It kicks off with a snare drum attack like a military call to attention, before singer Michael Stipe unleashes a rapid-fire stream of lyrics beginning with: “That’s great, it starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, an airplane…” building up staccato tension until the second chorus, where Stipe wails the title, while bassist Mike Mills chimes in with a more upbeat harmony, singing, “Time I had some time alone.”
“It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” was built from the melody of an earlier, more straightforward R.E.M. track, 1985’s “Bad Day”, sometimes also referred to as “PSA”, or “Public Service Announcement”. A demo of “Bad Day (PSA)” was rejected for the band’s 1986 album Lifes Rich Pageant. By 1987, the group had reworked the song: increasing its tempo, opening with that call-to-arms drumbeat, and retrofitting the lyrics to reflect a dream of Stipe’s about an apocalyptic party: “Birthday party, cheesecake, jellybean, boom!”, with guests with the initials “LB”: Lenny Bruce, Lester Bangs, Leonard Bernstein, Leonid Brezhnev.
R.E.M. have confessed a debt to Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”. “End of the World” started a wave of songs that built on Dylan’s template, reeling off a list of observations on the state of the world in a stream-of-consciousness, slightly surreal style: INXS's “Mediate” (1987), The Escape Club’s “Wild Wild West” (1988) and, most notoriously, Billy Joel’s much-memed midlife reflection, “We Didn’t Start the Fire” (1989), which condensed headlines of the previous 40 years into a five-minute singsong. In 1993, Beck’s “Loser” was a late entrant into this category, a laconic, mumbled set of slacker musings that could have been transcriptions of bong fumes.
All of these songs cram as many thoughts and historical moments and images as possible into a few minutes, and Canadian group Great Big Sea had a minor hit in 1997 with an even faster countrified cover of “End of the World”: a minute and a half shorter than the original, achieved by spitting out the lyrics at hyperventilating speed, auctioneer style.
The song’s title has been a subeditor’s gift, inspiring everything from headlines to titles for South Park episodes. It’s as versatile as Dr. Strangelove’s tagline, “How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb”, to evoke panic and detachment, calm in the storm of accelerating and absurd news cycles. It plays over the opening sequence of the 1996 film Independence Day, as the invading aliens’ signal is detected, and, in that moment, it’s clear that the humans will win.
That said, it’s not a soundtrack for every battle: in 2015, R.E.M. called for then-presidential candidate Donald Trump to cease and desist after using “End of the World” as his walkout music to a Stop the Iran Deal rally, with Mills saying at the time, “Personally, I think the orange clown will do anything for attention. I hate giving it to him.” Stipe’s response was stronger: “Go f*** yourselves, the lot of you — you sad, attention-grabbing, power-hungry little men. Do not use our music or my voice for your moronic charade of a campaign.” This didn’t stop Trump from using other R.E.M. songs at his rallies, without permission: the group are still considering legal options to prevent this.
“Bad Day” was eventually released in 2003, with a video that imagines the band as news anchors describing tornadoes and rainstorms that appear inside living rooms, offices and even their television studio, as chyrons and rolling ticker news updates reel off updates of the situation that are as banal as any of the lyrics of the list songs previously mentioned are bizarre.
Recently, “End of the World” broke into the top 100 in the US iTunes download charts, its popularity spiking with the World Health Organisation’s declaration that Covid-19 had reached pandemic levels. (It last saw significant sales in 2012, around the time of the predicted Mayan apocalypse.) What’s eerie is how its video anticipates coronavirus lockdown: a teenage boy wanders around a rural house with a knocked-out wall and a floor full of destroyed furniture and domestic detritus. He looks serious while clutching portraits, cuddles his dog, and dances to the music. For all the chaos left unexplained, it’s a relaxed, comfortable isolation, very focused on the present, even if in the outside world the news rolls on and just gets weirder: Time I had some time alone. The boy practices skateboard tricks as the camera pans out to a field of grass, a waiting dog, and a sunny day outside.
What other songs evoke troubled times and give comfort (or not)? Let us know in the comments section below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: Capitol Records; Columbia/Legacy; UMC (Universal Music Catalogue); Cleopatra Records; Columbia; Polydor Associated Labels; Great Big Sea USA Ltd.; Concord Records
Picture credit: Frans Schellekens/Redferns