The strangest pop star REM’s Peter Buck has ever encountered: “One of the weirdest”
If you take a look at the bands and artists that frequently find their way into the top end of the charts, one thing that tends to unify them is their overwhelmingly accessible approach to making pop music.
Yes, there are exceptions to the rule, but part of the reason why some of said exceptions tend to still have success in the mainstream is down to the fact that their quirks come from a place of having tried to slightly mutate what is considered to be ‘normal’ pop music, and still allowing those accessible elements to come across.
There are acts who have been well known slightly outside of the mainstream, such as Frank Zappa, but a large reason as to why he’s so popular despite all of his freakishness is because he always knew how to tie his proclivity for experimentation to a tangible idea that people can see as similar to what the mainstream has to offer, be that melody, lyricism or musicianship.
Of course, Zappa is the sort of artist who experienced very little in the way of chart success throughout his career, so what about those who have endured spells in the Top 40 who had an air of outsider flair injected into their otherwise accessible sound? There are plenty of examples of acts that, against the odds, have managed to introduce musical ideas and concepts traditionally eschewed by the world of popular music, who, unlike Zappa, have actually managed to do this.
During a 1989 interview with Marc Allan, REM guitarist Peter Buck was questioned as to whether what the band, who had just released their sixth studio album, Green, were doing could be considered to be inaccessible. His response, which didn’t exactly deny the band’s peculiar approach, suggested that there are few others brave enough to take the same approach that they were employing at the time.
“I just think that what we do is quite often we’re judged by how much people understand, literally, like, what is this song about?” he pondered. “Whereas to me, I think, ‘Well, gosh, we have probably one of the weirdest harmonic senses of kind of rock ‘n’ roll bands that have records in the Top 40.’”
He continued, noting how certain elements of their work, such as their harmonies and structures, were unlike what most of their contemporaries were doing, and that very few people give them credit for that, while others tend to get recognised for this approach. “No one notices that, so I guess we put it across OK,” he added.
“I mean, Prince is probably the only guy in the Top 20 that’s stranger than we are.”
Peter Buck
“I think the guy’s probably a genius, so good for him,” he noted of the purple-clad icon. “I could never understand why Lovesexy wasn’t a big hit, ’cause ‘Alphabet St’, is a great song.” It’s fair to say that REM were nowhere near as strange as Prince, and that Prince is perhaps one of the greatest examples of someone who managed to have a reasonable amount of crossover success despite creating some of the most wildly inventive music of a generation.
However, as far as the mainstream goes, particularly in the late 1980s, when commercial music was becoming increasingly homogenised, REM were far ahead of the curve and served as a major inspiration for all of the forward-thinking indie rock that began to emerge in the following decades.
