R.E.M: the aftermath

R.E.M. wrote a song, circa 2004, called "Aftermath".

There was a CD single released at the time, although the album where the song was featured, Around the Sun, turned to be a commercial failure and probably the lowest point of the band's career.

There's several interpretations of "Aftermath". Some like to think of catastrophes of a political nature, like a user wrote, a few years ago, saying that "The line “When london falls and you’re still alive…” always makes me think of the July 2005 bombings, it’s almost prophetic" (See: http://popsongs.wordpress.com/2007/05/12/aftermath/#comments).

Around the Sun was indeed a politically charged record. "Final Straw", another of its songs, was penned by Michael Stipe in response to the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq.

R.E.M. have always been a polically conscious band. In a recently published book, British journalist Dorian Linskey wrote:

"R.E.M. local county, Clarke County, went to Dukakis by four votes. "We were joking, oh, it's the four of us", says (Peter) Buck." (See: 33 Revolutions per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, from Billie Holiday to Green Day, HarperCollins, 2011).

The single "Aftermath" suffered the same fate as Around the Sun: they were poorly received. Some fans of the band, on the web forum murmurs.com, went as far as calling "Aftermath" the worst single in the entire history of R.E.M.

I personally don't think Aftermath is a band song, nor Around the Sun is too bad of an album (it's predecesor, called Reveal was a worst album, in my opinion). In fact, the main album's single, "Leaving New York" experienced better reception in the U.K. (where it peaked at number #5 of the singles' chart) than in the U.S.

While Around the Sun is not a bad album, it's definitely a slow album. Compared to the loudness of "What's the frequency, Kenneth?" or "Living well is the best revenge", the songs on Around the Sun are a whisper. What the previous Up (1998) and Reveal (2001) lacked in accoustic sounds, Around the Sun more than compensated with its guitars and pianos.

As most of you heard in the news, R.E.M. announced, on September 21st, that they were calling it quits, that Peter Buck, Michael Stipe and Mike Mills will no longer operate as a single unit, in other words they disbanded. The news still reverberates today several days later, in newspapers and television stations all over the world.

Your correspondent here, being an ardent R.E.M. fan, was personally touched by the news. I was amongst the first in the world to learn of the news, as that morning I was logged on to the fansite murmurs.com where its chief editor, Mr. Ethan Kaplan, titled his post: "R.E.M. call it a day", early in the morning of September 21st.

So we are now experiencing the Aftermath of that decision. There will be no new R.E.M. albums in the future, there will be no more live presentations of the band, they're now an old institution, like probably The Beatles or The Byrds, who in their heyday dominated radio programming and were the darlings of the music industry. But those bands exist only in the memory of people, in the records they produced, the albums that people store at home and listen to with certain regularity.