Intimacy and Distance: On Stipe's Queerness (original) (raw)

From Southern Gothic to Postmodern Anonymity: R.E.M. and the Globalization of American Popular Music

Journal x: Jx, 1998

R.E.M. transformed itself from a locally-identified music group from Athens, Georgia to an anonymous, postmodern band in the period between 1983-1995. Forming in Athens in the early 1980s, when most of the members were enrolled at the University of Georgia, R.E.M. has released an ep, ten albums and three compilation albums. Michael Stipe sang and became the group’s enigmatic frontman: Peter Buck, the allegedly self-taught musical historian, primarily played guitar; Mike Mills played bass and keyboards, and sang back up; and Bill Berry, noted for his bushy eyebrow, played drums and also sang back up. Always relentlessly identified as hailing from Athens, Georgia, at the outset of its career, R.E.M. toured locally, but also configured itself outside that home-base as representing a new South. Paradoxically, however, as it became more successful, the band deliberately became, at least in some ways, more anonymous and less-regionally identified. Critically valorized as one of the most erudite, articulate and principled of American rock bands, R.E.M. had rejected traditional Southern rock mores and music--an association with Jack Daniels, macho posturing, Confederate flags and fraternities, as well as a more blues based guitar sound--and instead tried to convey a new Southern sensibility, partly gothic, pastoral and lyrical, and partly cosmopolitan. At first, the band embraced its own vision of Southern culture, primarily in the context of Southern religion and aestheticism, and its potential for anonymity, but gradually tried to replace that identification with a mixture of politics and postmodernity, one that finally emblematizes not the South but the West. In this article, I explore how R.E.M. used both the South and postmodernism in its self-configuration, and especially its visual self-presentation, and why the two finally became incompatible, though only partly incommensurate, modes of representation.

Realizing R&B's Identity Crisis: An Analytical Research Paper

Although scholars and music industry professionals have expressed their criticisms on the current state of R&B, as far as we know, R&B’s identity crisis has not been critically examined in an academic setting. However, an analysis of the social and musical factors contributing to R&B’s ongoing identity crisis reveals that many popular recording artists stretch the artistic and musical boundaries of contemporary R&B by continuously gravitating towards and moving away from the genre. More specifically, this paper will use qualitative and historical research methods to evaluate how R&B is affected by genre interplay, racial issues, and the rise of alternative R&B—in an attempt to gain a further understanding of the genre’s current identity crisis and highlight areas for future research.