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R.E.M.
R.E.M., formed in Athens, Georgia in 1980, is widely credited as one of the foundational bands of American alternative and college rock, building a devoted following through independent college radio airplay years before the band achieved mainstream commercial success. Guitarist Peter Buck's jangly, arpeggiated guitar style and frontman Michael Stipe's often deliberately mumbled, difficult-to-decipher vocal delivery on the band's early albums gave R.E.M. a distinctive sound that influenced a generation of subsequent alternative and indie rock guitarists and vocalists. The band's 1991 album Out of Time and its hit single "Losing My Religion" marked R.E.M.'s definitive commercial breakthrough into mainstream popularity, a shift that came after more than a decade of steadily building critical acclaim and college radio success without major commercial radio crossover. R.E.M.'s decision to formally disband in 2011, while still commercially and critically viable rather than continuing past a natural creative endpoint, was relatively unusual among major rock acts, and the band's three-decade career bridging college radio's underground scene and full mainstream commercial success established a template that numerous subsequent alternative rock bands have followed.
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Pearl Jam
Pearl Jam's 1991 debut album Ten became one of the best-selling albums of the grunge era, and the band's combination of frontman Eddie Vedder's deep, emotionally intense baritone vocals with more traditionally structured, classic-rock-influenced songwriting distinguished them somewhat from grunge's more overtly punk-influenced contemporaries. The band's prolonged legal battle with Ticketmaster in the mid-1990s, in which Pearl Jam publicly refused to book tours through the company over its service fees and effectively curtailed their own touring for several years as a result, became one of the most significant artist-versus-industry conflicts in 1990s music, though the band ultimately couldn't sustain the boycott long-term. Pearl Jam's continued active career, sustained across more than three decades with largely the same core lineup, distinguishes them from most of their grunge-era peers, several of whom either disbanded or lost key members to death relatively early in the genre's history. The band's sustained commercial and critical relevance well past grunge's mainstream commercial peak in the mid-1990s, combined with their consistent lineup stability, has made Pearl Jam one of the most enduring and longest continuously active bands to emerge from the Seattle grunge scene specifically.
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