REM was one of the first proper bands I got into in my mid-teens. Prior to that, I mostly listened to C64 chiptunes, Jean Michel Jarre (eek!) and a side helping of assorted chart music. That's right, I'm not even going to pretend I was too cool for that shit back then. I wasn't. I was an adolescent, and in the same manner that I was developing, so was my appreciation of music. Anyway, it might come as no surprise to learn that my first encounter with REM was through 'Shiny Happy People', which in turn, piqued my interest in their 'Out of Time' album a bit later on.
When hearing REM for the first time, something about them intrigued me, and I could immediately perceive this was a band of hidden depths. I liked Michael Stipe's voice and was fascinated by his strange and often oblique lyrics. The music itself was also compelling and interesting to me as it was quite different to a lot of the music I was used to hearing. It was one of my first introductions to "alternative music" during a time when it was starting to gain prominence.
Anyway, I borrowed 'Out of Time' from my local library, taped it and played the shit out of it. Being new to the band, I was then to discover that REM had a huge back catalogue that stretched a long way back; long before I even knew they existed. That same library introduced me to some more of their earlier works, but it was 'Green' that really grabbed my attention and somehow, my sixteen-year-old self fell in love with that album straight away. It had rockier numbers counterbalanced with quieter, acoustic tracks, all sewn together by Stipe's enigmatic poetry. To say I loved this album would be an understatement.
A few years later 'Automatic for the People' hit, and again, I played it to death, but I always came back to 'Green', even with the releases that would follow in the years to come. REM is one of the key formative bands that helped shape my growing interest in music as a teenager, providing me with music that the shy, awkward outcast I was then could really connect with. I tend to look back on those developmental years with a sense of retrospective embarrassment, but it was there that I was introduced to music that would influence on the person I would eventually become, and 'Green' was a very important album in that process.
No comments:
Post a Comment