Gloss on What Was Postmodernism?

McHale’s reference to R.E.M.’s angel imagery in the “Losing My Religion” video is spot on, but the band is a complicated touchstone in McHale’s discussion of the persistence of narrative in the postmodern period. Larry McCaffery in his essay for ebr, “White Noise/White Heat, or Why the Postmodern Turn in Rock Music Led to Nothing but Road,“ argues that R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe [not to mention Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, Captain Beefheart, and Brian Eno] takes a sculptural, as opposed to narrative, approach to songwriting.