Modern Rock Tracks No. 1s - R.E.M. and "Losing My Religion"
From a childhood joke to a Florence disco, "Losing My Religion" has been the North Star of my musical journey into modern alternative rock, and its light still shines bright to this day
R.E.M. - “Losing My Religion”
Weeks atop the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart: 8 weeks (March 16 to May 4, 1991)
Previous Modern Rock #1 hit: Jesus Jones - “Right Here, Right Now”
Next Modern Rock #1 hit: Simple Minds - “See The Lights”
Billboard Hot 100 chart toppers during this time:
Mariah Carey - “Someday” (3/16/91, 2 total weeks)
Timmy T - “One More Try” (3/23/91)
Gloria Estefan - “Coming Out of the Dark” (3/30/91 and 4/6/91)
Londonbeat - “I've Been Thinking About You” (4/13/91)
Wilson Phillips - “You're in Love” (4/20/91 and 4/27/91)
Amy Grant - “Baby Baby” (5/4/91)
When I though about this column a few days ago, I reached out to some grade-school friends to see if they remembered a weird situation from our middle-school days.
Before I discuss, a caveat: I’m not afraid to admit I was not really a popular guy in grade school. That doesn’t mean I was the *least* popular, but definitely in what I would consider the lower third: obnoxious, overly sensitive, and caught within the confines of perpetual unrequited love. I was an easy mark on a lot of fronts, but for some reason getting teased by the girls was probably the toughest.
I described this memory to my friends and they absolutely did not remember it at all — and fairly noted that I might have been a little crazy to think it happened — but I remember it vividly. There were a couple of girls who wanted to get a dig in on me, but did it in such a way that they were laughing at me instead of with me, a distinction I didn’t really recognize at the time but came to understand completely as I aged into high school and college.
Referencing the video for this week’s hit, R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion,” the girls tied the imagery of people in the video raising their arms into the air to me raising my hand to answer a question in class. Thus, for a brief period, I was referred to by these girls as Matt “Losing My Religion” Madurski. Of course, knowing me, I leaned into it not as a joke at my expense, but as an opportunity to garner attention from girls who seemed to be interested in me, even if it wasn’t in the way I was hoping. I would raise my hands in the way they demonstrated, and they would laugh. In retrospect, I think that’s where I started to lean into self-deprecating humor as a crutch to build relationships with people, before eventually just becoming comfortable with my own goofiness.
The funny part of this is I had NO IDEA what they were talking about! I was not an MTV watcher at the time, and even though I knew the song from its ubiquity on the radio in 1991, I didn’t see the video till many years later. When I finally watched it, I still didn’t really understand what they were saying and, admittedly, didn’t get the joke at my expense, but if it’s the girls I’m thinking it was, I suspect it wasn’t intended to be a well-developed joke, but rather taking something from the zeitgeist and using it at my expense.
From this unusual childhood anecdote begins a long history of loving R.E.M., and loving “Losing My Religion,” a song that kicked off the beginning of my pop-music awakening in the early ‘90s and launched the band into the stratosphere of greatest bands of the decade.
“Losing My Religion,” arguably R.E.M.’s biggest hit (even if not their best song), was the lead single off “Out Of Time,” an album that absolutely boosted the band into the mainstream consciousness while also strengthening their dominance on alternative radio. With this track, R.E.M. became the first band to nab three #1 hits on the Modern Rock Tracks chart, an impressive feat given the chart’s relatively short lifespan, and it matched “Orange Crush” as the longest-charting #1 MRT single at that time, topping the chart for eight weeks.
And there’s so much to dissect about the song, not the least of which is the decision to lead the song with a mandolin instead of a guitar. In a podcast interview transcribed on Ultimate_Guitar.com, Stipe said the mandolin was an opportunity for lead guitarist Peter Buck to learn a new, challenging instrument, and it clicked with “Losing My Religion”:
"The music just existed first, I know that Peter was tired of playing guitar after touring for 9-10 years in the 1980s. And he was buying wild, interesting instruments that he did not play. His experimentation as a musician was to throw roadblocks in front of himself by trying to play something that he couldn't play.”
"So, this was one of his first experiments on mandolin, we still have the original cassette that he gave me of 'Losing My Religion' and it is exactly the same arrangement. It sounds identical to what wound up as the final version of the song. So that's all Peter." —Michael Stipe
Notably, the song lacks a traditional chorus as well, simply going from line to line with some occasional lyrical repetition, though no perfectly timed “refrain.” The song is so different sonically and structurally from the band’s albums that came before it that it’s almost like we’re talking about a completely different group. Gone are the college-rock days of jangly guitars and sometimes unintelligible lyrics: R.E.M. went from “Pop Song 89” to mainstream pop, in a way that differed vastly from the frontrunners of pop in this moment (though I would love to hear someone breakdown whatever similarities exist between R.E.M. and Londonbeat or Wilson Phillips).
It’s hard to imagine, but at one point Warner Bros. suggested the band release “Shiny Happy People” as the first single from “Out Of Time,” which would have worked but probably not on the same level as “Losing My Religion.” There’s something to be said for launching a new record with an upbeat track featuring the amazing Kate Pierson of fellow Athens, Ga., natives The B-52’s, a band that was already riding a pop-music high from their “Cosmic Thing” album success. But “Losing My Religion” defined this band’s entrance into the ‘90s, and set the stage for future success in the coming months and years.
And as it turns out, “Shiny Happy People” would be the perfect recovery song for the implications of “Losing My Religion,” effectively a song about unrequited love and the nervousness that comes with deciding whether or not you should announce your intentions to that person. In a “Today Show” interview, Stipe reflected on what he was looking to capture with the lyrics:
“I wanted to write a song about unrequited love and about desire. And I had not written love songs up to that point. So this was kind of me stepping into what I considered to be the most clichéd of pop songs.”
“‘That's me in the corner, that's me in the spotlight’ was really about someone who's so shy, so intractably shy, a wallflower who's kind of forced forward into trying to express this feeling of love for someone, and failing miserably probably.”
Grade-school Matt probably didn’t make that connection, but for the decade or more that followed, the idea of reaching out, taking a chance and making your intentions known to an unrequited love interest definitely created a connection. Oh no, did I say too much? Did I say enough? Are you laughing with me? At me? Or was it just a dream? If you’ve ever had those moments, and I had many, you can absolutely appreciate where Stipe took this song lyrically, and it works on a much deeper level.
This song was omnipresent throughout the ‘90s and still clings tenaciously to most radio formats even now in 2024. Its album, “Out Of Time,” won a Grammy award in 1992 for best alternative album and topped the Billboard 200 charts on two separate occasions. “Losing My Religion” on its own netted two Grammys: Best Short Form Music Video and Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. As noted earlier, it spent a then-record-tying eight weeks atop the MRT chart and topped out at #4 on the Hot 100 in June of ‘91.
Two more tracks from “Out Of Time” would peak in the top-five of the MRT chart: the aforementioned “Shiny Happy People” reached #10 on the Hot 100 and #3 on the MRT chart, and “Texarkana,” while not officially released as a single, topped out on the MRT chart at #4. And while R.E.M. won’t appear in this column again behind their superlative effort in “Out Of Time,” it won’t be long before they’re back with their next album.
But with “Losing My Religion,” it’s like the band never left, and indeed, the song has certainly played a role in more than one amusing anecdote from my lifetime. In 1999, when I turned 20 years old, I was on a college trip with my best friend Mike (
) visiting Italy, and we were in a busy Florence discotheque watching a bunch of our Italian peers singing karaoke. On a whim, we decided to go up and sing the only American song we knew from the catalog: R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion.”Strangely, not long after we started singing, the room cleared out. I’m not sure why, because I thought we sounded awesome, like this:
Turns out it was more like this:
Whatever the case, “Losing My Religion” is a tremendous track, and though its ubiquity has taken some of the shine off of it in the past 30+ years, it clearly set the stage for R.E.M. to take over commercial alternative and alt-pop radio for the better part of the decade. I’ll be talking about them again real soon.
Rating: 9/10
Chart Check: A look at other notable MRT chart songs from this time period
Speaking of alternative tracks that defined the ‘90s, we have a couple of contenders in the bunch this week. Lots of tracks went after “Losing My Religion” in its eight-week run at the top, but came up short.
“I Touch Myself” by Divinyls: Australian rockers The Divinyls had a long and successful career in their native land, though success was harder to come by in the U.S. That is, until Chrissy Amphlett turned up the heat with “Touch Myself,” a song that dared to embrace self-inflicted pleasure at the mere thought of another person. This song blazed its way up the pop and alternative charts, and peaked at #2 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart and #4 on the Hot 100.
(Note: I couldn’t let this one pass without bringing up one of the most famous movie clips involving this song…)
“Unbelievable” by EMF: Before this ‘90s earworm topped the Hot 100 in July 1991, it made the rounds on alternative radio, and peaked at #3 on the MRT chart behind “Losing My Religion.” This dance track found its way into a variety of different contexts and settings, though few as amazing at the time the song was used to market cheese.
“Miss Freelove '69” by Hoodoo Gurus: It’s been awhile since I talked about Hoodoo Gurus in this column, and it appears this will be the last. The Aussie band would go on from here to nail down a good many hits in their native Australia, but this would be the last time the band would chart in the U.S. This groovy jam is actually quite entertaining, though, and managed to top out at #3 on the MRT chart.
“3 Strange Days” by School Of Fish: Ah, School Of Fish. This is a band that seemed to be on the early rise in the ‘90s behind this alt-rock staple, which peaked at #6 behind R.E.M. While it was a good track and laid the foundation for alt-rock success going forward, the band tanked after the release of their second album and disbanded soon after.
“Quick As Rainbows” by Kitchens Of Distinction: Shoegaze progenitors Kitchens Of Distinction get a shout-out here because of their unusual name, and the fact that the band formed in a London district called Tooting, which seems funny to me for some reason. At any rate, this song is the band’s debut on the MRT chart, and they finished at #18. The band will have a couple more minor MRT hits going forward, so we may see them in this space again going forward. Or not.
“The Wagon” by Dinosaur Jr.: Alt-rock godfathers Dinosaur Jr. make their first appearance on the Modern Rock chart with “The Wagon,” a track that rocks from the first second and doesn’t quit. The only thing that ran out of steam related to this song was its ascension up the MRT chart, peaking at a modest #22 behind R.E.M.
Brilliant piece here Matt. We're the same age so your story about using humor to deflect from the wrath of teenage girls hits me right in the feels.