News flash: R.E.M.'s music is no longer the domain of "cis men"
Like a Terminator army, music journalists are traveling back in time to fight culture-war battles in a desperate attempt to re-shape the present. It's doomed to fail.
I just came across a GQ article on the legendary rock band R.E.M. published on February 15th (a few days ago at the time of this post).
Author Michael Idov writes:
It wasn’t what they did but how they did it: Mills’s melodic bass, Berry’s near-monastic restraint behind the drum kit, Buck’s way with the arpeggio, Stipe’s oblique lyrics, the way all these choices meshed into one. This makes their songs hell to cover, especially, one must say, for cis men. One extra drop of testosterone and they become frat rock. (A good test case: Hootie and the freaking Blowfish, whose “Losing My Religion” is perfectly faithful yet somehow unlistenable.)
While I understand what Idov is getting at, I find his assertion puzzling — not least for the glaring and inescapable fact that R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe once presented as a cis man, albeit one who now identifies as queer. Though Stipe wrote in a 2014 Guardian piece that he embraces the ascendance of gender fluidity since he came out in 1994, he’s never renounced he/him pronouns or explicitly labeled himself as nonbinary. Moreover, up until ‘94, R.E.M.’s fans had no way of knowing that Stipe was queer. Even when you look back in hindsight, with the benefit of knowing Stipe’s stance since then, you have to strain to read gender nonconformity in the music.
I’m shocked that Idov’s editor didn’t press Idov to be more precise. Then again, I’m hardly surprised.
Idov appears to be on a mission to retrieve past events in order to thread them through his contemporary ideological framework without acknowledging that social mores have changed dramatically since R.E.M.’s heyday. On the one hand, Idov’s assertion is totally fair — did Stipe see himself as falling outside the gender binary back then? That sure does seem likely. But on the other hand, we still don’t quite know whether Stipe would have had any issue with being classified as a “man” — a “bisexual” man — for much of the time R.E.M. was active, before the modern gender lexicon took hold.
My peers, by and large, are encouraged to write from the perspective that the present maps onto the past very neatly, as if we can just snap our fingers and make it so when, in fact, different eras are distinguished by different sets of groundrules. Which means that judging the past by present standards becomes somewhat impossible, much like when sports analysts compare athletes who played in different decades.
I suspect that music writers actually know this — which is precisely why they’ve been deployed, like a Terminator robot army, to travel back in time in a desperate campaign to re-shape the present. This effort, I suspect, is doomed to fail — but not before masses of people play along. Still, we can only lie to ourselves en masse for so long before the cracks in the lie begin to show.
A Pitchfork piece from July of 2022, for example, was recently re-posted to Pitchfork’s Facebook with the oddly revisionist headline Queer and trans people invented the dance scene as we know it. Another piece from July, 2023 titled The Secret Gay History of Indie Rock starts out with a quote from (queer) Michael Stipe. These headlines flatten distinctions between various LGBT subsets: presenting the term “queer” as if it’s simply interchangeable with “gay,” a distinction that gay Catholic conservative and marriage-equality advocate Andrew Sullivan illuminated during his recent appearance on Meghan Daum’s podcast The Unspeakable.
The Pitchfork headline (also a line from the article, which in turn links to this 2014 Resident Advisor piece) conveniently sidesteps the fact that past behaviors along the timeline of dance music culture don’t always align with the suite of traits we currently define as “trans.” The sensibilities that might have motivated a person to buck against gender conformity at the discos of 1977 or the raves of 1997 don’t necessarily make for an apples-to-apples comparison with what ultimately evolved into today’s trans movement. (Daum addresses this with Sullivan as well.)
Even if we just look at the present, a person who would self-describe as having “gender dysphoria” is not in the same circumstance as someone who chooses to identify as the opposite gender, who in turn is not the same as someone who renounces gender altogether or positions themselves somewhere along a fluid gender spectrum. These are not all the same person. They don’t all hold the same conception of what gender even is in the first place. Their respective concepts of gender can, in fact, be incompatible with one another.
And yet, for all that I’ve seen my peers fixate on the subject and push to insert trans identity into their music coverage over the last ten years, virtually none of them make these crucial distinctions. You could say that, when it comes to being precise about identifying who’s who, music journalists by and large appear to be as ignorant as the people who get tagged as “transphobes.” How can one possibly write on behalf of a given community while failing (or at least neglecting) to recognize the contours within that community? How can you advocate for people you don’t even see?
(I use the term gender dysphoria in quotes, by the way, because I have doubts as to whether trans proponents and opponents alike should keep pathologizing what we widely refer to as “dysphoria.” Could we not all make a shift towards viewing this phenomenon as an exceptional way of being that comes with its own set of benefits in addition to the profound discomforts we’re already focused on.)
When it comes to race — a subject that has captured the attention of the same media outlets that dwell on gender — failure to recognize distinctions between groups likewise runs rampant. Click on any of the thousands of pieces where a supposedly well-meaning journalist or radio/TV host paints all “BIPOC” or “people of color” with the same broad brush and you’ll find that their awareness of cultural variety operates at the most crude level at best. It’s as if they divide all the world’s people into “white” and, well… everyone else.
According to this view, one brown-skinned person might as well be the same as the next and the next and the next, no matter how different their backgrounds might be. Instead of a vast array of ethnicities and cultures, we’re encouraged to see nothing more than a gelatinous cube of “non-white”ness. If we stop and think for even a few seconds, we realize that this a horridly regressive way of looking at people that echoes the most racist attitudes from the age of European colonial expansion. And yet, many of the same racial presumptions — or, if we’re being fair, prejudices — that we’d thought long-outdated have found new life, conjured back up at the fingertips of my peers.
Meanwhile, business is also booming for time-travel with the intention of altering the past in order to support the fashionable race narratives of today. In HBO’s 2021 documentary Woodstock 99: Peace, Love and Rage, the filmmakers explicitly frame the oafish, destructive behavior of the Woodstock crowd as evidence of a white-supremacist undercurrent that, according to them, was simmering to boil during the ‘90s. According to this interpretation, ‘90s music reflected the angry, hateful, and entitled disposition of the white-racist dudes who made up the majority of the audience.
Walking away from the film, you’d think there were tens of millions of these young men who teetered on the verge of joining neo-Nazi groups. Was there a white-supremacist underground active during that time? Sure. Does it have anything to do with the rioting at the 1999 edition of Woodstock? I think it’s a stretch, and that’s putting it kindly. In fact, I think it’s lazy and irresponsible — reprehensible, actually — of the filmmakers to take such liberties with history.
In any case, I responded to Michael Idov’s R.E.M. article via Twitter:
@michaelidov @GQMagazine That statement >seems< harmless enough, and I understand the point you're making—that Michael Stipe doesn't conform to the typical macho rock thing—but there's an insinuation here that I'm both unclear on and uncomfortable with. Maybe you can help me understand:
@remhq's fanbase is largely north of 50 yrs old. I would imagine a huge chunk of it consists of "cis men" as you describe.
Michael Stipe is queer, not trans per se—i.e: for much of R.E.M.’s career, he would have been perceived as a cis man. The conflation of homosexuality, queerness and transgenderism here gives me pause. (I also have trouble with the conflation of various trans modalities into a single silo, but I'll try to keep this simple.)
I'm deeply disturbed by this push to have people with shared traits melt into undifferentiable blobs of flesh, as if people aren't distinguished by their individuality or capacity for free thought, as if all of us are to simply be subsumed into our respective groups.
Right now, there isn't even room in music journalism for the diversity of trans perspectives to express themselves. Same for all these other "communities" that music journalists are ostensibly advocating for >while< reducing these same communities to little more than slogans.
It's quite dehumanizing—horrifying, actually. And I have to wonder >why< this is being done.
We >could< try to have more constructive, more conscientious conversations around sexual orientation and gender (which, again aren't the same thing).
Those conversations require that we music writers do some heavy lifting and really >apply< ourselves to understanding/unpacking complex social phenomena. I'd love to see music journalism grow to be able to accommodate these conversations. I know it could.
But that would require that we take the messy, thorny middle path between "trans rights" and "gender critical" pole positions. Our industry—editors and publishers—aren't giving us room to do that, but we could insist on doing it anyway.
Or we could just use legacy artists like R.E.M. to reinforce modern dogma by threading it back through the past and tell ourselves that we're making sense.
Meanwhile, there's something sad about drawing lines around what we can allow ourselves to enjoy, and who gets to enjoy things most (cordoning-off certain groups and rationing-out the joy of music according to the hierarchy of the progressive stack).
I guess this is the natural tragic endpoint for a society that's never healed from the puritanical fervor at the core of its DNA.
In article after article, it's like I'm listening to a minister browbeat congregants in a Massachusetts settlement circa 1635 telling them to get on their knees whenever they want to do something "sinful" like go sing in the grass.
We all have the right to seek bliss in music. And when someone wants to intercede against that, what that says to me is that that person needs healing. It says that they haven't learned to enjoy sensations—to simply—exist untainted by shame.
Why else would people want to shame others into being conflicted about music, of all things?
It would be like clergy giving people a guilt complex about getting sunlight or breathing air. We would call that sick, and rightfully so. But in our line of work, critics are >rewarded< when they stew in their fixation with depriving themselves and moderating the joy of others.
As scribes who observe art, why would we not >want< to help people find transcendence on their own terms—or, for that matter, draw their own conclusions about complex issues like gender?
That's a lot to throw at you, but I'm here if you (or anyone) has an answer or wants to have a conversation...
No response so far. I imagine people read replies like that and assume that I’m mentally ill for going on at such length. I don’t care about that so much as it would bother me if my approach caused people to shut down before they could hear what I’m saying. My initial response to Idov was much more harsh, but I didn’t want to be antagonistic.
That said, while I think it’s crucial to try and avoid saying these things with an attacking tone, I think it’s just as crucial to actually say them. It's a bad sign for a society when people walk around uttering non-rational things while luxuriating in their authority to detach from the truth. We've all had to cope with a kind of collective mental decompensation around the idea of gender.
It’s time to get messy again! That might initially be painful, but I suspect it’ll ultimately be for the best. I also suspect that people will feel much better once they feel like they have license to explore what I describe in my tweet as the “messy, thorny middle.”
It’s a fruitful, if difficult, place to be.
NOTE: This piece has been updated/corrected to reflect that Michael Stipe’s identification as queer.
<3 SRK