WELCOME TO THE OCCUPATION - R.E.M.
“To our Fans and Friends: As R.E.M., and as lifelong friends and co-conspirators, we have decided to call it a day as a band. We walk away with a great sense of gratitude, of finality, and of astonishment at all we have accomplished. To anyone who ever felt touched by our music, our deepest thanks for listening.”
~ R.E.M., September 21, 2011
I have always, and will always, credit this band for bringing me out of what I like to call my musical “wilderness years.” I don’t know, really, how I managed to wander as far off course as I did. It’s possible, perhaps, that when the first five records your parents give you when you’re little, to start off your collection, include two Peter, Paul & Mary records, some Joni Mitchell, ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’ and The Beatles’ ‘Abbey Road;’ and your dad’s record cabinets are stuffed with records you love just as much but he’s not ready to part with yet, but at the same time he’s starting to take an interest in classical music, so you’re discovering that with him, while your mom never met a record she couldn’t learn to love so you picked up from her how to embrace ‘Blue Suede Shoes,’ ‘Blue Monday’ and the ‘Blue Danube’ with equal fervor…and, well, just about the only way you can really rebel against that or attempt to assert yourself through your record collection is (or was, in my case) to start listening to a lot of stuff with precious little redeeming value that will only embarrass the hell out of you later.
Which it does, which is why I’m not naming names here. I don’t even think I was trying to keep up with the cool kids, because they’d never had anything to do with me and I never thought they would and was past caring. It’s all a bit mortifying, at any rate, especially given that I must have actually liked a fair bit of it. Or thought I did. Because it’s not like I went through a period where I no longer took any pleasure from my records, I know I did. It’s just that when I heard R.E.M. for the first time, I shivered, and I hadn’t done that in such a long time.
I’d forgotten that music was supposed to do that to you, sometimes (as I’d been too busy using it to annoy other people in the name of self-actualisation, or something).
And the first time I heard this song, I cried. Not even because the song itself is that powerful (although it probably is anyway); it’s just that I stood there, rooted to the spot, feeling for all the world like the prodigal daughter come home again, home to the way I used to experience music, to the way I’d grown up loving it, and every single musical avenue I’ve explored since, probably every piece of music I’ve purchased or loved since, can be traced - however circuitously - back to that moment.
I will always love them for that, and for so much more.
It’s funny, because they’ve been a bit off my radar for a while now, and yet I’ve sort of felt this coming. I can’t honestly say I’m surprised. At all. But it still hurts. And it isn’t what I wanted to come home to today.
Thanks, guys. For everything.
