by Tom Demi and Bryce Napier, first published November 30, 2015
Document
released September 1, 1987 I.R.S. Records
“...a couple in front of me were having a manically good time ... wagging their forefingers and their butts at ‘And I dee-cline!’—I think that was the moment when I decided I had totally lost ownership of this band.”
Tom here, starting off this post. With Document, R.E.M. continued their push into the mainstream, but mainly on their own terms. They actually risked having the album overlooked, coming only a few months after their Dead Letter Office B-sides-and-rarities compilation, but they were still able to build on the momentum of the previous studio album, mainly on the strength of Document's first single.
I can clearly remember the first time I heard "The One I Love." I was in a record store called Final Vinyl, a place that had become virtually my second home over the previous year, and it so happened that the owner, Joe, was an R.E.M. fan, too. I mentioned in the last post that this place specialized in used LPs (and, increasingly, CDs), including "used" promotional records such as the 12-inch single for "I Believe" I had bought there. So Joe was well aware that I would want to hear their brand new single when I walked in one day in August 1987. He played it, and I knew right away that this was the hit single they'd been waiting for: a killer intro, an instantly memorable melody, powerfully buzzing guitars, simple but edgy lyrics.
Like most people, I kind of blipped over the word "prop" in the lyrics ("a simple prop to occupy my time"). I was so used to Michael Stipe's history of quirky and unintelligible words that it didn't matter much to me what it was, and the song was ridiculously catchy. Soon I understood, but it's always been amusing how so many people see the song as some kind of tender dedication—it could hardly be more visceral, in reality. So, with a bit of disbelief but also validation, I watched as "my band" suddenly had a song in the Top 10, blaring out of everybody's radio that fall. The album hit the Top 10, too.
I always felt that they had earned their success. Besides the quality of the music itself, they had toured relentlessly for years, engaged with fans on a personal level (including a tiny but legendary acoustic gig at McCabe's Guitar Shop in May of that year), and exuded a consistently arty charm with their album covers and promotional materials ("MAMMOTH HUGE COLOSSAL UNDERSTATED" went the tagline for their previous album's campaign). The new album marked that progression and sense of purpose by opening with an undeniable call to arms. At this point, I'll let Bryce expound further on the album itself.
You definitely were not the only one to blip over "prop." Even in a brilliantly succinct ode to insincerity and disaffection, Stipe was destined to be misunderstood. Like the Police's "Every Breath You Take," Pet Shop Boys' "Opportunities," and Springsteen's "Born In The USA" before it, once "The One I Love" broke, it became a dedication/anthem to a legion of listeners who weren't paying close enough attention to sense the darkness at its heart.
Document serves as a jarring reminder that all of R.E.M.'s output up to that point had been released during the Reagan era. After four albums that were top heavy with impressionistic swatches of words (and near-words) that addressed nebulous ideas via glancing blows, we're suddenly thrust into Cold War paranoia. The earnestness and timelessness of early R.E.M. has made room for a heavy dose of cynicism and of-the-moment social commentary. I imagine there was an acute awareness on Michael Stipe's part that a segment of their fanbase was beginning to look upon him as their voice. Poised to capture a much wider audience, he may have decided it was time to have something declarative to say.
Even though "The One I Love" became their breakthrough single, it's the other charting single from Document that has endured. Of course, I'm referring to the manic karaoke dare "It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)." The rapid-fire verses and cathartic chorus captured—especially in hindsight—the 1980s like no other song. Although bursting with indictments, apocalyptic imagery, and cultural references, it isn't the breakneck history lesson that Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start The Fire" is, despite the two songs often getting lumped together thanks to their outward similarities. For me, it's a stream-of-consciousness interpretation of the sensory overload in the 24-hour CNN news cycle feeding us fear and mistrust of the Soviet "evil empire." It's life under the looming threat of nuclear annihilation in the nascent Information Age. The flipside is that the '80s are remembered as perhaps the most frivolous decade in living memory. Movies were unapologetic popcorn fare, television was complacently formulaic, music was dominated by bland corporate rock and hair bands. Ask someone to give their impression of the decade, and you're much more likely to hear about Aqua Net and off-the-shoulder neon sweatshirts than the ever-present threat of World War III. This bizarre dichotomy of impending death and "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" explains how one could feel fine at the end of the world, and how R.E.M. could deliver an infectious rave-up in response to it. And that's just one possible take on the "feeling fine" punchline. Mostly it's strange to be made aware that the band was manned by humans living in the same world as the rest of us, and not just a sonic apparition that occasionally appeared in introverts' bedrooms. In any case, if I had to pick just one song for the '80s time capsule—by any artist —I think this would be it. I wouldn't necessarily call it their best (though I like it very much), but I would call it the quintessential R.E.M. track.
Quite true, "End Of The World" has endured, and not only in the public consciousness, but it found a more or less permanent place in the band's live set through the rest of their existence. The main exception was the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, but eventually that catharsis won out once again. Clearly, the irony in this song was much more apparent than in "The One I Love," and… you could dance to it (I remember their performance on the Monster tour, during which a couple in front of me were having a manically good time singing along to it, turning to face each other at the "Offer me solutions, / Offer me alternatives" lines and wagging their forefingers and their butts at "And I / dee-cline!"—I think that was the moment when I decided I had totally lost ownership of this band).
I didn't see them on this tour, however, and I had even skipped the Lifes Rich Pageant tour. Since I had seen them twice in 1985, I figured that the set list couldn't have changed all that much, and they were also starting to play larger venues. I had heard how they felt and looked kind of lost when they played stadiums opening for the Police, so I was wary about losing the sense of intimacy that I had experienced on the Fables tour.
The record has some of the ponderous tone of Fables, as well as the heaviest subject matter in their entire catalogue. Yet it shoulders all that weight admirably. "Exhuming McCarthy," in addition to being one of the most evocative song titles of all time (and one of my wife's favorites from the band), is a taut, poppy tension-breaker, and could have been a single. "End Of The World As We Know It," of course, rips the roof off the joint. And weirdly, one of the lighter moments is a cover of Wire's "Strange." The original is a creeping, ultra-heavy plodder that seems to be considering the supernatural. Within the context of Document's song cycle, however, its paranoid assertion that "there's something going on that's not quite right" gets repurposed as a suspicious appraisal of the government, and plays as a rollicking barroom stomper, replete with handclaps and a piano glissando.
I had read quite a bit about Wire by this time, and R.E.M.'s cover pushed me in the direction of seeking out their albums. I was surprised, too, at how slow and spooky the original was, but it turned out that quite a few of Wire's other tracks do have the upbeat energy of R.E.M.'s cover, and they have become one of my favorite bands.
Over the years, I took a number of cues from R.E.M.'s influences. By the time of Document, I had caught up with the entire studio catalogue of the Velvet Underground, having been entranced by the three Velvets tunes R.E.M. had covered on B-sides. But as you say, R.E.M., and Stipe in particular, were using their platform to try to influence people's opinions on political matters, too, and "Exhuming McCarthy" was a major highlight for me as well. If only Mike Mills's "sign of the times" vocals were beefed up with double-tracking or something, it would be absolutely perfect, in my view, but that escalating energy that amps up through the "sharper than stones" and especially the "vested interest" sections make this song a classic.
Document has long been an album of moments for me. Four moments, specifically: the three singles ("Finest Worksong," which kicks off the album in style, did not succeed on the radio the way the other two singles did, but still managed to find purchase in my brain) plus "Exhuming McCarthy." Other songs left vague impressions—I could have sung along with lyrical snippets like "crazy, crazy world" or "standing on the shoulders of giants" without being able to tell you the name of their songs ("Fireplace" and "King Of Birds," respectively), or even the album from which they originated. It surprises me when a Red Hot Chili Peppers album suddenly breaks out at track nine. (I kid, but Mike Mills does give his best Flea impression on the bass-slapping "Lightnin' Hopkins," which is about as funky as R.E.M. has ever been. It took a few passes at it to readjust my expectations, but I like it.)
I would quibble with the sequencing at the end. "Oddfellows Local 151" feels like a leftover character sketch from Fables (which, admittedly, does it no great favors in how it hits my ears), and overstays its welcome by a minute or two before randomly fading out. Album over. The solemn "King Of Birds" is clearly the closer here. (I'd almost make an argument for the sweetly nihilistic "Fireplace," where first the rug, then the floor, then the chairs, and finally the walls themselves get successively swept into the fire in preparation for dancing. Its simplicity and hypnotic 6/8 swirl would have made a fine ending note; however, introducing a saxophone two minutes before the end of the record would have been a disorienting left turn to make at the finish line.)
It's funny you mention that about the sequencing, because this is one R.E.M. album that I always thought could use a major overhaul in its song order. Somewhere I have a tape of my own sequence; I don't remember for sure, but I think I put "End Of The World" at the end. I do know that I placed "The One I Love" as track two, keeping up the momentum from the fiery opening of "Finest Worksong." "Welcome To The Occupation" feels a bit flabby in that spot. I absolutely agree that "Oddfellows…" goes on too long and is too much of a throwback to Fables; "King Of Birds" would make a fine ending—stately and timeless. I would add that I've always been drawn to the anthemic "Disturbance At The Heron House," too—like the last album's "I Believe," this song was promoted as a "radio single" to rock radio stations in between officially released singles, and for me it embodies a Who-like quality of suspicion of authority that R.E.M. seems to have internalized for this album.
The inherent problem with acquiring a sizable chunk of an artist's back catalogue in a condensed time frame is that the albums can lose their individual identities. It becomes an exercise in cherry-picking: this song stands out, that song maybe sounds promising—and the rest just melt together into one giant morass of song. Spinning through Document in its entirety a half-dozen or more times has restored its individuality for me. It's not a concept album, but there is a thematic cohesiveness that definitely makes a statement. Perhaps their only album-length statement that is something beyond "We are R.E.M., and we're going to keep you guessing."