R.E.M. - Perfect Circle

FINEST WORKSONG

Rolling Stone doesn't stop there. On December 3, 1987, it officially crowns R.E.M. on its cover as "America's best rock'n'roll band." The homeland is on the hunt for new heroes to set against four Irish prophets by the name of U2, who are colonizing half the world. It's an anointment that sounds like a passport to the stardom the Georgians had never hidden wanting to chase, even if without resorting to any Faustian pacts with the devil. "We have a contract with the world that says: 'We'll be the best band in the world, you'll be proud of us. But we have to get there our own way,'" Buck had declared two years earlier. On the other side of the Atlantic, authoritative outlets like Q and The Observer don't hesitate to erase even that geographical boundary, declaring that "R.E.M. are the best band in the world."

Stipe and co. had reached the point of no return. The Athens parties, the college radio spins and the folk nursery rhymes were relics of a past that could no longer return. It had all happened damn fast. But now it was time to set down, in black and white, that now unstoppable process. "Document" seals the end of the age of innocence, of that thrilling underground arc. It's no coincidence it would be the last record cut for IRS. And it would also be the most successful for Miles Copeland III, Jay Boberg and Carl Grasso's small label. R.E.M. would break the million-copies-sold barrier for the first time. But it would also be their last as an indie band. The die is cast: the former squatters of Oconee Street would become rich rock stars, on the payroll of one of the world's biggest majors, Warner Records.

First, though, there's this document of proven maturity, recorded in Nashville. A vibrant farewell to a world that's crumbling, and within which R.E.M. would ideally remain "the ones who made it," while all around them the careers of countless fellow travelers burned out, from Hüsker Dü to 10,000 Maniacs, by way of X and the Replacements. That initial self-deprecating title, never actually printed, Last Train To Disneyland, perhaps held some truth. Because "Document" really is the final stop of an entire period of dreams and daydreams, but it's also a proud proclamation against the circus of illusions that Ronald Reagan's America was becoming. A chaotic, desperate "musical document." As Buck would explain: "This LP is an oblique look at the world and at ourselves. It's steeped in a very caustic, almost Orwellian humor. It's an album about America, but not in the manner of Born in the U.S.A., which is very rhetorical. America in 1987 is Disneyworld, and in fact Disneyworld was supposed to be this album's title. 1987 was the year of Irangate, of Reverend Jim Bakker's sex scandal, of Newspeak and Doublethink, so this is an angry record because, like all our work, it reflects the period in which it was made and our state of mind as Americans forced to live in a chaotic, corrupt society. The president is a thief, there are paramilitary organizations everywhere, the country's moral conscience seems to have gone insane..."

Scott Litt's bright production, which would stay by R.E.M.'s side for almost ten years, injects a mighty rock charge, forging a full-bodied, powerful sound closer, if anything, to the arena rock of contemporaries U2 and Simple Minds than to the raw, folk-inflected arrangements of their early days. Even so, the Georgians would always keep a safe distance from the pompous bombast into which Bono Vox and Jim Kerr sometimes slipped.

The fact is that the muscular "Finest Worksong" – with its almost hard-rock distorted guitar, clattering bass and martial drumming – bursts in like a punch in the eye for anyone still stuck in the days of Fables of the Reconstruction. And it's a new "call to arms," in the vein of "Begin The Begin," this time aimed at the world of work.

The time to rise has been engaged

You're better best to rearrange

I'm talking here to me alone

I listen to the finest worksong

Your finest hour

Another chance has been engaged

To throw Thoreau and rearrange

You are following this time

I beg you not beg to rhyme (blow your horn)

Your finest hour (blow your horn)

It's their own highly distinctive "state of the union address", one that will unfold across the next two tracks as well, always with the same vibrant yet allusive tone. Stipe's "labour" leanings crystallize into an indictment of exploitation and the greedy deindustrialization of the Reagan era. With a direct reference to Henry David Thoreau, author of Walden, the book recounting his own firsthand experience — he devoted over two years of his life (from July 4, 1845 to September 6, 1847) to seeking an intimate bond with nature while also rediscovering himself, in a society that, in his eyes, no longer stood for true values but only for commercial gain. "Throw Thoreau" is thus an invitation not to retreat into the woods but to confront urban life head-on, claiming one's own rights. "As far as the work ethic goes", Buck would explain, "we're not talking generically about toil, but about the fact that work is each of our lives. We're not interested in writing songs à la Bruce Springsteen, about the mythology of hard work... For us, work represents a means to be freer and more independent".

But even though R.E.M. were never this explicit in their political claims, that same backdrop of chaos and insecurity gripping the whole world still lingers.

Take your instinct by the reins

Your better best to rearrange

What we want and what we need

Has been confused been confused (blow your horn)

Your finest hour (blow your song)

Picking up the words of “I Believe” (“What you want and what you need”), Stipe pillories the contradictions of the yuppie era, tearing away the rhetorical veil of an America imprisoned by its Hollywood dream, embodied in the very features of the White House's occupant. An illusion that collides with inequality and marginalized lives, like those of the homeless in Athens, to whom the closing “Oddfellows Local 151” will be dedicated.

WELCOME TO THE OCCUPATION

Tones worthy of a courtroom speech also fire up the following “Welcome To The Occupation”, another fierce invective against Stars-and-Stripes imperialism subjugating Central America (in this case, El Salvador, as Stipe would clarify). It's the ideal “third chapter” of a saga that began with “Green Grow The Rushes” and “The Flowers Of Guatemala”. And, as in those cases, it's still the soft guise of a ballad, almost pastoral in flavor, that conceals the text's hard shell, in keeping with that entryism mentioned earlier.

Hang your collar up inside

Hang your dollar on me

Listen to the water still

Listen to the causeway

You are mad and educated

Primitive and wild

Welcome to the occupation

The clatter of a typewriter opens an anti-imperialist pamphlet, wrapped in sweet (and deceptive) melodies. Everything here is direct and unusually clear-cut. Aware that he'd failed to get through to listeners with the two preceding ballads, this time Stipe doesn't mince words in denouncing US occupation across Latin America, built on lies and the denial of those peoples' right to self-determination. The “collars” are the white ones worn by American office workers, who suffocate the revolutionary aspirations of the “blue” ones, the laborers, in the name of the anti-Marxist crusade Washington waged with particular fury in those years.

Hang your collar up inside

Hang your freedom higher

Listen to the buyer still

Listen to the Congress

Where we propagate confusion

Primitive and wild

Fire on the hemisphere below

Here we stand and here we fight

All your fallen heroes

Held and dyed and skinned alive

The cultural backwardness of these peoples (“primitive and wild”) thus becomes the alibi for setting fire to the hemisphere below (Central and South America). A policy born of that strategy of chaos dictated by Congress (“listen to the Congress”), also aimed at commercial colonization: “Listen to the buyer still,” Stipe cries, before alluding shortly after to other plundered resources: “Sugar cane and coffee cup/ Copper, steel and cattle.”

EXHUMING MCCARTHY

“Document” paints an America blind and paralyzed by terror. An America still haunted by the ghosts of McCarthyism, the chilling anti-communist witch hunt that swept through every corner of public life (Hollywood included) in the early postwar years, complete with persecutions and blacklists. In the oppressive pall of Reagan-era America and the Cold War, Stipe sees an “exhuming of McCarthy” (“Exhuming McCarthy”). A new season of fear and censorship, perhaps flying the reassuring banners of prosperity, embodied by banks and big capital. 

You’re beautiful more beautiful than me

You’re honorable more honorable than me

Loyal to the Bank of America

It’s a sign of the times

It’s a sign of the times

A lopsided, freewheeling rhythm – "a kind of vampiric surf-guitar-funk", Buck would later call it – acts as a counterpoint to the gravity of the lyrics. But there can be no doubt about the harshness of the words.

You’re sharpening stones, walking on coals

To improve your business acumen

Vested interest, united ties, landed gentry rationalize

Look who bought the myth, by jingo, buy America

Where only the law of money and power counts, even myth is up for sale, along with America itself. "Jingo" is thus a pun: it can stand for an exclamation like "gosh", but it's also slang for a jingoistic, reactionary nationalist; while the following line ("Enemy sighted, enemy met, I'm addressing the realpolitik") zeroes in on the new McCarthyist obsession of the 1980s, the one that, through the cynical calculations of realpolitik, aims to sweep away whichever enemy is at hand, be it the Soviets or their satellite states scattered around the world. Sealing the connection is the retrieval of a fragment from the 1954 hearings against a general suspected of communist ties. A brief sample, taken from a live TV broadcast of the time, in which the army's chief counsel addresses Senator McCarthy, reassuring him and urging him to rein in his accusatory zeal.

“Let us not assassinate this man further, Senator

You’ve done enough. Have you

No sense of decency, sir?

At long last, have you left

No sense of decency?”

Waiting for a chorus that will never come, we arrive at that final appointment, as surreal as it is atrocious: “Meet me at the book burning”. Under the sign of that fire – as we shall see – which will serve as a linchpin for the whole album, old and new forms of censorship intertwine. Like the one carried out by Tipper Gore's Parents Music Resource Center – the wife of the Democratic figure and future vice-president Al Gore – devoted to censoring musical works deemed offensive to public decency. A crusade the zealous Tipper would launch starting in 1985, after being scandalized by the sexual content of a song her daughter Karenna was listening to, namely Prince's “Darling Nikki” (from the album “Purple Rain”). And mockingly, Mills will add the line “It's a sign of the times”, paying homage to a contemporary and highly controversial song by the Black prince of Minneapolis himself (“Sign O' The Times”).

IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT (AND I FEEL FINE)

Never so verbose and unhinged, Stipe even invents an ode to the End of the World, rattling off, rap-style, his own highly personal Subterranean Homesick Blues. A frenetic, apocalyptic mantra that for many would become “the anthem of independent America”. While Dylan's talking blues, with its recurring “Look out kid”, aimed to unmask the American dream by pointing out all the traps scattered throughout contemporary society, “It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” is instead a semi-serious chronicle of a world in pieces. An ironic pastiche of stock phrases, nonsense rhymes, quotations and surreal allusions, like the dreamlike reconstruction of a party for Lester Bangs, which Buck and Stipe actually attended; in the dream, the singer is obsessed with the idea of being the only guest whose initials weren't L. B. (hence the free-associated names of Leonid Brezhnev, Leonard Bernstein and Lenny Bruce).

That’s great, it starts with an earthquake, birds and

Snakes, an aeroplane and Lenny Bruce is not afraid

Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn-world

Serves its own needs, dummy serve your own needs […]

The other night I dreamt of knives, continental

Drift divide. Mountains sit in a line, Leonard Bernstein

Leonid Brezhnev, Lenny Bruce and Lester Bangs

Birthday party, cheesecake, jelly bean, boom!

You symbiotic, patriotic, slam book neck, right? Right

It’s the end of the world as we know it

It’s the end of the world as we know it

It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel

fine… fine…

(It's time I had some time alone)

Apocalypse, yes, but through small warning signs ("it starts with an earthquake"), tiny cracks in an American society that's cheerfully going insane. The only way to tell this story, then, is through unbridled delirium, where dream memories blend with hallucinations of the end of the world. Stipe rattles off his stream of consciousness with unusual declamatory fervor, propped up by thunderous jingle-jangle guitars and a frantic rhythm. "I wanted it to be the most bombastic vocal I could possibly do," he would recall. "Something that would be completely overwhelming, that would fall on you and stick in your hair like chewing gum." And the track, indeed, is one of those that gives you no escape, forever lodging itself in the listener's mind. It would become a classic, as well as a live staple, the final adrenaline rush that accompanies the band's farewell.

Ligabue's cover, alas, will completely betray its spirit, but it was hard to imagine otherwise.

THE ONE I LOVE

The dry drum hits, the stormy, metallic guitar phrases. And Michael Stipe's voice more seductive than ever. For R.E.M., the time has finally come for their first love song. A perfect ballad, one that leaves listeners enchanted by its melodic grace and vibrant emotional charge. It's impossible for it not to become a hit, the first great hit for Stipe and co., who finally cross the threshold of the Top Ten: a sensational result for a band from the indie circuit. And yet, "The One I Love" isn't really a love song. If anything, it's a cruel reflection on a disposable relationship.

This one goes out to the one I love

This one goes out to the one I’ve left behind

A simple prop to occupy my time

This one goes out to the one I love

After the first two verses, in which for the first time R.E.M. utter the fateful word "love," the third line, revealing the true nature of that love (a mere pastime), sarcastically betrays any notion of sentiment. And the subtle variation in the following line – "another prop has occupied my time" – also explains how that pastime was replaced without much regret. Even so, there's still that guilty, anguished cry: "Fire." Fire, a recurring element throughout the album, bursts in here in a jarring way, effectively functioning as a refrain.

Many have compared "The One I Love" to "Every Breath You Take" by the Police, pointing out their shared nature as "anti-love songs," in which romantic clichés are turned on their head. The parallel holds up, though Stipe adds an extra touch of cynical humor: "It's a brutal kind of song, and I don't know how many people get it," he would later reveal to Q magazine. "I've always made sure my lyrics were open to more than one interpretation. Maybe, at this point, it's better if people think it really is a love song." And then: "The song just came out of somewhere, and I realized it was really violent and startling. But it wasn't aimed at anyone. I would never write a song like that. Even if there were just one person in the world who thought, 'That song is about me,' I could never sing it. I didn't want to record it. It felt excessive. Too brutal. I think there's already enough ugliness in the world." But the simplicity of the lyrics also reveals a new Stipe, one who has come to terms with himself: "I think I realized I can't just ramble on about whatever comes into my head anymore, like I did before. In some of our early songs, whatever popped into my head to sing, we'd just record it."

"The One I Love" is the ticket to stardom, the song that turns R.E.M. from a college band into celebrities before they've even realized it. But some die-hard early fans are already scandalized.

FIREPLACE

Fire again. Not the unforgettable one from U2, but the one that "destroys and purifies," in Stipe's words. And it's the singer himself who explains the origin of this new hallucination. The lyrics of "Fireplace" are in fact based on a speech given by Mother Ann Lee, the spiritual leader of the Shakers, a pacifist, communitarian religious sect that fled to the New World in the seventeenth century to escape persecution in England.

Crazy crazy world crazy crazy times

Crazy crazy world crazy crazy times

Hang up your chairs to better sweep

Clear the floor to dance

Shake the rug into the fireplace

The Shakers, so nicknamed for the jerky movements of their liturgical dances, were amiable puritans who — besides sex and alcohol — also renounced electricity. The light of the lit fireplace, then, was the only glow that could illuminate their frenzied mystical trances.

One of the album's more bizarre moments, the broken waltz of “Fireplace” shows off a peculiar drum pattern from Berry, but above all an unprecedented free-jazz sax interlude courtesy of Steve Berlin (Blasters, Los Lobos). A naive little sketch that seems to evoke the simplicity of life amid the infernal chaos of this “crazy, crazy world.”

KING OF BIRDS

Another aching ballad, riding on guitar chords now western, now vaguely oriental, with the drums stamping out an almost march-like cadence. Psychedelic overtones for lyrics that are once again cryptic, perhaps inspired by Birdy, the William Wharton novel Stipe devoured during the 1985 Reconstruction Tour. The birds that foreshadowed the apocalypse on “It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” are once more harbingers of catastrophe: this time the earthquake that devastated Mexico in 1986: “A hundred million birds flew away.”

A thumbnail sketch, a jeweler’s stone

A mean idea to call my own

Old man don’t lay so still you’re not yet young

There’s time to teach, point to point

Point observation, children carry reservations

Standing on the shoulders of giants leaves me cold, leaves me cold

A mean idea to call my own, a hundred million birds fly

Singer sing me a given, singer sing me a song

Standing on the shoulders of giants everybody’s looking on

The quote about the “dwarves on the shoulders of giants,” coined by medieval philosopher Bernard of Chartres and later made famous by Isaac Newton (“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”), probably carries a double meaning. On one hand, it speaks to those who recognize the teachings of the past as the foundation of their own fortunes; on the other, to those who want to cut every tie and run on their own legs (hence the line “standing on the shoulders of giants leaves me indifferent”). It's difficult, however, to pin down an autobiographical core in the song, even in the exhortation addressed to a phantom singer, who is asked to perform, as in the line “I am king of all I see, my kingdom for a voice”.

More than one listener, though, will see in these words the first signs of a new self-awareness: that of a star sought after and worshipped by everyone. My kingdom for a voice. Because with “Document”, Stipe and co. laid the foundations of their future as stars. That document is like a diploma. “The most influential college-rock band graduates,” Rolling Stone would headline. With their time at I.R.S. university over, it would be Warner's turn to reap the precious fruits.

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04/05/2026