Things that happen when you’re thirty-one.

[bodlon]

R.E.M. changed my life.

It sounds ridiculous, and it possibly is, but I was born in 1980. By the time I was self-aware enough to track which artists were which, R.E.M. was on my radar. I only vaguely remember a musical landscape before "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)," and Out of Time is the indelible mark on my consciousness that separates the 1980s from the early 1990s. It epitomizes for me what those years felt, looked, and sounded like.

The thing about my affinity for R.E.M. is that they were always about more than music for me. Their music has been a balm, a road map, a dictionary, and a kick in the ass. Automatic For The People is full of songs that helped me make sense of politics as well as my struggles with depression and loneliness. Monster and its associated media gave me a framework for trying to understand all kinds of things like relationships and queer identity.

Michael Stipe was the role model I needed in high school to help me own my own strangeness and creativity and regard it as an asset. He's the reason I tried photography and did three years of high school journalism. Mike Mills is the reason I took up bass guitar, and is probably the root of my love of glittery things.

Without R.E.M., I'm almost certain some of the best and most important things I've ever done for myself would never have even been on the menu. Their music and their public personae were touchstones for me in adolescence, and even as an adult they're a well-worn, familiar point of reference.

The grown-up line is that we should give up idolizing celebrities. Interviews with rock stars in magazines shouldn't inspire us and make us change. I get that. But ordinary human beings or not, they're also artists who inspired me, and sometimes still do inspire me to try new things, play with language and sound, and remind me that ordinariness and magic can occur in the same confined space. In that sense, they've done me an incredible service. It's natural to feel some loss and nostalgia, I think.

So to R.E.M., all I can really say is this:

Thank you for making music I'll never stop listening to*, for showing me how to be politically engaged for literally as long as I can remember, for the things you gave me as a brilliant, accidental consequence of doing a thing you love. I'm glad I saw you live, I'll miss hearing new songs from you on the radio, and may all of your new adventures be amazing.

"Pick up here and chase the ride.
The river empties to the tide.
All of this is coming your way."

---
*I won't talk about certain albums if you won't.

(Original image from TV Tropes, alterations mine.)

This post has been mirrored from Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive. To see it in its original format, visit dimlightarchive.com