The breaking is a little tongue in cheek, and I'm not sure if he's come out before tonight, but tonight was REM's last stop on their US tour, in Atlanta, and Michael Stipe gave a great nod to Obama during the encore. The opening band was "The National" and apparently they have a song called "Mr. November" which is about Barack. The merch stand was selling t-shirts with Obama's likeness that said Mr. November as a caption.
Michael started by talking about a desecration of MLK Jr's grave that he wrote a song about, though I'm not exactly sure what he was referring to. He then went on to say that Georgia had a chance this election to make history, held up one of the Mr. November t-shirts, and implored us all to go out and get Obama elected. There was an interesting mixed reaction from the crowd, mostly cheers from where we were standing, but definitely some defiant Boos came through. I saw a bunch of people with the aforementioned t-shirt, mostly younger people.
The most interesting part was listening to people's conversations on the bus / subway back to our hotel. There was one very drunk girl who kept talking about Christopher Walken for president and how "no one would mess with us if we had deer hunter for president". Very funny. Overall it seemed the alternative rock crowd is on board, and it was nice to see.
Oh yeah, and REM rocked by the way!!!