Was R.E.M. the greatest Gen X band?

Wilco is a good contender and they opened for REM and were the better band at that time. Tweedy was also born in 1967 which is prime Gen X.

Wilco it is.

and I finally used the dancing pineapple.

 

Fugazi Pavement Blake Babies REM Uncle Tupelo Wilco Superchunk (after all "Slack Mother ****er") PJ Harvey Nirvana to name a few

 

Yes, Sonic Youth would have appealled much more to Gen Xers. SY started getting pretty well known around 1987.
And by then most of the Boomers were not really on the move anymore so to speak....getting some gray hair, not clubbing as often, or buying as much music....instead getting married, trying to get ahead in their careers, etc..
Becoming big couch potatoes....

 

I believe it's 1945-1965, although that means some of "us" are actually Baby Boom echoe babies, the children of Baby Boomers.

As others have pointed out, I'd personally move those dates further into the past. I'm "officially" a Boomer but musically came of age with MTV and college radio, not the Beatles and Woodstock.

 

I was also one of the few Boomers that got into The Pixies.....I really didn’t know anyone my age that like them nearly as much as I did then...I was 31 at the time.

 

Same here, both bands were huge for me. But REM after Adventures in Hi-Fi, and New Order after Hook departed/was booted, just aint the same.

 

If we're being honest, the true Gen X defining acts are Michael Jackson, Madonna and Prince.

 

I really enjoy Wilco but do they have enough hugely popular songs to fill up a greatest hits album?
Nirvana had a few huge hits that everyone seem to know back in the day - All Apologies, Teen Spirit, etc.
When I think of the word ‘greatest’, I envision some massive airplay and some truly iconic imagery like the pix of Kurt Cobain & Eddie Vedder pasted seemingly everywhere as well as constant footage on MTV etc.

 

I’ve never decided on a favourite band of that time period, but I’d definitely consider R.E.M. strong contenders up to the time of ‘Automatic for the People.’ They’d had a Beatles-worthy run up until then. Not so much afterwards, though.

 

Gotta include through New Adventures in my view

Love R.E.M., a top 10 band for me for my lifetime, but so is Wilco (and Sonic Youth for that matter)! Nice to see a thread where 3 of my favorites are mentioned on the same page

 

More like Generation Jones, or Blank Generation, as Richard Hell (a boomer, natch!) coined it: Anyone who wasn't old enough to experience the 1960s as a young adult or at least teenager, but too old to experience grunge as a teen/early 20-something. Alienation was the craze, as Ric Ocasek (another boomer!) sang.

 

Hey if you get a chance, check out @Parachute Woman 's Billboard Alternative chart thread...we're going through a lot of the Gen X bands and solo artists...

Every Billboard Modern Rock/Alternative #1 Single (Part 2: The 1990s)

 

Gen X? WTF is that?

 

No.

 

Yes.

 

I never understood the I.R.S. cult who acted like REM turned into Phil Collins and sold out all strands of credibility when they signed with Warner. People act like IRS was freaking S.S.T. or Dischord or something when it was the freaking label of The Go Gos and Fine Young Cannibals

 

Whatever age-generation the members of a band belongs to, their biggest group of fans are mostly in the generation just before. Like, Boomers are the biggest group of Beatles fans, who are part of the "silent generation", Gen-X are the biggest group of REM fans (who are boomers), millennials are the biggest Nirvana fans (who are Gen-X), and Gen-Z (or whatever the gen after millennials are called) are the biggest group of fans of, say, 21 Pilots, who are millennials. And so it will keep going.

 

R.E.M. were great, but (from this era) I prefer Elvis Costello and the Attractions


And if Costello is a bit too old for the demographic described, I'll go with Nirvana





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I'll beg to differ on that one. I saw REM in August '99 with Wilco opening. They were mediocre and roused no one with their set. One passerby on the way to his seat flipped them off. It was almost laughable. Maybe Wilco was the better band to a few music writers at the time, but REM had way more mojo, even without Bill Berry. I was brought to a Wilco show around 2010, and they still struck me as average then. Their "hit" at the time included the words "I don't care anymore" over a melody ripped from George Harrison. Try a little harder than that, boys.

 

I'd say so. They maintained such a high level of quality for so long and churned out an album a year when nobody was doing that anymore. Between 1983 and 1992, they released eight albums, and for me only Green showed a drop in overall quality. U2 seems to be the prime competitor and I liked them in that era but less. They released five albums - live albums don't count - and I'd say two of these (The Unforgettable Fire and Rattle and Hum) were spotty.

Guns and Roses and Nirvana were both iconic bands, but both were essentially done within five years of breaking out so I'm dinging 'em on body of work and longevity.

Wilco strikes me as a cult band that didn't expand to a larger audience as I expected them to after Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. They're not for everyone.

 

I was a junior studying at LSU when the Chronic Town EP and Murmur LP were released and, irrespective of their actual ages, have always considered them sort of a transitional band in the cultural sense. For the tail-end boomers my age, they were a college radio, minor label (albeit a major label subsidiary) “alternative” rock (defined as a marketable genre)-in-its-infancy band. For the younger Gen-Xers who discovered the band around the time of their Document LP (or what I sometimes refer to as the start of Michael Stipe’s decipherable years ) and followed as they reached worldwide megaband status with subsequent major label albums, hit singles and heavy MTV rotation, R.E.M. was definitely one of the big, influential rock acts of their young adulthood. Thus if they feel so inclined, the Xers certainly have justification to lay claim to them as well.

 

I was actually wondering if our friends in the UK (and other places) place such a premium on delineating different generations.

 

Their audience (me included) was probably mostly Gen X. The guys themselves are not.

 

Post 60's there are two major generations, Punk and Rave. That's it, there is nothing else.