I’ve been reading The Name of This Band is R.E.M. A Biography lately, and it’s got me nostalgic for the fact that, for a good number of years there, R.E.M. was the band I was unmistakably a fan of. I think everyone’s been there at some point in their life if music has been in any way important to them: having a band that you listen to and identify with a bit too much, and find yourself spending too much time thinking about.
From Out of Time through… New Adventures in Hi-Fi, probably…? that was R.E.M. for me; I bought the albums — Automatic for the People was the first CD I ever owned! — and the singles alike; I even bought the videos and bootlegs and read books about the band, too. (Not much changes there, I guess.) I had feelings about what B-sides should have been on albums, and what songs should have been singles if only someone had listened to me, whose teenage wisdom was obviously very important on such topics. R.E.M. was my band.
These days, I rarely listen to them, unless I’m feeling particularly nostalgic. Now that we’re a quarter-century out from my intense love affair with the band, it strikes me that their longest lasting effect on me wasn’t aural, but visual; the aforementioned videos and the album sleeves (and tour program art, when I saw them in 1995 or 1996 for the Monster tour, whenever that was) all had an unmistakable impact on me was I was developing my visual language at the same time as I was preparing for, and then starting, my art school career.
I wasn’t aware I was doing it at the time, I don’t think; certainly, when I first started getting into the band musically, I didn’t really spend too much time analyzing the album covers of Document and Eponymous and Green as I got them out of the local library over and over again. (That’s not true; I was fascinated by the texture of the black lines on Green‘s cover, for some reason.) By the time Out of Time and certainly Automatic for the People were coming out, though, and my obsession was at its height, I remember being fully aware of looking at the type choices, or considering why that particular photo had been chosen versus any other options. (I can still remember feeling just a little bit disappointed by the obvious Photoshop filter on the Automatic album cover.) Perhaps more than any single other influence, R.E.M. shaped what I thought looked good, and also what I thought I wanted to create for myself.
At this point, I’m not sure if I should thank them for that, or regret that I didn’t latch onto something more immediately commercial, given how my art and design career went. What could have happened had I found myself obsessed with the visual stylings of, I don’t know, whoever designed Heat magazine or something similar…!