The Alternative Number Ones: R.E.M.’s “Drive”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for members only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

The first thing that we see through the strobe-lit slo-mo black-and-white haze is a sea of hands. There's a terrifying mass of young people here, and they are in ecstasy, to the point where they stop being individual people and transform instead into an abstract impersonal whole. At first, we don't know why these kids are so excited. Maybe they're raving. Maybe they're at an especially fired-up youth service. Maybe they're crazy in the head. After 10 seconds, though, Michael Stipe's form comes tumbling into view, and the context snaps into focus. These kids are rocking and possibly also rolling, and their hands hold aloft Stipe, their golden idol.

Michael Stipe was not the first rock 'n' roll star to crowd-surf in a music video. By fall 1992, the act was already de rigeur, the type of youth activity that got parodied in commercials. Earlier that year, Eddie Vedder elevated the rock-star stage-dive to as-yet-untouched heights in the "Even Flow" video, plummeting from the rafters like New Jack in ECW. ("Even Flow" peaked at #21 on the Billboard Modern Rock chart. Pearl Jam will eventually appear in this column.) But the crowd-surf meant something else when Michael Stipe was the one up there.