Out of Time

Now, do not read that and think I am somehow suggesting that nothing is new anymore or that everything has already been done or that I am secretly applying for a job at Tracks magazine. There are still new things in this world. But they don't feel new to me. And I am placing much of the blame on R.E.M.

Growing up, I hated R.E.M. In fact, my high school metalhead friends and I compiled a "Bastard List" on the back of my life-science notebook, and Michael Stipe was always No. 4 (preceded by Bruce Springsteen, our high school principal, and some kid from another school named Gene, whom I'd never met). I didn't even own an R.E.M. album until I was a sophomore in college, when I bought a used copy of their early singles compilation, Eponymous, for $5.99. And then -- for the next four or five years -- I was relatively obsessed with their entire catalog.

But what I have come to realize is that those four or five years (from 20 to 25, roughly) represent the only time when things can seem new. When you're a teenager, you can't appreciate innovation intellectually -- everything seems normal, and you take everything for granted. And when you reach 30, you can't enjoy innovation viscerally, because it's impossible not to see how everything is ultimately derivative of something else. And yet there is a very specific window of time when newness can feel truly authentic, and it's a really amazing moment in your life. I was reminded of this when I watched a bunch of R.E.M. videos I had not thought about in years.

The R.E.M. DVD Parallel compiles the videos the band made for the albums Automatic for the People (1992) and Monster (1994). I'm not sure why I decided to watch this DVD the other night; I think it was probably because I'd heard we were interviewing Michael Stipe for this month's "My Life in Music," and I suddenly felt vaguely nostalgic for the mid-'90s. However, these videos did not make me nostalgic for any specific moment.

They did evoke a period when I first encountered a certain kind of aesthetic self-awareness about how art and music reflect life. Take the video for "Nightswimming," my favorite R.E.M. song and a video I remember liking very much in 1993. This was two years after Richard Linklater's film Slacker. Looking back, it seems obvious that the director of "Nightswimming" was influenced by Linklater's style: handheld cameras, lack of narrative, making things look cheap and unpolished, etc. I never put those thoughts together at the time. Yet when I saw this video at 21, it was perfect: I understood that it was different, but I did not understand how or why. It merely seemed like R.E.M. was making a video that was exactly like all the other things I was starting to love at that time in my life. It almost seemed like I was being entertained by something that I was actually informing, and all of that was an absolute accident. I am not sure I have the capacity to enjoy that response again.

What really blew my mind, though, was the clip for 1995's "Star 69." And it wasn't so much the video, which was pretty staid, but the idea that there was a period when the *69 automatic callback function of the telephone was so significant that R.E.M. could write a song about it.

Caller ID has become so universal that the idea of a crank call (or even just a surprise call) is on the way to becoming as extinct as the woolly rhinoceros (part of Crank Yankers' appeal is nostalgic). In fact, Caller ID is so widespread that it has eliminated the need for *69. However, the technology was a huge deal when it debuted. I remember using it constantly, willingly paying 75 cents a shot just to see if my girlfriend had called and hung up (which happened four times a day). *69 was a massive innovation -- but only for three years. It was (suddenly) this incredible new thing, and then it was (suddenly) completely passé. And now its whole legacy is contained in one R.E.M. song. That three-year period of my past is now three minutes and eight seconds long.

I miss when things were new.