The End of Their Interest Value As I Knew It: REM's Document

Mark E. Brooke was from Dunedin, New Zealand and knew a few of luminaries of the Flying Nun scene as familiar faces at gigs. He was an understating wit of great power and had the advantage of looking out at the universe through light emerald tinted glasses which put him at sufficient distance from anyone he spoke to which in turn allowed him a lot of leeway with his observations of his fellows. While I had refined my old post punk rig to affect a series of tuxedos-by-day he kept hold of his punk roots with a light leather jacket, Docs and drainpipes. His hair was kept Howard Devoto cropped to keep its recession from his forehead from being too obvious. We mentored each other's writing and reading. He was a much better writer. I threw out an opening sentence once which we were both to use for a short story. I read his and didn't finish mine. On Fridays after work we would get drunk and talk.

Smith Street Fitzroy/Collingwood in 1987 had a shop called Leedin Records. There was also a video shop on the same strip called Leedin video. On our way back from McCoppins one evening we went by Smith to pick up some more alcohol and stopped in at the record shop. He chose an Elvis Costello compilation, being a devotee (as I had been) and I came upon the new REM album Document. I was aghast as I had no idea it was out or even if they were still going.

Back at mine we put the REM record on and it slammed straight into the stadium sized rocker Finest Worksong with a gigantic drum sound and army of guitars. Through it, though, saving it from pure sellout, came Michael Stipe's odd cartoony growl which set the whole song at home again. Welcome to the Occupation was a lot more trad for the band and in a minor key. Exhuming McCarthy was like Finest Worksong but chunkier. Disturbance at the Herron House sealed the pattern and by the time we were halfway through the big one from the album, It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine) which mixed a Subterranean Homesick Blues roll call with a goofy I-IV-V chorus I thought: well at least it's catchy.

Side two was a a little darker mooded and contained the still great King of Birds but really was more of the same. They'd even managed to get the old Wire song Strange wrong by dressing it up as the new rock like the rest of the album.

What I was hearing was a pattern which continued at least through the following album, Green, which I also bought. Big rock song to start with, something more abstract after, big goofy rock song after that, a big ballad with a mandolin, a minor key cliche fest for a single and so on. It had been the same on the previous one, Life's Rich Pageant and looked to set in.

This did not make me an unfan. As I said I bought the next one and went to see them play Festival Hall with the Go Betweens and dug the show. What it did, when the big fast food catchiness of it wore off, was take me back to the first albums that had made a fan of me in the first place.

What I liked about Murmur and Reckoning was a mix of joyous sixties style guitar chime, a real hook in every song and best of all lyrics that pretty much admitted they were only there to put the human voice in the mix (which is how I listen to the vocals in almost every song I ever hear). It was almost like hearing a stoat or grizzly bear fronting the Byrds.

Increasingly, REM were assuming a vague kind of liberalism which served to reform the lovely growling nonsense into the kind of sloganeering big choruses that I've heard too often. By the time Document came out they were set on course and wouldn't budge until irreversible fame tracked them down. They became interview subjects probably because that's just a lot easier to do. And while Document wasn't necessarily the point that began it is the first time I noticed it. For all my fandom of the band and enthusiasm of this album I had increasingly no option but to admit that whatever I wanted it to be it was just a big middle-of-the-road rock album. There had been a resurgence in old school rock dressed as lamb in the mid to late eighties. Most of it was American but there was plenty of UK crud like Jesus and Mary Chain to match the Georgia Satellites or Jason and the Scorchers. The half decade of alternatives that had preceded this was swept away  as even old guard critics who had fought the big one back in the winter of '77 were typing their approval. It was happening here, too, it's just that there where the choices seemed easier bad retrograde ones were being made.

But if I recall the album the memory of Mark Brooke gets in the way and the kind of ethics-confronting exhanges and thought-trains we'd get into, drunk or not, and the idea that creativity needed nothing but a starting point and a medium still tap me on the shoulder. Whatever happened to it when it was finished, whether it was published, played on the radio, declaimed in a smoky pub or read at Cambridge that first procreative ignition had to take you somewhere that you weren't and if it didn't you were probably trying too hard, thinking too much and plunging your feet into the sand. If we edited each other, hissed in petulance or swore or tripped into mutual insults those notions of the work and its worth remained intact, waiting like tsking teachers for the tirade to ease into silence when the real work would have to be done.

We drifted. He moved back to NZ and took up tertiary teaching. His wife became a doctor. They had kids and were probably happy in that annoyingly non-cloying way that some couples are. I got on with some failed novels and nothing jobs until my guilt woke me before thirty to get myself qualified in something and start some honest work. Meantime there were other people to meet friends to draw even closer, things to do. They were done.

REM left their indy IRS label after Document and went to a major. The follow up, Green, was even bigger and a tour of the world's stadiums put them on the shelf next to U2 where they've stayed to graze and fatten. Younger bands emerged but sounded no better and accepted the sugary crown of fame and influence in even faster trajectories.

Years later I heard Shiny Happy People on a radio. It was instantly recognisable and immediately annoying. I understood every word, even from across the room. I stumbled on the video. They were miming the words which they'd sworn felt too fake before. They'd started comfortably in convention and unless they suddenly converted to industrial neo disco there was only one direction they were likely to go. But it wasn't that they'd sold out it was that I didn't care. It was watching as they changed their wardrobe and divested themselves of the last few things that set them apart until all they had was the surface. This wasn't creativity it was brand recognition. For my money, see also Nirvana, a recognisable talent buried under multitracking and so much compression that the volume knob ceases to be a choice or statement. Massive fame and idolatry followed. But tell me which frontman didn't do himself in.