R.E.M.
In his new book, Dixie Lullaby: A Story of Music, Race, and New Beginnings in a New South (Free Press), music journalist Mark Kemp chronicles the complicated relationship that the generation before mine has had with the south and its signature sounds–this is the generation with memories of jim crow and desegregation, of Martin Luther King and the first wave of Stax soul out of Memphis, of white southern boys stealing the blues back from Clapton and Page and bringing it all back home, mutated once again. Lynyrd Skynyrd was a brilliant band, and Kemp sees them as standard-bearers in the fight to shake southerners free of their racist legacy–and of the burden of guilt they bore on behalf of northerners still in denial about their own unenlightened past. But Skynyrd was long gone by the time I came of age, and the southern indie rockers I grew up with saw the band as part of the old guard that had to be swept away. What we wanted this time was something less macho, less anti-intellectual–music that understood what it was like to grow up a very blue person in the very red states.
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The set itself carefully balanced upbeat and down-tempo tunes, old material and new, for almost two hours. Though R.E.M.’s been huge for a long time, the band was ambivalent about its position for years, and that uncertainty and self-criticism seem to have helped it learn to refine and control every detail of a performance. Last week many of those details seemed marshaled into a collective posture of defiance–Stipe even held a silver cassette player next to his mike to insert the sample of army defense counsel Joseph Welch into “Exhuming McCarthy” (“Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”). R.E.M.’s anger is the anger of the reformer, not the revolutionary, but that makes it a good match for the anger of all the latte-drinkin’, Volvo-drivin’ middle-class urban Democrats who want to send Dubya back to Crawford for good. (Those Democrats also undoubtedly make up a significant slice of the band’s current demographic–I doubt you’ll find too many R.E.M. fans in a typical black bloc.) When Stipe dedicated “I Wanted to Be Wrong” to President Bush (“God gave us the upper hand / There’s honor among thieves”), a few outnumbered Republicans made their discomfort known with boos. They soon quieted down again, but if the song’s sad, bitter plea touched anything in them, Stipe broke the spell for sure when he came out for the encore modeling a Kerry T-shirt like Ben Stiller on the runway in Zoolander.
