The minor chords that connect four classic REM songs
The whole point behind the alternative movement was being the polar antithesis of the mainstream. Sure, people could still appreciate the music made on a grand level, but there was always a certain niche that set most bands apart from the Led Zeppelins of the world, which made them more entertaining as a result. While REM might hold the distinction of one of the first truly mainstream alt-rock acts, they did have a few motifs that people take for granted like on ‘Driver 8’.
Then again, just because someone uses a melodic fragment over and over doesn’t exactly mean that they are lazy. It’s all about using it in different contexts, and when listening to the first version of ‘Driver 8’, Peter Buck is still using his signature Rickenbacker sound, which sounds somewhere between The Byrds and the beginnings of what Johnny Marr would do when working with The Smiths.
But if you weren’t careful, you could easily mistake ‘Driver 8’ for just another decent song by the world’s best college rock band. Not necessarily on the same level as ‘Radio Free Europe’ or anything, but by the time they launched into ‘Losing My Religion’ with the same minor chords, they had turned the entire music world on its head.
No one expected someone a decade into their career to reinvent themselves this drastically, but just as grunge came in, ‘Losing My Religion’ took those same chords and made them sound beautifully melancholic. Right as ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ came in announcing itself to the world, soft rock was now required by law to be taken much more seriously the moment that Buck plucked out that melody on the mandolin.
But what is it about that chord progression that actually makes it work? After all, the same thing was used in ‘The One I Love’, so why couldn’t that have done the same thing ‘Losing My Religion’ had? Simple: context. As much as the chords work in one song melodically, it’s all about having the right rhythm and the perfect story to go along with it.
If anything, ‘Driver 8’ felt like the breeding ground for this kind of chord progression, having all of the emotional power but just not with the right lyrical theme yet. Even when they put it into a love song, there was no other way to perform it except for draping it in a quasi-folk rock style when making Out of Time.
After Automatic for the People marked a watershed moment for them as one of the kings of alternative music, the only way to escape its shadow was to return to the same chords over and over. Whereas they shook with emotion in previous tunes, hearing it again in ‘Bang and Blame’ is much more raw, almost like they were trying to shake their foundations back to ground zero.
Most people can just try to throw the same pop-formula chords together in the hopes of getting a tune out of it, but REM recycling their chord progressions is the basis of what separates the professionals from the amateurs. Yes, they’re the same chords, but it doesn’t matter when they make you feel something different every time they’re played.
