Refusing to kowtow to commercial pressures, the band achieved success on their own terms, and, like all the great rock acts that preceded them, they created a unique sound and style that many have copied but few can capture. This book collects the best of these critical essays, record and concert reviews, interviews, and other material that helps unlock the mystery of R.E.M."--BOOK JACKET.

REM is the most acclaimed "thinking" rock band to have appeared throughout the past decade. They are one of the few contemporary groups to achieve the cultural significanc of the 60s' artists such as the Doors and Bob Dylan. This book covers in great dtail every aspect of their career. Everything you ever wanted to know about REM - and much more.

A Companion to Media Studies is a comprehensive collection that brings together new writings by an international team to provide an overview of the theories and methodologies that have produced this most interdisciplinary of fields. Tackles a variety of central concepts and controversies, organized into six areas of study: foundations, production, media content, media audiences, effects, and futures Provides an accessible point of entry into this expansive and interdisciplinary field Includes the writings of renowned media scholars, including McQuail, Schiller, Gallagher, Wartella, and Bryant Now available in paperback for the course market.

R.E.M.'s public image has always been tightly controlled. Icons of anti-celebrity rock, who bacame huge celebrity rock stars, they were, according to the story, the first U.S. post new-wave band who were both commercially successful and cool. Drawing on exclusive interviews with Mike Mills, Peter Buck and other members of R.E.M.'s nuclear family, Fiction re-evaluates the music and career of a group who sold almost no records for the first half of their existence, then became 'the biggest rock group in the world' in the second half.

In the summer of 1978, the B-52's conquered the New York underground. A year later, the band's self-titled debut album burst onto the Billboard charts, capturing the imagination of fans and music critics worldwide. The fact that the group had formed in the sleepy southern college town of Athens, Georgia, only increased the fascination. Soon, more Athens bands followed the B-52's into the vanguard of the new American music that would come to be known as "alternative," including R.E.M., who catapulted over the course of the 1980s to the top of the musical mainstream. As acts like the B-52's, R.E.M., and Pylon drew the eyes of New York tastemakers southward, they discovered in Athens an unexpected mecca of music, experimental art, DIY spirit, and progressive politics--a creative underground as vibrant as any to be found in the country's major cities. In Athens in the eighties, if you were young and willing to live without much money, anything seemed possible. Cool Town reveals the passion, vitality, and enduring significance of a bohemian scene that became a model for others to follow. Grace Elizabeth Hale experienced the Athens scene as a student, small-business owner, and band member. Blending personal recollection with a historian's eye, she reconstructs the networks of bands, artists, and friends that drew on the things at hand to make a new art of the possible, transforming American culture along the way. In a story full of music and brimming with hope, Hale shows how an unlikely cast of characters in an unlikely place made a surprising and beautiful new world.