R.E.M. vs. U2 best of the 80's

You can tell a lot about a band by how they tell their own story. This fall, R.E.M. released And I Feel Fine, a collection of songs from their early years, 1982 to 1987. The deluxe two-disc edition comes with liner notes in which R.E.M.'s four founding members relate stories of the band's early years. As a one-time devoted fan, I devoured these 11 short pages of storytelling—a tiny window into the songs I'd spent so many hours rapturously listening to, obsessing over, and decoding.

In weighty contrast to this slim text is the just-released U2 by U2, a $40 coffee-table book that exhaustively recounts—in 352 pages of interviews—the birth, struggles, and modern-day megasuccess of U2. Now that U2 has become America's spokesband for human dignity, it's difficult to remember that R.E.M., the quiet Georgians with the elliptical lyrics, once competed with U2 for the title of world's best rock band. With U2 triumphant and R.E.M. fading into near-obscurity, And I Feel Fine reminds listeners that R.E.M., not U2, made the most memorable music of the 1980s.

Throughout that decade and the early 1990s, a fierce rivalry existed between R.E.M. and U2—not in real life, mind you, but in my head. Among certain floppy-haired music nerds in that era, you were either an R.E.M. person or a U2 person, and this R.E.M. person has spent the last five years in agony, watching my one-time heroes release several drab albums, while U2 famously announced they meant to matter again—and succeeded.

It's hard to imagine R.E.M. making a similar pronouncement, given the determination with which they pursued their off-center, Southern muses for so many years. For all of their ambition, in the 1980s, R.E.M.'s music was willfully obscure. Much has been made of Michael Stipe's mumbly lyrics, but it wasn't that you couldn't make out the words of early R.E.M. songs—you just didn't know what the hell they meant. Neither did the band. "I still have no idea what that song is about," Stipe writes about "Pilgrimage," and bassist Mike Mills says the same about "Gardening at Night" (while drummer Bill Berry claims it's based on a euphemism for peeing along the side of the road during an all-night drive). The lyrics could mean anything, and therefore they meant everything, weighted as they were with mystery, resonance, and passion. "It's not necessarily what we meant," writes Mills, "but whatever you think." A friend once gave his sister, for her birthday in 1988, a complete collection of R.E.M. lyrics, painstakingly hand-transcribed from repeated listens to the songs. Were they right? It hardly mattered.