“I recall that you were there/Golden smile and shining hair/I recall it wasn’t fair.”
This is therefore an examination of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope rather than reiteration of it, but any readers who have lost their hearts to a troubled waif or watched while someone else did will relate to Ty’s obsession. In fact, it is the watchers in this tale that carry a lot of the interest; Syd, Ty’s sister, and his zany best buds all provide admirable support in different ways for their lovelorn pal as he works very hard to break his own heart. —The Bulletin
As I’ve emphasized time and again, manicpixiedreamgirl is not autobiographical. Not literally. Emotionally, maybe. If you’ve read it — and you should! — you may recall a moment where our self-heart-breaking protag Tyler catches a glimpse of not-so-manic pixie Becky’s bag, on which is pinned a band logo patch. The band, astute readers have no doubt noticed, is Just This Once, who made an appearance in Zero opening for Gothic Rainbow at Damage Control. This little moment is based on reality.
[Sidebar: Just This Once is a real band that played exactly … wait for it… just that once. True story. I’ll post it someday.]
I saw my personal MPDG (who, like Becky, was not at all one) standing at a bus stop in front of the 7-Eleven nearest our school. She was just stepping onto the bus, and I saw her wearing that T-shirt. The orange earth and mysterious runes reading GREEN R.E.M.
First and only thought: What is a green rem, and how can I get one??
Fortunately, I had pop-musically trained friends like Tim and Greg to gently explain that a “rem” was R.E.M., and Green was their newest album. Great! I went and got it, and not unlike Tyler, listened to it until I liked it (manicpixiedreamgirl, p.160)
That’s the day I became an R.E.M. fan. Because, as I wrote in manicpixie, it’s about a girl. Isn’t it always?
It turns out I genuinely did enjoy Green. It also turned out I’d already enjoyed older songs by the band, I just hadn’t known it was them. Superman, It’s The End of the World, and The One I Love had played in the background of Tim’s house several times before, but I hadn’t bothered asking about them. To be sure, the jangly pop of R.E.M. was a big departure from my roots in junior high, where Ozzy, Iron Maiden, and AC/DC were de rigueur among my degenerate stoner buddies.
Huh huh–you said rigueur. That sounds like “dick.” Huh huh! OZZY!!!
But there was a girl at stake, and if she liked R.E.M., then by god, I would too. I even…
(Hold on. I am about to actually make this public. Jesus. Well, in a hundred years, who’s going to care?)
I even learned the “Stand” dance. Perfectly. I would correct others. Because there were lots of people out in public doing the “Stand” dance.
Not really. But I did buy the cassingle with “Memphis Train Blues” as the B-side. By that point, I was committed. I picked up their previous albums (from Murmur through Document) and proceeded to listen to them endlessly.
I confess, linking the “Stand” video to this post has got me a little nervous, because while I probably still know the “Stand” dance — muscle memory, I swear to god — it’s not something I would show off at, say, a Social Distortion show. But to be fair, I hadn’t been to a Social Distortion show at that point. Music appreciation (or over-indulgence) is a fluid, incorporeal thing, with no real certainty of continuity, especially in high school. Then again, so are friendships, romances, future plans, and often, parents.
Long after my non-relationship came to a non-close with that T-shirt wearing girl, R.E.M. remained a staple. I’m sure I would have fallen for Out of Time like the rest of the galaxy if I hadn’t already been a fan, but even then, their hit singles weren’t my favorite. Oh, I listened to “Losing My Religion” just as…religiously…as everyone else, but it was never my favorite. Just like “Stand” wasn’t, either.
I preferred, unironically thank you, R.E.M.’s more off-the-R.E.M.-path stuff, though I think now that they did, too. Document‘s “King of Birds” can still be found on my mix-CDs (which I do have, thank you again. If you’re nice, I’ll show you the video I made for it. But probably not.) I wallowed in mellow purple songs like “Perfect Circle” off Murmur. “Swan Swan H” (Lifes Rich Pageant) made zero sense then and makes zero sense now, but its slow-marching tempo and inscrutable lyrics were great for eyes-closed late-night crooning along. I’m still not sure what bone chains are, but it’s fun to sing.
The great thing about R.E.M. at that time was their sheer selection. If you bought AC/DC at any point in the last, say, eighty years … you got AC/DC. As Jim Breuer points out, they’d do a great “Row Row Row Your Boat.” You ready? You got to row! row! row!…Fire! All right! You ready?
R.E.M. gave this teen options. Plenty of fun, “Everyone sing along!” songs like “End of the World,” whose lyrics I believe are still being debated in Congress, or “Pop Song 89” which has a good beat and you can dance to it.
But then other times, sometimes even moments after a great dancing song when you’re all pumped up and ready to take on the night with your buds, you’d need to settle down and smoke a slow cigarette and wonder what SHE is doing right then. At those times, you needed a “World Leader Pretend,” where Michael Stipe could put into words so effortlessly what you were feeling:
I sit at my table/And wage war on myself/It seems like it’s all/It’s all for nothing.
(Did a video for that one, too.)
I lost my taste for R.E.M. right around Up. By 1998, other bands had supplanted the Athens group who’d walked me through a number of broken hearts and stupid choices. Once the internet became the internet as we know it today, I found myself going backward rather than looking forward, scouring the web for rare acoustic or live versions of older songs I loved. Apart from personal taste, no one can take away from R.E.M. that they put on a hell of a show, and they stuck to their artistic guns – for better or worse. Any band on Earth would do well to emulate how they did things, no matter the style of music.
Which actually leads me right back to Social D, another one of the few uncompromising bands that’s ever existed, but they don’t really share the same space as R.E.M., not in our world, and not in my own. So I’ll cover Mike Ness and his Spinal-Tapian cycle of musicians some other time.
It’s just funny how we find music. If you grew up in the 90s, you were going to find R.E.M. whether you wanted to or not. I’m glad to have found them before Out of Time happened, because, street cred. But they would not have had the impact on me they did if not for that distressed T-shirt worn by That Girl at a bus stop circa 1989.
And for that, I thank them.
