Nostalgia Isn't What It Used to Be

The sad lament of People of a Certain Age

I’m getting a lot of social-media traffic this week about the band R.E.M. sitting down for a big interview with CBS on the occasion of their induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame (whose existence I think I learned about this week). This includes a clip in which they’re asked the inevitable “What about a reunion?” question, to which all four of them reply “Absolutely not” (more or less).

This, of course, got me thinking about musical nostalgia; I am, after all, an academic, and overthinking stuff is What We Do. This made me realize that R.E.M. sits in a weird space for me: I think they’re the first band I cared about where a potential long-awaited reunion would be pitched squarely at me.

The Inevitable Reunion Tour has been a big business for a few decades now, but this has mostly involved bands I either never cared about at all, or who had broken up before my adult musical taste really settled in. A lot of the great bands of an earlier generation have only been around during my lifetime in some latter-day version— Pink Floyd, the Who, Led Zeppelin— or just kept shambling endlessly on without ever breaking up for long enough for it to be all that big a deal, like the Rolling Stones. The Eagles made bank on reuniting— “Hell Freezes Over” and all that— but their implosion happened when I was in grade school, so it wasn’t that big a deal for me.

The closest to a Significant Reunion for me was probably The Police getting back together to tour in 2007, but even there, they broke up when I was The Pip’s age, so it’s not like I had that strong an attachment to them as a band (honestly, I kind of hated “Every Breath You Take” in 1984, because it was so played out; “King of Pain” ruled, though…). Sting was a wildly successful solo artist by the time I started college, and the Police were to some degree The Band Sting Used to Be In.

(This is not to be read as an endorsement of the idea that Sting’s solo work was in any way better than The Police. It’s not; they kicked ass in a way that he individually did not.)

R.E.M., though… Their big commercial breakout (with Document) happened while I was in high school, and they were one of the Biggest Bands in the World when I was in college and grad school. The greatest-hits package Eponymous was one of those albums that absolutely everybody seemed to own; if you’re my age, it’s almost impossible to name the subject of the Bradley Cooper Oscar-bait biopic Maestro in a normal tone of voice. It just wants to come out as “LEO-NARD-BERN-STEIN!”

Their shift to a more expansive sound with Out of Time was huge news— I remember reading previews about how different it was going to be in Rolling Stone at the time, and being anxious to hear it. The inclusion of mandolins and power ballads and “Shiny Happy People” were fodder for endless conversations.

(Personally, as goofy R.E.M. tracks go, I always preferred this one, off Automatic for the People to “Shiny Happy People”:

(Some absolutely spectacular wardrobe Choices in that video, too…)

So, this is a band who meant a good deal to me at a crucial stage. They dropped off the map a dozen or so years ago, though, and have been kind of memory-holed— I don’t think the Kids These Days have much of a sense of how big a deal they were to college-age folks in the early 1990’s. But my generation of former college students is now very much in that sweet spot for nostalgia, sort of like the Eagles in the mid-90’s, which means the idea of a reunited R.E.M. ought to feel huge.

And yet, my reaction is pretty much “Meh.” I actually respect them a fair bit for flatly saying “No” when asked about it, for more or less the reason one of them gives: “It wouldn’t be as good.” I don’t have any great enthusiasm for the idea of hearing them bang through their classic era hits in 2025.

This is largely because in a sense they already did the moral equivalent of the reunion tour, with a couple of rounds of “Back to Basics” albums, starting with Monster:

The last song of theirs that I really like, “Supernatural Superserious” has a bit of this character, too (they disabled embedded playback, so just a link to that one)— a good bit of “Oh, yeah, this is what I was Way Into in 1989…”

(I will note in passing, here, that in thinking about this scenario, U2 plays the role of the Rolling Stones. They just keep shambling on, never quite going away completely enough to pitch a “reunion”…)

I think the main reason for my lack of interest is their long denouement. Monster was pretty great, but it was a brief-ish interruption in a shift away from the more straightforward rock of their early days. This accelerated after the departure of drummer Bill Berry, and a lot of their later stuff is a lot more… art-y, in a somewhat pejorative sense. I don’t care for it that much.

It makes me think that any prospective R.E.M. reunion would end up a little like the Robert Plant and Jimmy Page reunion of a while back, in which Plant in particular seemed to be trying to disavow most of what drew people to Led Zeppelin in the first place. He had moved very decisively in a softer, more folk-y direction, which, you know, is great for him and all, but what I want from a half-reunited Zep is him yowling bombastically about Vikings over crushing blues riffs.

I’m a little afraid that a reunited R.E.M. would similarly lean into, like, a slowed-down orchestral rendition of “Radio Free Europe,” and, you know, I’ll pass on that. It’ll probably turn up in a movie trailer soon enough, anyway, and that will be just fine. I’ll stick with the MP3s I ripped off my CD collection back in the day, and remember them at the peak of their powers.

Having just praised their harder-edged stuff, I will somewhat ironically close this by drawing one last song from their softer side, but since I lived in Rockville, MD for almost six years in grad school, this one’s always spoken to me:

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So, yeah, I’m really going to bring in the crucial Youth Demographic with this one. If you’d like to see more of me yelling at clouds in the future, here’s a button:

And if you want to plug a different favorite song from R.E.M., or a different band whose reunion I ought to be into, the comments will be open: