Bookbag: Murmur by J. Niimi

This edition of Bookbag comes courtesy of Continuum Press's 33 1/3 series and is dedicated to Nick, both for being himself and for this life-changing alert.

R.E.M. didn't expect their single to succeed (Buck says that they only hoped just to make one great single before they broke up), and the band sealed copies of their first demo tape with Do Not Open. R.E.M. was the locus of several different brands of fatalism: the "no future" anti-commercial ethos of punk, Southern Gothic's regional defeatism—and later, the emergence of college radio, itself a kind of turning away...

I can't believe I sold my copy of the Sneakers' Racket to the used record store. Still have my Pylon and Let's Active, thank God.