#pretty-good

[wordsflowingout]

*whispers* fearlessly and forever

[modernserf]

The very first tape I ever bought, when I was eight years old, was REM's [_Out of Time_][1]. I had listened to [my Mom's tapes][2] before and I had [a favorite song][3] but this was the first music that belonged to me. I was deeply in love with this record in a way that I never would be again; when you only have one album in your library it tends to get a lot of play. Late at night, I would sit in my bed with my Walkman and listen to it over and over, particularly "[Shiny Happy People][4]." I often would fast-forward through "[Low][5]" as the sexual imagery made me feel very tingly/uncomfortable, and "[Country Feedback][6]" was kind of a bummer so I skipped that a lot too. Still, I listened to at least most of that album several times a day. Fortuitously, for a future music nerd like myself, there were extensive liner notes that I would pore over like a Talmudic scholar. _Out of Time_ is actually an anomaly in their catalog - none of their other albums would feature nearly as much vocal work from Mike Mills or guest spots as high profile as Kate Pierson and [KRS-One][7] - but their mode of operation was a mystery to me. Given that I had an allowance of I'm guessing five bucks a week, and [my other needs][8], I have no idea how I managed to save up enough money to buy more of their albums. It must have taken quite some time and been a really big deal, thus I came to know them all in minutest detail. I was starting to listen to other bands -- I was also cassetting my way through the Pearl Jam catalog -- but REM was far and away my favorite. I was even buying some CDs when the tape wasn't available, as was the case for all their IRS albums. This was both a significant cost and scheduling burden, as I did not have my own CD player and had to either listen when my parents weren't home or scrounge up some money to make tape dubs. Eventually, after collecting all of their albums I spent a marathon evening dubbing the best songs from each onto a side of a tape so I could carry their catalog around more easily. And when I was home, I could listen to their whole history on a rainy day and trace their [imaginary journey across America][9]. This also happens to be around the time the web was going mainstream. I found [File Under REM][10] (the site looks almost exactly like it did back then, btw) which had good approximations of their generally impenetrable lyrics. More enticing still was their collection of RealAudio versions of their unreleased rarities. My very indulgent grandmother let me take over her computer and 28.8 modem for what must have been hours as I downloaded these songs and recorded them onto tape for posterity. Downloading videos at this time was unthinkable, so instead my Dad stayed up late in the night during VH1's A-Z music video weekend to tape the handful of REM videos they showed. (Thank God they didn't have "[Pop Song '89][11]" (NSFW) -- that would have been awkward.) An interesting aspect about this fandom is that although I knew a lot about the band from reading _[It Crawled From the South: an REM Companion][12]_ I wasn't actually that interested in the members outside of the band. I admired [Mike Mills][12.5] a lot since he was the band member I most resembled, and I became a bassist largely because of him, but I never wondered about his hobbies, his favorite foods, or his birthday. (Or if he had a thing for [Japanese schoolgirls][13].) I never got to know Bill Berry beyond the unibrow. And Michael Stipe, ostensibly the most "celebrity" of any of them, was just this vaguely menacing androgynous cipher that fascinated me but I never really explored. His [sexuality in particular][14] (NSFW) was hard for me to process; a boy on the cusp of puberty has confusing enough ideas about sex, so imagine what a queer-ish one must have felt. As I grew older, my tastes in bands fanned out and I started listening to less and less REM. Bill Berry left the group around this time and the band slid into their infamous decline. As I became a teen and more social, it became more and more important to have a band that I could share with my friends; a band that wasn't a bunch of forty year old men making adult contemporary. The very last cassette I bought was Weezer's [blue album](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weezer_(1994_album)), and I would spend the four years of my high school memorizing the exploits of Rivers Cuomo et al. until they too put out a [string][15] of [boring][16] [records][17]. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_Time_(album) [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_on_Broadway [3]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkwmSzPdVnY [4]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCQ0vDAbF7s&ob=av2e [5]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqVI_CHlFAI&ob=av2n [6]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boUZmibXQUQ [7]: http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/081204/krs-one-the-mystery-continues.gif [8]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Grand_Bar [9]:http://mwbassguy.livejournal.com/61246.html [10]:http://www.retroweb.com/rem.html [11]:http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xb940_rem-pop-song-89_music [12]:http://www.amazon.com/Crawled-South-R-M-Companion/dp/0306807513 [12.5]: http://modernserf.tumblr.com/post/4159549333 [13]:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mxEoA3G9Wg [14]:http://fleshbot.com/5842214/ever-wanted-to-see-michael-stipes-dick-here-it-is [15]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weezer_(2001_album) [16]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maladroit [17]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_Believe