Barber Street

As the 1980s opened, the UGA art school taught that anyone could be an artist, and punk and other new music broadcast on the radio announced anything could be a musician. These ideas eroded the traditional boundaries between cultural producers and consumers, a process made concrete in the small space of downtown Athens. The emergence of a music underground in Athens was also part of a trend dubbed “regional rock” by critic Tom Carson of the Village Voice. Regional rock offered one way of thinking about a larger shift in which a new generation rejected older forms of political organizing and turned instead to cultural rebellion. The participants in these new scenes adapted for their own purposes a model of cultural rebellion with a long history—Bohemianism. The band R.E.M. emerged in this scene, drawing on the fluidity that had characterized the Athens scene from the start to build a new model. R.E.M., many argue, represented an authentic expression of the southern present. As one member of the “scene” put it, R.E.M. made the South look better.