Tonight’s selections from R.E.M.’s fifth album, 1987’s Document.
How did this Southern rock band, who had more in common with Wire than with then-popular Peach Staters Georgia Satellites, find a spot in the public consciousness alongside U2, Guns N' Roses, and George Michael, who all more or less owned 1987? R.E.M. cultivated an air of mystery that extended from their music (the obscure lyrics, the refusal to lip sync in videos) to the packaging (mismatched tracklists, head-scratching instructions to "File Under Fire"). And "The One I Love" was an odd choice for a hit: Peter Buck's guitar possesses a rich, strange grain that charges the song with vague menace, especially when he unspools that psych-rock solo, and the mosaic hook itself is split between Stipe shouting "Fire!" in an empty theater and Mike Mills adding a descending countermelody. Lyrically, the song is one contradiction twisting into another: "This one goes out to the one I love/ A simple prop to occupy my time." Twenty-five years later, it remains nearly impossible to parse the implications of that particular couplet; on the other hand, 25 years later, it's still worth trying, as the latest in Capitol Records' reissue series proves.
If 1985's Fables of the Reconstruction was their most self-consciously Southern record to date and 1986's Lifes Rich Pageant their most overtly political, Document maintained both their regional self-definition as well as their indirect social engagement, even going so far as to sample Joseph Welch reprimanding Joseph McCarthy. ("At long last, have you left no sense of decency?") The album is a prolonged meditation on the idea of labor, opening with "Finest Worksong" before teasing out the implications on "Welcome to the Occupation". The defiantly chipper "Exhuming McCarthy" opens with the clack of Stipe's typewriter, connecting the work of the band with that of the journalist, and even "Fireplace" is less about the dance party than the preparations for it: "Hang up your chairs to better sweep, clear the floor to dance," Stipe sings, twisting his lines with each repetition until the entire building has been dismantled in an act of constructive destruction. — Pitchfork
Finest Worksong
It is no accident that R.E.M.‘s finest album to date opens with the anthemic reveille “Finest Worksong,” a muscular funky-metal wake-up call that is an unmistakable declaration of intent. “The time to rise/Has been engaged,” bleats singer Michael Stipe over the industrial scrape of Peter Buck’s guitar and the martial locomotion of bassist Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry. “We’re better/Best to rearrange.” Document, the fifth in a series of singular state-of-our-union addresses by America’s most successful fringe band, positively ripples with the confidence, courage and good, swift kick of a rock & roll band at the top of its form.
For R.E.M.’s latest step forward is actually the result of a key step backward. Stipe and company are hardly strangers to change. Without exception, their records combine a spirit of willful perversity with a healthy restlessness and a steadfast refusal to acknowledge either commercial or critical expectations. But in the beginning — before the enigmatic electric folk of Murmur, the exploratory smorgasbord of Fables of the Reconstruction and the consummate outlaw pop of Life’s Rich Pageant — there was the Beat, and R.E.M. knew how to use it. It was the band’s incomparable stage rage, Buck’s Who-like slice-and-dice guitar, Stipe’s steely vibrato and Mills and Berry’s rhythmic tug that wowed Deep South barflies and East Coast in crowds in the early days.
Document captures those thrills and chills in tight, vivid focus. Coproduced by the band and engineer Scott Litt with a striking technical clarity and a diligent respect for bar-band basics, it is the closest to the band’s live sound that R.E.M. has come on record since its ’82 EP Chronic Town and its 1981 indie single debut, “Radio Free Europe.” — Rolling Stone (from 1987)
It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)
Document was the first R.E.M. album that I was there for upon its release, and I couldn’t stop listening to it. “The One I Love” might have been my least favorite song out of the 11 tracks, and I’m still not sure how much of that was an immature resentment that it was all most of my classmates knew about the band those first months of my sophomore year, while I had been learning every word on Dead Letter Office.
The R.E.M. on Document was different from the band I’d just been getting to know. From the opening track, “The Finest Worksong,” Bill Berry’s drums punctured through the mix instead of contentedly shuffling things along. Mike Mill’s bass still bounced around the melody, but more as a traditional rhythm section and less as a counter lead guitar. Pete Buck’s signature jangle still shaped everything, but there was distortion and muscle to it. And most notably, gone were Michael Stipe’s mumbles. You can actually understand the words on Document without looking at the lyrics sheet. They even sometimes made sense.
But that jump from indie-music darlings to real rock stars was done with grace. The songs on Document hold up as well today as anything on Murmur or Reckoning. The band may have been more radio-ready here, but they were still experimenting, adding dulcimer to the gorgeous “King of Birds,” sampling Joseph Welch’s rebuke of the red scare on “Exhuming McCarthy,” and packing dozens of references—including my introduction to Lester Bangs—into the stream-of-consciousness anthem “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” a track we all shout-sang while packed into a friend’s beat-up old Monte Carlo. — Paste Magazine
The One I Love
REM’s breakthrough album Document may not be the unlikeliest record to crack the Billboard top ten, but it’s one of the more subversive, a collection of brooding lefty folk rock and howling Southern Gothic that went on to swallow middle America whole, its extraordinary centrepiece – a brutal anti-love song whose chorus is simply a roar of the word “fire” – becoming the mind-bogglingly inappropriate soundtrack to numerous late Eighties weddings and dances. [...]
For me, it’s possibly to the credit of the Clinton administration that when I first heard REM’s fifth album, ten years or so after its release, I didn’t really get it. I got bits of it, probably, and I was aware that most of the first half was intensely political, but with Western imperialism at a low(ish) ebb, Document seemed to lack a certain context, something that REM themselves implicitly acknowledged with a Nineties output that was more emotional than political. [...]
I mean, I’m kind of taking guesses at what at least two of those songs mean precisely. But the wonder of prime REM is that all four members were so utterly in tune with each other that Stipe’s tendency towards opaqueness doesn’t interfere with the sense of the song. ‘Finest Worksong’s precise, powerful, pounding calls to mind labour, construction, effort; ‘Welcome to the Occupation’s nuances come secondary to Stipe’s unnerving final scream of “listen to me”, a pliant, urgent plea against national insanity; the run of ‘Disturbance at the Heron House’, ‘Strange’ and ‘It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)’ is that descent into skittering, half-elated descent into chaos. Though ‘Welcome to the Occupation’ and ‘Exhuming McCarthy’ could legitimately be called protest music, the first half of Document (dubbed Page on the original cassette and vinyl) is less that than an emotional articulation of the band’s tremendous sense of unease at the moral disintegration of their country. — Drowned in Sound
Oddfellows Local 151
Ultimately, though, Document doesn’t owe its impact to any one style of writing, or tempo, or to any one element in the mix. Rhythms klutz or throb, guitars niggle or yaw, basses decompress or boom, and words circle or cascade. Even the self-imposed ‘out with the old R.E.M., in with the new’ dictate isn’t that firmly adhered to: King Of Birds and Oddfellows Local 151 are character narratives worthy of 1985’s Fables Of The Reconstruction, while Buck concedes that Disturbance At The Heron House is effectively a slowed down remake of much earlier R.E.M. song Gardening At Night.
Some think that R.E.M. forsook their earlier mystery and warmth on Document. But the lyrics are still oblique, and they don’t give up the whole story on first listen. And how appropriate is it to be cosy, anyway, when the world’s falling down around your ears? Great art says something about the human condition in the time of its making. And great rock’n’roll has a long-standing tradition of bringing the news to all the young dudes.
Scott Litt won his bet that The One I Love would be R.E.M.’s breakthrough hit single: it snuck under the radar as a straightforward love song in the US, and made it to No.9. Rolling Stone recognised the band’s time had come, putting them on its cover with the line, ‘America’s Best Rock’n’Roll Band.’ Document went on to become R.E.M.’s first million-selling album. A combination of all the above enabled the band to negotiate a massive new deal with WEA, including a cast-iron artistic freedom clause. That, combined with their ongoing refinements of the chaos method, set the band up for a decade-long run of multimillion-selling leviathans: from Green via the patchy Out Of Time to the awesome Automatic For The People, then past the frankly not-that-great Monster to the shamefully underrated New Adventures In Hi-Fi. — UDiscoverMusic
Exhuming McCarthy
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WHO’S TALKING TO WHO?
Jimmy Kimmel: Maya Rudolph, Roy Wood Jr., Wet Leg
Jimmy Fallon: Mariah Carey, Bozoma Saint John, Anderson .Paak (R 9/29/25)
Stephen Colbert: Nick Offerman, José Andrés, Nathaniel Rateliff
Seth Meyers: Lionel Richie, Sarah Sherman (R 9/29/25)
Comics Unleashed: Kyle Erby, Billy Gardell, Matt Kirshen, Sarah Tiana
Watch What Happens Live: Bette Midler
