10 Songs That Changed Rock History
7. Radio Free Europe - R.E.M.
Before MTV ever reared its head, there wasn't too much variety when it came to rock music. Unless you were the ultimate hipster who bought import singles and kept up with college rock stations, chances are you were left with just the radio stations to keep up with new music. So in an era that was dominated by Journey and REO Speedwagon, how the hell did we get to here something like this on the radio?
Coming from Athens, Georgia, the entire mindset behind Radio Free Europe sounds like it shouldn't work. You have a guitar that sounds like it's leftover from the '60s and a singer who is so inarticulate that you can barely make out what he's saying. Despite sounding like a recipe for disaster, this became one of the biggest songs of the early '80s, pretty much announcing the indie rock craze that would bleed into the alternative revolution once the '90s kicked in.
Wanna know how important something like this is? The success of this song alone was enough to propel its parent album Murmur into MTV's best albums of the year, beating out Michael Jackson's Thriller entirely. It doesn't matter where you came from. When your song is so good that it displaces the King of Pop, you know things are never going to be the same.