Hello and welcome to Tea n’ History, with your somewhat overworked hostess, Felicia Angel.
Earlier this week, R.E.M announced they were splitting up (http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/r-e-m-break-up-after-three-decades-20110921) and caused a huge world of people unhappy, somewhat not caring, and others wondering what will happen.
REM has been together for 31 years, so in some ways it’s inevitable that this would happen. Most were introduced to them during the time when many of their most famous songs came out, such as “Shiny Happy People”, “Everybody Hurts”, “Losing my Religion” (my dad’s personal favorite), “Man on the Moon” and others.
For myself, my dad was introduced to them when he saw them as a guest star on SNL. He enjoyed the song, and went to buy their current album at the time, “Automatic for the People”. While I haven’t heard much from them besides doing some of the soundtrack for the Andy Kaufman bio-pic “Man on the Moon”, they were still a group that I enjoyed to listen to at times and had songs for nearly every occasion.
Well, ok, there was mostly slow reflective songs, sugary-happy songs, and songs that could be just fun or the chorus used to insanely, horribly cliche matters.
Example? In the movie “Independence Day”, the chorus or song “It’s the End of the World as we Know It (and I Feel Fine)” was use a great deal. After the lead singer’s appearance on “Sesame Street”, there’s another version now called “Furry, Happy Monsters”. Their song about Andy Kaufman was used as the title of a movie about him!
Bands split up at times. My sister was saddened when Stone Temple Pilots disbanded, and also when Velvet Revolver did the same thing (granted, that was all the lead singer and his problems). The band Santana has had various musicians, save the lead guitarist Carlos Santana himself, over the years, and one break-off group of the early 1960s group turned into Journey. Bands break up and do return tours, sometimes with all the drama returning during those and reminding the group why they broke up in the first place. Hence the most famous attempt at getting a band to regroup just once – “The Beatles”, as pleaded too by Chevy Chase to appear on early SNL.
31 years of doing something can often be considered an achievement, and at times it can take a long while to get into the spotlight. Even if you never do make it big, some people are happy with the status of being in the band. That they were around for so many years, as well as left us some great music, is always something to be happy about and remember them with.
Tea 'n History 