When R.E.M. Predicted 'The End of the World as We Know It'

‘200 Greatest 80s Rock Songs’ Book Excerpt

Frank Mastropolo

I.R.S. Records

“It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” was included on R.E.M.’s 1987 album Document and reached №69. Its lyrics were written by R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe in the stream-of-consciousness tradition of Chuck Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business” and Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”

“It’s very lyrically straightforward,” Stipe said in Musician magazine. “It’s very clear that it’s about using people over and over again. I think that’s probably a sentiment everyone has felt at one time or another so you can apply it to yourself. But it’s not an attractive quality.”

“The words come from everywhere,” Stipe explained in Q magazine. “I’m extremely aware of everything around me, whether I am in a sleeping state, awake, dream-state, or just in day-to-day life.”

Stipe based the song on a dream about the home of music journalist Lester Bangs.

“There’s a part in ‘It’s the End of the World as We Know It’ that came from a dream where I was at Lester Bangs’ birthday party and I was the only person there whose initials weren’t L.B. So there was Lenny Bruce, Leonid Brezhnev, Leonard Bernstein . . . So that ended up in the song along with a lot of stuff I’d seen when I was flipping TV channels. It’s a collection of streams of consciousness.”

“I wanted it to be the most bombastic vocal that I could possibly muster,” Stipe recalled in Reveal: The Story of R.E.M. “Something that would completely overwhelm you and drip off your shoulders and stick in your hair like bubblegum.”

Frank Mastropolo is the author of the new eBook 200 Greatest 80s Rock Songs, part of the Greatest Performances series, and Fillmore East: The Venue That Changed Rock Music Forever. For more on our latest projects, visit Edgar Street Books.