(CNN) -- In 1980, in the pre-Internet, pre-download days when R.E.M. formed in Athens, Georgia, there was no alternative. There was no Americana. There was no grunge.





If you listened to pop music, there were essentially three divisions: Top 40 of the type you heard on the rapidly fading AM radio, the corporate rock of album-oriented FM and what was then called college radio -- a catch-all for the punk, new wave, electronic, low-fi and oddball music that almost never crossed over to the mainstream.





R.E.M. helped to change all that.





They weren't the only ones -- the New York art-punks of the late '70s, notably Talking Heads and Blondie, had hit the Top 40, and fellow Athens scenesters the B-52's had established a national following with their party-down rave-ups.





But it was R.E.M. that, in the words of Allmusic.com's Stephen Thomas Erlewine, "transformed the American underground." If, in the '60s, teenagers gathered in their parents' garages in the hopes of being the next Beatles, in the '80s young adults knocked around dormitories in hopes of being the next R.E.M.: melodic, guitar-based and determined not to sell out to the corporate-music crowd.





R.E.M. was the great hope of fame-fantasizing, used-record-store clerks everywhere.





"They did this grass-roots thing that nobody had ever done," said Angie Carlson, a former member of the band Let's Active, which toured with R.E.M. in the mid-'80s. "They sort of bypassed big marketing, and were at the clubs networking with the cool fellow record-store people."





In R.E.M.'s wake came a breadth of artists who turned college radio into a home for guitar-based rock and power-pop: the Replacements, Jason and the Scorchers and the Del Fuegos, among many others. Years later, Nirvana emerged and the whole world broke open. Kurt Cobain, in fact, was a big R.E.M. fan.





Now R.E.M. has come to an end.





"To our Fans and Friends: As R.E.M., and as lifelong friends and co-conspirators, we have decided to call it a day as a band," read a message posted on the group's website Wednesday. "We walk away with a great sense of gratitude, of finality, and of astonishment at all we have accomplished. To anyone who ever felt touched by our music, our deepest thanks for listening."





The band didn't easily fit labels. Its early sound, led by Peter Buck's ringing guitar arpeggios, might best be described as folk-rock, equal parts Byrds-ian harmony and punk snarl. Alongside was lead singer Michael Stipe's reedy vocals and, more distinctively, his resonant, nonsensical lyrics, full of phrases such as "Cages under cage" and "Hear the howl of the rope." (Pre-Internet, a popular music-geek parlor game involved deciphering R.E.M. lyrics.)





And underneath Buck and Stipe was the rock-solid rhythm section of bassist Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry, filling spaces with melodic bass lines and powerhouse percussion. R.E.M. may have had its artsy flourishes, but the band also -- in "American Bandstand" parlance -- "had a good beat you could dance to."





The band formed at a time when "underground" really meant something, said Carlson, now of Figure Eight Publicity.





"You couldn't trade (music) on the Internet. You had to know somebody or you had to go the club," she said. "And that's the other reason a band like that was able to thrive -- people went to see live music.





"And they had such a cool vibe in person. They were smart, they were funny, they were charismatic. All of that played into it."





Moreover, the band worked hard, providing a model for others to follow. In the '80s, starting with the 1982 EP "Chronic Town," there was
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