The song became a top ten hit when it was released as a single and was, for a time, ubiquitous. Whether it was also a catastrophic lapse in R.E.M.’s artistic-slash-countercultural-slash-intellectual taste depends on the listener’s judgment and, often, their conception of the band’s true mission. Did they exist to improve pop music or to blow it to smithereens? Had they cracked the code of the dominant paradigm or simply surrendered to it? Think again about the creatures swarming the barricades in “Belong.” Were they breaking free or were they heedlessly leading the way into a cruel and chilly sea? Or was it simply a very good (and extremely catchy) joke?

  The band’s surging confidence evidenced something else: an itch to climb even higher in the cultural sky, to hear their music playing even more loudly across the mainstream airwaves. It was a measure of their belief in the new songs, and, perhaps, the echoes of the ovations they’d heard during the Green tour. They’d worked so hard to make this music, to create songs that sounded like an expression of who they were, of what mattered to them, of what they believed about music, about society, about truth. Of course they wanted it to be heard. And, as ever, they’d need to make a video to go along with the leadoff single. No longer resistant to making the sort of piece that could break through the litany of ordinary clips, Michael figured there were plenty of ways to pursue the most popular, and powerful, outlet for pop music with an artist’s sensibility.

  He connected with Tarsem Singh, a young Indian-born director with an eye for visual art, and an offbeat sense of grandeur. Michael, who had been besotted with Sinéad O’Connor’s luminously emotional video for her cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” offered the director a performance he had refused to do for a decade: a lip-synched vocal. After spending a day or two in Athens with Michael and his bandmates, Tarsem (as he is known) came up with a colorful concept melding images drawn from a Gabriel García Márquez story about a fallen angel, the homoerotic interpretations of religious iconography by the French photographers/artists Pierre et Gilles, plus the visual palette of the Italian Renaissance painter Caravaggio, in order to capture the overwrought emotions of the song’s narrator. The words that tumble out in a rush. The feelings that can’t be spoken. All of that, along with a particularly electric performance from Michael, made for a video that was both artful and emotional, thought-provoking and cinematic.

  The video and the single came out together during the third week of February 1991, and they were just getting traction when Out of Time followed them into the world in mid-March. Then it all took flight. The sound of the mandolin coming out of car windows, playing in the corner café, drifting on the breeze. And on television too, with Michael dancing across the screen, Michael standing with angel wings sprouting from his shoulders. Michael abruptly collapsing out of frame. Michael sitting where he fell, face half-shielded, gazing into the screen with eyes burning, imploring, singing. Michael’s eyes locked on yours, coming through the screen. That’s me in the corner, that’s me in the spotlight, losing my religion. The single started fast, then picked up speed. Leapfrogging the charts into the top thirty, the top twenty, the top ten, then the top five. It peaked at number four and stayed on the charts for nearly half a year, long enough to sell more than a million copies.

  When Out of Time came out on March 12, it went the same way, shooting skyward like no record R.E.M., or any alternative music act, had ever made, until it got all the way to the top of the Billboard chart. The number one album in the United States of America. And not just for one week: “Losing My Religion” pushed it up there once, then the album slipped back a few slots, drifting down slowly until “Shiny Happy People” hit, lofting the album skyward again, up and up until it was in Billboard’s top spot again. Out of Time sold more than three million copies in the United States during its first year, and more than twice that number across the rest of the world, and it’s kept right on selling through today, now standing at just south of twenty million copies. It made the individual members of R.E.M. multimillionaires and also international celebrities. It turned their path, from college town heroes to the club circuit, from college radio to mainstream success, into a superhighway for the legion of outsider artists that followed them. It kicked open doors for the likes of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden. It solidified the relationship between rock ’n’ roll and political activism and might have even led to the defeat of one president of the United States and the election of another.

  35

  Shiny Happy

  It was the “Shiny Happy People” video that made Jay Boberg angry. Not because he didn’t like the tune or begrudged the success of the band he’d gone out on a limb to sign to I.R.S. in 1982 and helped build into a platinum-caliber act, only to see them depart for the land of major labels. “I did five albums and an EP with them, in a period that was far more difficult to sell records in,” Boberg says. “And I couldn’t get them to be in a fucking video playing their instruments, or have Michael do anything like singing in one.”

  Boberg may be overstating things—the entire band mimed their parts in “Wolves, Lower,” albeit in slow motion, and everyone but Michael feigned to the recorded “So. Central Rain” track on that video—but not by much. Recall the blurry, herky-jerky Jim Herbert film for the first side of Reckoning, or the upside-down quarry footage Michael submitted as the video for “Fall on Me.” “The videos they did for us were more like art pieces, and I deferred to the artistic sensibility. I mean, the video for ‘It’s the End of the World as We Know It’ is a fucking kid on a skateboard. The band’s not even in it. And can you imagine what that could have been if they had been in it? And then they do what they did for ‘Shiny Happy People’?”[1]

  And yeah, the video, much like the song itself, is beyond eager to please. Directed by Katherine Dieckmann on the stage of the Georgia Theatre, in Athens, the clip is candy-colored and soft-focus. Michael, dancing next to Kate Pierson, wears an orange cap, his cheeks powdered and rouged like a kewpie’s. Mike, miming his part on a stand-up bass, spins his instrument like an old-time country player and laughs for joy. Bill, whose loathing of music videos, and especially performing in music videos, was without peer, not only dances while thumping a strap-on snare drum, and not only points his sticks at the camera, but flashes a big smile at the lens while he does it. Twice. The only band member who seems put out by the exercise is Peter, who fakes his guitar part on a mandolin and refuses to look into the camera, let alone smile at it. And yet, when the stage fills with shiny, happy ordinary folks all joining in with the choreographed “Shiny Happy People” dance, even he makes a game attempt to bop around with them. And all the while Michael, no longer averse to pretending to sing for the camera, emotes cheerily, lip-synching in seeming harmony with Pierson as they dance and smile at each other like some kind of new wave Sonny & Cher.

  Boberg, with visions of “Fall on Me” ’s upside-down quarry video still playing in his memory, shakes his head and sighs. “Give me a fucking break.”[2]

  * * *

  —

  Now there were new things they wouldn’t do. Or at least one main thing, which was mounting a concert tour. This twist did not delight Lenny Waronker, who went into R.E.M.’s second album for Warner Bros. as aware of how Green’s post-“Stand” singles had flopped on radio as he was of how well “Stand” had done, and how the band’s road work through 1989 had kept the album selling even when “Pop Song 89” and “Get Up” left radio programmers and listeners so cold. The label president went back to Julie Panebianco and implored her to convince the band to rethink the decision to stay off the stage, but she knew them too well to think that any amount of arm-twisting would change their minds. Waronker understood. He knew how artists worked. He also knew how contracts worked. Fortunately for him, R.E.M. had no intention of letting their new album slip between the media cracks.

  They devoted all of March and April to an intensive publicity road show, spending almost an entire month sitting for interviews in Europe and the United Kingdom before heading back to North America for an array of television, radio, and other media appearances held mostly, but not entirely, in the media capitals of the United States and Canada. When they did perform live music for the cameras or radio, they played acoustic versions of their songs, usually just “Losing My Religion” and “Shiny Happy People” on television, and a few other mostly new selections when they played on the radio. A few of the in-studio radio performances went longer, including several new songs and a few older selections, also played entirely on acoustic guitars, congas, and organ.

  They also planned to make a few appearances before live audiences, but the two club shows they played at the Borderline club, in London, in mid-March were semi-secret, the band performing under the name Bingo Hand Job. The three stateside shows with live audiences were mostly intended for television viewers, the first an appearance of NBC’s Saturday Night Live in New York, an episode of MTV’s Unplugged, the popular series that featured big acts playing their songs in stripped-down arrangements, and an extended set on the live public radio show Mountain Stage, broadcast from the Capitol Plaza Theater, in Charleston, West Virginia. They included band friends Robyn Hitchcock and the British political folk singer Billy Bragg playing their own sets at the London and Mountain Stage shows.

  Broadcast live on April 28, the Mountain Stage show featured the band performing eight songs—half from Out of Time (“Radio Song,” “Half a World Away,” “Belong,” and “Losing My Religion”), three favorites from earlier albums (“World Leader Pretend,” “Fall on Me,” and “It’s the End of the World as We Know It”), and one cover, the Troggs oldie “Love Is All Around,” with Mike singing lead. The show’s other guests (Bragg, Hitchcock, and a handful of others) joined for a cover of Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s “Dallas,” which took them to the end of the national broadcast of the show, though the executives at West Virginia Public Broadcasting made a spontaneous decision to keep the band on the air, preempting whatever was scheduled to come on the air next as they continued to play. R.E.M. performed five more songs for the local listeners, including a retake of “Radio Song,” which they had apparently botched on the broadcast, along with “Disturbance at the Heron House,” “Low,” “Swan Swan H,” “Pop Song 89,” and finally “Get Up.”

  In West Virginia the event had a momentousness that resonated all the way to the seat of the state’s government, where Governor William Caperton declared the date of their performance on Mountain Stage R.E.M. Day in West Virginia. His official reasoning had something to do with the band’s support of the state’s public radio station, but his actual motivation had more to do with the band’s surging popularity, and the opportunity to associate himself, and the state, with a group of entertainers whose influence and power had come to extend far beyond the boundaries of popular music.

  * * *

  —

  Out of Time officially cleared the bar for platinum status, selling its millionth copy on May 24, 1991. It took twenty-six more days for the next million copies to be sold, and it hit triple platinum on October 11, almost exactly seven months after the album arrived in record stores. Then came awards season: overseas, Out of Time and “Losing My Religion” and the band itself won a bushel of trophies, including a BRIT award, an NME Award, and two Q Awards in the UK, while picking up four GAFFA award nominations in Denmark. In the United States they earned a nomination for an American Music Award, won a Billboard Music Award, and were nominated for seven Grammys, including Album of the Year and Best Rock Performance; they ultimately took home three trophies, for Best Alternative Music Album and (for “Losing My Religion”) Best Music Video, Short Form, and Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group.

  But the band’s biggest night that year came at MTV’s Video Music Awards in September 1991, where the “Losing My Religion” video was nominated for no fewer than nine awards. Bill, Mike, and Michael came to the ceremony, at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles, accompanied by Holt, Tarsem, and other colleagues and friends. The video-loathing Peter chose to stay away. Mike and Bill looked to be having a fine time, all the more so as the night wore on. Michael, who until recently had approached pretty much all interviews and other nonmusical duties with impatience bordering on visible contempt, seemed giddy, and not just because his band was being celebrated so richly. He’d come to the evening, to this entire moment, with his own agenda, and it was playing out exactly as he’d hoped it would.

  It started even before the awards began. Sitting with chief MTV newsman Kurt Loder on the channel’s special riser outside the venue, Michael and Mike talked gamely about how excited they were for the coming show. (“When we make a video, I guess we make it right,” Michael said.) After Michael noted that he didn’t even own a TV (“Maybe I’ll buy one if we win all these awards”), Loder, as if the thought had just occurred to him, pointed to the red ribbon pinned to the lapel of his jacket, which both musicians also wore on their chests. “Do you know what the story is on these ribbons? I know they’ve been circulating.” This was a curious question, if only because Loder had already pinned one on, and obviously knew what it signified. No matter. Michael shifted into an airy but focused response about the AIDS crisis and the hundreds of thousands of people who thought the government hadn’t done enough to confront it. “So a lot of people in the entertainment industry are wearing these red ribbons, and I’m trying to ask other people to do the same thing to show compassion for the AIDS crisis and people with AIDS.”

  Then the awards show began. Arsenio Hall hosting, bony index finger pointing, flashing that knowing, foxy smile. Flashy, perfect performances from MC Hammer, Metallica, and Prince. Awards dispensed by Cher, Billy Idol, and Pee-wee Herman. Categories, nominees, awards. Music videos, the bastard creation of the Monkees, Fellini, Dick Clark, and spandex. The early 1990s, in all their shiny, happy glory. And over and over, it was R.E.M. and “Losing My Religion.” Given nine nominations and nine potential shots of prime-time air, Michael came with a sack of T-shirts, each with a different word or slogan printed on the chest. Ultimately the video won six of the awards: for editing, direction, art direction, Breakthrough Video, group video, and Video of the Year. Each time they won, Michael would lead the way onstage, skipping to the podium, billboarding a different message across his chest. Rainforest. Love Knows No Color. He usually came flanked by Mike and Bill, and sometimes Tarsem too, and they’d take turns thanking their managers, the office staff, the Warner Bros. Records team, all the people who’d helped get them there.

  When they got to the climactic Video of the Year acceptance, Michael bounced up looking strangely bulky. This was because he was wearing multiple T-shirts layered on top of one another. At the podium he stripped them off, one after another. Wear a Condom. Choice. Alternative Energy Now. The Right to Vote. Handgun Control. Huge cheers greeting each reveal. At the post-show press conference he pulled two others out of the sack: National Health Care. Love Knows No Gender. They were all going to sign each shirt, then donate them to charitable groups involved with the shirt’s cause to sell as fundraisers. “Now we’re going to go home and go to bed,” he concluded with a small smile. “Separately.”

  Once again R.E.M. walked in the footsteps of the B-52’s. A year before Out of Time sent the band to the upper reaches of the charts, the original Athens art-pop band had the biggest album of their career with Cosmic Thing, a quadruple-platinum seller that launched two singles into Billboard’s top three. The video for “Love Shack” nabbed the MTV Video Music Award for Best Group Video in 1990. The Bs had always been larger than life—the sky-high beehive hairdos on Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson, the retro-futuristic stage wear and decor, Fred Schneider’s sardonic braying about extraterrestrials and possessed sea life. The 1985 death of guitarist and band visionary Ricky Wilson (Cindy’s brother) to AIDS had nearly collapsed the group, but their comeback underscored the seriousness beneath the surface of their party songs. Because they were a predominantly gay group, most of the members’ physical existence had been politicized by forces so far beyond their control that the only rational response was to dress like superheroes and sing the weirdest songs they could imagine. When Michael came to the MTV awards dressed as nine different political billboards, he was up to the same thing.

  He was also evoking Bob Dylan’s watershed promotional film (a music video in the days before music videos) for “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and the indelible image of the singer gazing into the camera while flipping through an armload of signs bearing key words and phrases from the song’s lyrics. What all three artists shared was a connection to New York’s avant-garde art scene and a talent for merging the artistic with the political in a way that resonated with the cultural mainstream.

  The two Athens bands, it’s worth noting, traced their connections to the New York scene through the same person: Jeremy Ayers. It began with his connection to Andy Warhol in New York, then the homophobic attack that sent Ayers back to Athens, where he had met, nurtured, and then brought together the members of the B-52’s. He then befriended, encouraged, and helped shape the public persona of Michael Stipe. All were essential building blocks in the development of both bands, of the Athens music scene, of the indie culture of the 1980s, and of all popular culture in the 1990s.