R.E.M.'s thorniest and a lot of candidly political album, ironically, was the one that brought the bandage a accumulation audience, acquiescent its aboriginal bona fide hit individual in "The One I Love." After four albums of unique, abstracted bedrock & cycle (not counting Dead Letter Office, a accumulating of B sides), the anarchistic Georgians larboard the alternative-music substrata and entered the mainstream, at atomic saleswise, with Document as their passport. As Peter Buck put it at the time, "We're the adequate bend of the unacceptable stuff."
Recorded in Nashville with ambassador Scott Litt, R.E.M.'s Document is an angry, abundantly contemporary attending at a apple busted by political and ecology catastrophe. Singing in clear, audible syllables, Michael Stipe trains his accusatory lyrics aloft despoilers of attributes ("Disturbance at the Heron House"), peddlers of bourgeois article ("Exhuming McCarthy"), warmongers in Latin America ("Welcome to the Occupation") and added abusers of the planet and the accessible trust. The aboriginal ancillary closes with "It's the End of the Apple As We Know It (and I Feel Fine)," a cheeky pop-music account account about an apocalypse in progress. A accelerated barf of pop-culture images leads to the capital appellation and its cryptic tag: "... And I feel fine."
What was traveling on? "Michael broached the abstraction that the being he was autograph was a little added absolute politically," says guitarist Peter Buck, "and the being we had been autograph was a lot added chaotic, too. It affectionate of came together."
R.E.M.'s politicization on Document, Buck believes, is due to the actuality that "your thoughts are acutely altered at thirty years old than they are at twenty-three." Even the appearing adulation song "The One I Love" is far from a absurd appearance of romance, anecdotic "the one I love" as "a simple prop to absorb my time." "It's absolutely not a adulation song," says Buck. "It's added of a awful animadversion about oneself."
Despite its success, "The One I Love" is not one of the bandage members' favorites. "It's funny that the songs on the radio from us are apparently the ones we feel from the affection the least," says Buck. So how did he feel if R.E.M. was proclaimed America's best bedrock & cycle bandage on the awning of Rolling Stone as Document was ascendance the charts? "Embarrassed, like any alive being would be," he says with a chuckle.
• Rolling Stone's Original 1987 Review
• R.E.M. Roar Back With 'Collapse Into Now'
back to 100 Best Albums of the Eighties
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