100 Best Albums of the Eighties

41. R.E.M., ‘Document’

R.E.M.‘s thorniest and most overtly political album, ironically, was the one that brought the band a mass audience, yielding its first bona fide hit single in “The One I Love.” After four albums of unique, visionary rock & roll (not counting Dead Letter Office, a collection of B sides), the unconventional Georgians left the alternative-music substrata and entered the mainstream, at least saleswise, with Document as their passport. As Peter Buck put it at the time, “We’re the acceptable edge of the unacceptable stuff.”

Recorded in Nashville with producer Scott Litt, R.E.M.’s Document is an angry, largely topical look at a world wracked by political and environmental catastrophe. Singing in clear, enunciated syllables, Michael Stipe trains his disapproving lyrics upon despoilers of nature (“Disturbance at the Heron House”), peddlers of right-wing dogma (“Exhuming McCarthy”), warmongers in Latin America (“Welcome to the Occupation”) and other abusers of the planet and the public trust. The first side closes with “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Fine),” a nervy pop-music news bulletin about an apocalypse in progress. A rapid-fire spew of pop-culture images leads to the main title and its cryptic tag: “… And I feel fine.”

What was going on? “Michael broached the idea that the stuff he was writing was a little more direct politically,” says guitarist Peter Buck, “and the stuff we had been writing was a lot more chaotic, too. It kind of came together.”

R.E.M.’s politicization on Document, Buck believes, is due to the fact that “your thoughts are obviously different at thirty years old than they are at twenty-three.” Even the seeming love song “The One I Love” is far from a fairy-tale view of romance, describing “the one I love” as “a simple prop to occupy my time.” “It’s definitely not a love song,” says Buck. “It’s more of a nasty comment about oneself.”

Despite its success, “The One I Love” is not one of the band members’ favorites. “It’s funny that the songs on the radio from us are probably the ones we feel from the heart the least,” says Buck. So how did he feel when R.E.M. was proclaimed America’s best rock & roll band on the cover of Rolling Stone as Document was ascending the charts? “Embarrassed, like any sensible person would be,” he says with a chuckle.