I owe R.E.M. more than just a passing comment about how I haven’t thought about them since Monster came out, or how overdue their retirement is. They mean a lot to me, and hopefully always will. I was not a very cool twelve year old, but I was hip enough — and invested enough in what it might mean to be a little bit cooler — to talk my folks into sending me, with my tennis teacher, to the Fables of the Reconstruction show. I bought a shirt like the one shown here and wore it out. Even as I grew into snotty self-regard because I was listening to cooler music than the other middle schoolers, I benefited from the band’s incessant promotion of other musicians, and the admirable enthusiasm with which they tried to leverage their celebrity into exposure for other groups. Their habitual name-dropping in interviews was always done not out of cooler-than-thou status competition, but out of real generosity. Thanks, guys.

I owe R.E.M. more than just a passing comment about how I haven’t thought about them since Monster came out, or how overdue their retirement is. They mean a lot to me, and hopefully always will.

I was not a very cool twelve year old, but I was hip enough — and invested enough in what it might mean to be a little bit cooler — to talk my folks into sending me, with my tennis teacher, to the Fables of the Reconstruction show. I bought a shirt like the one shown here and wore it out.

Even as I grew into snotty self-regard because I was listening to cooler music than the other middle schoolers, I benefited from the band’s incessant promotion of other musicians, and the admirable enthusiasm with which they tried to leverage their celebrity into exposure for other groups. Their habitual name-dropping in interviews was always done not out of cooler-than-thou status competition, but out of real generosity.

Thanks, guys.