Anti-Climacus

As pointed out by Jacob Levy on both the twitters and the facebooks, and also pointed out by my friend and lurking reader Chris (hi Chris!), R.E.M. have officially broken up. Me being me, my first two reactions were snarky:

1. Too bad they didn't do this 14 years ago, before they made all those terrible albums. And, you know, honored what they said about how the band would end when one of the original members left.

2. From Mike Mills' statement: "We have always been a band in the truest sense of the word. Brothers who truly love, and respect, each other. We feel kind of like pioneers in this--there's no disharmony here, no falling-outs, no lawyers squaring-off."Snark: someone should tell that to Jefferson Holt.

But more seriously, they were a great band that had the incredible luck to have produced consistently excellent music for an extended period of time, and to have had two undeniable creative peaks in Murmur and Automatic for the People. That their more recent work was mediocre-to-bad (to slightly-above-mediocre on the last two albums) is less an indictment of them personally than a recognition that even the best talents will fall off from time to time. They were and remain my first musical love, and though we no longer have the band, we have the work, which is quite enough.



The facebook posting led to a discussion on which bands, if any, have ended on a high note. Aside from people pulling out their personal favorites, the answer seems to clearly be no, for approximately the same reason few sports stars end their careers on a high note: the ego, the recognition that one was once capable of great things, and the unwillingness to face decline mean it's a world with many more imperfect endings rather than perfect ones.