AMV chronicles #075: Project REM Sleep

This is definitely going to be an entry short on substance, one I just feel like posting for the sake of acknowledging that, yes, this actually happened and boy does it feel weird to look back on from a distance of over a decade.

Released only a month after YouTube.com was activated and opened to the public, “Project REM Sleep” wasn’t the one of the biggest or most unique multi-editor AMV projects to come out of the mid 2000s, nor was it the most technically-savvy or impressive video in its time, to say nothing of how it looks fourteen years after its debut. It’s been all but forgotten today, but it’s an interesting time capsule worth revisiting, if only to get a sense of what AMV culture was like at the time and to catch a glimpse of what an average AMV might have looked like smack dab in the middle of that decade. If you’re curious about or nostalgic for the golden age of AMVs and want an unfiltered sample of what it was like (not necessarily reflected in any of the most popular videos from the time that the average anime fan might know about today), this project is as honest of a sample as you’re going to find.

My fascination with this video–presented here only in part on YouTube, perhaps a relic of the early years of the site when uploading longer videos came with significant restrictions–hinges on my past obsession with and current apathy towards the music of REM, a feeling which pretty much mirrors how their legacy has changed over the years (if not for all of the reasons that kids today generally don’t care or know about them much at all). It shouldn’t be surprising that a band whose biggest successes came throughout the 80s and 90s wasn’t really able to ride that wave into and through the 00s, certainly not any more surprising than, say, how Grand Funk Railroad wasn’t really building a fanbase through the era of grunge and gangsta rap. None of this prevents this from still feeling tremendously weird to me, just because I remember when this band was very popular, hearing them on the radio, seeing kids at school wearing their t-shirts, watching their videos on MTV at friends’ houses (no, we didn’t have cable, truly a double-edged sword for a kid who would have watched the shit out of it every day if he had), etc. This is all natural nostalgia talking, probably completely incomprehensible to anyone under 30 and old hat nonsense to anyone over 50. I turn 40 tomorrow and it’s… probably no big deal but certainly a weird thing to think about as I continue to dabble away my days mining the bowels of all things youth culture past and present for… I don’t really know, to be honest.

Hard to say if REM was ever The Biggest Rock Band In The World or not, a title that might have been perpetually out of their reach thanks to U2 and Nirvana. Still, despite their humble indie roots (way before such a thing was remotely marketable) and lack of any discernible image, they had four top ten hits and were central to alternative rock from before it even had a name all the way until that very name lost all its meaning. The landscape of post-grunge, mall punk and nu metal didn’t leave them much wiggle room for a proper third act in their career, but then again, how many bands really get one in rock and roll? This was the state of REM as the ridiculously prolific OtakuForLife organized this MEP in late 2004, recruiting a handful of editors to “[use] the power of REM and a ton of shows.” In terms of technical quality, the MEP is all over the place, but considering the challenges associated with organizing such a project in 2004–actual comment on the audio from an aspiring participant: “I wish I could hear the mix but that filesize of 88.8 mb would take over 9 hours to send and bleh.”–just getting it finished in a couple of months was a major accomplishment in itself.

The entire MEP can be downloaded from animemusicvideos.org. I pity the viewer who actually does so without either knowing what they’re getting into or at least understanding just a little bit about why I find old videos like this as fascinating as I do. Obviously, this AMV suffers from the sort of inconsistency that plagues most MEPs, only heightened by the digital divide of knowledge and resources that made breaking into the hobby a much more tedious challenge back in the 00s than it’s been throughout this decade. There are varying frame sizes and other technical issues here that were likely just easier to ignore than attempt to rectify, and I imagine that getting the video done required a certain amount of compromise that wouldn’t fly quite so well today. But even in the disjointed sense of flow that these problems contribute to, it’s charming to soak in the variety of ideas and sources that each editor chooses to work with (a compliment that probably sounds way more condescending than I intended it to). Yes, this looks and feels very different than most MEPs that are made today, not simply because of the age of the sources but the unpredictability and stylistic shifts that occur from segment to segment. I’m not writing this entry to express my preferences in the battle of old versus new, just acknowledging that things have changed and… maybe that’s okay.

The yellow cassette I had of Automatic For the People unexpectedly blew classmates’ minds when I bought it into school in eighth grade for an English assignment (the last tape I ever bought, I think). Yes, that’s all I’ve got for today.