Yes,  that’s what it was last week. The band that made It’s the End of the World (as we know it) decided that it was time for it to go. And with that announcement came the end of an era.

REM not only defined college rock, it dominated it. It popularised the genre, taking it from the underground to the airwaves to it being called alternative, and with Nirvana, made it so common that to this day most people would be hard pressed to tell the difference between alternative and mainstream music; it’s become as hard as telling the Gallagher twins from Oasis apart.

The boys started out right at the beginning of the ’80s as a bunch of ex-students from the University of Georgia, experimenting with names such as The Twisted Kites and Negro Wives — fortunately for us, none of the names stuck and Michael Stipe came up with REM on a late night prowl through the dictionary.

Back then Michael Stipe was even more intense and his vocals resembled Eddie Vedder stuck in a balloon; he mumbled so much that most people couldn’t understand what he was singing. Undecipherable though he was, he was learning to enunciate while perfecting singing in his characteristic overarching way, which REM biographer David Buckley stated was similar to the way muazzins often recited. Also, guitarist Peter Buck was more interested in melodic rhythms than solo riffs. With bassist Peter Buck and drummer Bill Berry, he took the gnarly sound from the Beatles, combined it with punk, mellowed it down and came up with a jangle-pop sound that inspired hordes of other garage bands to follow. With bitingly deep lyrics, the band became the ‘different’ that every other act wanted to be.

Murmur was their debut album and brought notice from many a record label promising success. But the mainstream music flooding the airwaves then was of the Van Halen, AC/DC, Aerosmith and Kiss variety; REM’s popularity came from the very fact that the underground wanted to listen to something else. So the band stuck true to their following, dropping out of college to tour across the country in a blue van and living on a $2 a day food allowance. This led to a huge fan base and subsequent albums were a hit.

But the constant touring was tough and it was after their third album that talk first emerged of a break up. Michael Stipe even had his head shaved at a monastery in an attempt to find some peace. His frail health also led to questions about his sexuality in the media. Stipe handled the concerns in his characteristically insightful and anarchic way; when asked if he was gay or straight, he replied he was neither, just queer. Take that Black and White.

By the end of the decade, the band had become the spokesmen of choice for college students with their songs about life, politics, causes etc. The best though was yet to come. The early 1990s saw the release of Out Of Time which brought REM’s biggest hit to date, Losing My Religion. The song, sung by the man with an aching voice, became the words of a population confused between the myths of their faith and their books in college. But despite its wording, the song was not about religion, but about unrequited love. Stipe wanted to write an impassioned obsession-song, akin to Every Breath You Take by The Police, and what resulted was one of the few instances in human history when a person set out to write the greatest song in his mind and didn’t fail. Even the video, directed by Tarsem Singh, weaved Stipe’s spastic dance moves with representations of Hindu deities and Saint Sebastian in tableaux and won a Grammy.

The next album, Automatic for the People, went quadruple Platinum in the US and carries one of this author’s favourite songs, Man on the Moon, about the enigma that was Andy Kaufman. REM would later go on to work on the soundtrack of the film with the same name about the same man.

Though nothing ever matched their peak in the early ’90s, REM released 15 albums in all, the last one earlier this year. And throughout their 31 years they gave other bands a sound they wouldn’t have had, except on college radio stations. They gave Dave Matthews his audience. They were there when Nirvana unleashed Nevermind onto the world. Stipe introduced the world to Joseph Arthur by covering In the Sun with Chris Martin, and Gary Jules by covering Mad World.

In the end, aging sagging rockers was not the drum they wanted to beat and they bowed out gracefully, no lawyers no squabbles — another precedent set. — Shayan Shakeel