‘Losing My Religion’: The song that changed soft rock forever
By the early 1990s, rock and roll was in dire need of a reset. As much as people love the idea of the excessive side of the 1980s, there was no way that any musical revolution was going to last that kept getting more saturated and overblown by the minute. And while Nirvana may get their due credit for shattering anyone’s preconceived notions of what rock and roll was supposed to be, REM has already begun reinventing rock and roll from the ground up since the beginning of the 1980s.
Then again, no one was expecting a group like the Athens natives to take over the world. They were the epitome of an indie rock band at the time, and even though they started rising in stature as the decade wore on, there were bound to be limits on where they could go since they didn’t do customary music videos and would often be found outside the limelight most of the time.
But even if the band wasn’t the most photogenic act in the world, they still had their hands on something different when they began working on Out of Time. They had already seen some of the biggest hits of their career in ‘Stand’, but ‘Shiny Happy People’ would send things into the stratosphere all over again, even if the entire group saw the entire thing as a mindless pop song that didn’t represent them in the slightest.
Despite their penchant for hooks, nothing was going to be able to escape ‘Losing My Religion’. As much as soft rock may have been looking like acts like Huey Lewis and the News and the balladeer side of what Genesis was doing, ‘Losing My Religion’ managed to do the same thing for the softer side of rock as ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ did for the aggressive rock crowd.
Outside of being a finely crafted pop masterpiece, the lyrical content was about something far more gripping. The title may imply a biblical struggle with faith, but Michael Stipe is really talking about him losing his mind over a relationship falling apart. ‘Losing one’s religion’ was already a southern expression used to describe someone who lost their cool at some sort of social gathering, but whereas it’s usually said in jest, Stipe is genuinely hurt and vulnerable on this song, trying his best to make the kind of track that feels like a small piece of emotion brought out for the world to see.
It’s one thing to have this kind of classic in one’s arsenal, but considering what Nirvana would be doing a few years after this single dropped, soft rock would pick up where REM left off. Not everyone was adopting mandolins like Peter Buck was in the video, but looking at the biggest names in soft rock going forward, a lot of them tended to have the same stripped-down approach that the band did.
No longer did they have to make the synthesiser-heavy music that everyone expected. Now that meant that people could act a bit more casual and not have to cower to what the suits wanted out of fashion, whether that was Sheryl Crow’s rootsy approach to rock and roll, Third Eye Blind playing up their California-style brand of sunshine, or to a lesser extent, a band like Hootie and the Blowfish satisfying the country crowd as well as the rock and roll fans in the audience.
Even outside of traditional rock and roll, the biggest pop acts of the time were also willing to open up a bit more after this song stormed onto the charts. There may have been a lot of factors behind that change, but it’s hard to think of Alanis Morrissette getting something like ‘Perfect’ onto Jagged Little Pill without ‘Losing My Religion’, or Thom Yorke having the emotional honesty to make a tune like ‘Fake Plastic Trees’.
While it’s safe to say that REM didn’t exactly murder a generation of rock and roll, ‘Losing My Religion’ was the warning shot that showed that things were changing. Anyone could have kept listening to their Phil Collins and Huey Lewis CDs if they wanted to, but the minute that people started listening to the raw honesty in Stipe’s voice, there was no real point in going back to that era ever again.
