lyrics, and that he wasn't even sure himself what the definitive words are to some of those early songs. That was why he mumbled and moaned so much through a lot of those songs. Not sure if that is true, but I remember hearing him talk about that in older interviews.
 
Sanders said:
90s. R.E.M. is only there for the sake of an example
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Your example is flawed. R.E.M. did the vast majority of their influencing in the 1980’s. 1990s for a band like R.E.M. was more of a victory lap where they jumped from being the most important band in College/Underground Rock to the biggest rock band in music. I love both The Pumpkins and R.E.M. but The Pumpkins never rose to the level of importance as R.E.M.
 
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I think R.E.M. is one of the great American rock bands. They never really found their footing after Bill Berry left, but, for me, their output from "Murmur" through "New Adventures in Hi-Fi" is pretty strong throughout. And there are several songs post-Bill Berry that I enjoy too. I just don't think they ever really produced albums on the level of their early work in those later years. Even though they weren't as commercially successful at the end, their last two were actually pretty solid, and let them end on a decent note.
 
Sanders said:
They were the bridge between the teenage rage of grunge, and... Well, whatever the hell else was going on in rock in the 90s. R.E.M. is only there for the sake of an example. Put in Radiohead or Creed or something, it's the same statement.
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Hahaha! Comical take! Elevate a terrible band by putting them in the same sentence as the most influential band of the 80s and the most influential band of the late 90s/early 00s!
 
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