Cool Town by Grace Elizabeth Hale

Author:Grace Elizabeth Hale
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Back home, R.E.M.’s influence was everywhere in the mid-1980s. You could hear it in the vocals buried in the mix, the jangling guitars that did not really solo, the melodic basses, and the driving drums. You could see it in the return of the all-male lineups and the classic quartets with their guitar, bass, and drums instrumentation. Even bands that created radically different sounds adopted asymmetrical song structures, eccentric titles, and impossible to understand lyrics. They also copied the ways Peter Buck, Michael Stipe, Mike Mills, and Bill Berry went about being a band: knotting together friendship and business, sharing songwriting credits, quietly hiring managers and lawyers and booking agents, and downplaying ambition. The difficulties other local bands had just staying together made it clear how hard it was to stay on top of the little that was in a group’s control, let alone think about the art and the business of music-making. R.E.M. made it all look easy.

But even R.E.M. had difficulty navigating the politics of race and region. Being known as “southern” grounded the band within the region’s rich history of music-making, but it also risked linking white band members to the region’s long history of white supremacy. The modern popular-music industry emerged during a period when white Americans and especially southern whites were actively expanding segregation. Over the years, music-business people, folklorists, critics, musicians, and collectors had all played distinct but intersecting roles in fusing race and genre. In the 1980s, most people who listened to popular and even underground music still divided genres, styles, and even sonic gestures like a horn solo into racial categories.34

While older bands like the B-52’s and Pylon and newer groups like Time Toy drew on sounds people thought of then as “black,” R.E.M. in this period, with a few notable exceptions, sounded “white.” Reviewing Reckoning for the Washington Post, a critic wondered whether the “few seconds of inept funk” that formed a bridge between the echoing ending of “Camera” and the rolling country-western sound of “Rockville” might be “a satiric comment on rock bands who insist on copping fashionable black rhythms.” “Can’t Get There from Here,” written in the late summer or fall of 1984, extended this experimentation with sounds band members understood as black. “It’s just a kind of self-parody,” Peter Buck told a journalist the next year when the band recorded the song for their third album. “Y’know, white boys doing a soul-type song. And if you’ve got a soul song, whaddya do? You put horns on it.” Michael Stipe even resurrected his old rockabilly voice.35

In mostly avoiding sonic references that might be construed as “black,” R.E.M. followed a practice established by some white punk musicians. Jon Holmstrom, cofounder and editor of Punk magazine, bluntly explained a popular punk attitude: “The ‘white nigger’ was Norman Mailer’s fifties lesson in how to be cool. We were rejecting the fifties and sixties instructions on how to be hip.” “If you’re white, you’re like us,” he argued. “Don’t try to be black.

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