 This video is brought to you by CuriosityStream. If you sign up to CuriosityStream with the link in the description, you can also get access to Nebula, the streaming site created by and for creators like myself. On March 13th, 2020, 33 years after it was released, R.E.M.'s It's the End of the World as we know it, re-entered the American charts. The surge brought it up to number 72 on the iTunes chart, nothing astounding but certainly notable for a song that's three decades old. But of course, it's easy to see why. At the time of this video, we're currently in the middle of a catastrophic pandemic due to COVID-19. As sports seasons are canceled, travel restrictions put into place, and people are making runs on toilet paper and hand sanitizer, there's a surreal feeling of apocalypse looming in the air. And that's without even mentioning the plummeting stock market, the various large protests happening worldwide, and the impending climate collapse that we seem to be doing very little about. So for a lot of people, it really does feel like the end of the world right now. And sometimes the only way to face such extreme circumstances is with glib irony, which is part of why R.E.M.'s song still hits home. If you don't pay close attention, it might seem that this playful pessimism is all there is to It's the End of the World. Really, I wouldn't blame anyone that misses the messages in The End of the World. They're smashed between dense passages of surrealism and stream of consciousness, and they're delivered with a cheery punch. But make no mistake, there are clear references to real world events buried in It's the End of the World as we know it. And the song contains deeper messages, some that are products of 1987, but most that still feel relevant today. Let's take a closer look. World issues have always informed Michael Stipe's lyrics and, by extension, R.E.M.'s music. It might be easy to miss from some of their more successful songs, but in tracks like Exuming McCarthy, Drive, or Orange Crush, you can see clear criticisms of the America that Stipe was living in, and R.E.M. put their politics into action as well. Their 1991 album Out of Time included postcards addressed to senators to try to create more voting accessibility. They've also worked closely with the progressive non-profit Rock the Vote, which seeks to engage young voters. And it was this political tilt that inspired the early roots of The End of the World, a song called PSA. Stipe wrote PSA in 1985 as a response to how he saw the American media and the presidency of Ronald Reagan. R.E.M. recorded a demo, but PSA never made the cut of an album. 18 years later, though, it would finally see release as Bad Day, which R.E.M. released alongside a Greatest Hits album. In the early demos of PSA, it's easy to hear how the song would eventually morph. The cadence of Stipe's singing is nearly identical to The End of the World, particularly as the verse moves into the chorus. That early demo also reflects one of the song's biggest influences, Bob Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues. Both feature quick, ranted lyrics with harmonica breaks in the middle. Dylan's lyrics provided a direction that would morph PSA into It's The End of the World over the next year. Subterranean Homesick Blues is a song full of rapid-fire surrealism, but it's also spiced with potential references to the social situation at the time. From a distance, both songs appear to be random and absurd, but as you look at them, themes, patterns, and meanings begin to emerge. One of the strangest things you'll notice about The End of the World at first glance is a run of celebrities with the initial LB. In the first verse we get comedian Lenny Bruce, and then later on we get a list that includes composer Leonard Bernstein, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, and music writer Lester Bangs. This strange sequence was born specifically out of a dream that Michael Stipe had, where he was at a birthday party for Bangs and he was the only person there whose initials weren't LB. Stipe told Q Magazine that the rest of the song was stuff he'd seen flipping through TV channels. The words come from everywhere, I'm extremely aware of everything around me, whether I'm in a sleeping state or just in day to day life. One of the biggest global events that Stipe would have noticed while writing this song was the Iran-Contra affair. In the 1980s, the US government under Ronald Reagan broke an arms embargo to secretly sell weapons to Iran. They used the money from those sales to fund a radical terrorist group called the Contras, who were trying to overthrow a socialist government in Nicaragua. REM aren't explicit about their references to this, but it's easy to read the events influence on the first verse. This also speaks more widely to the Reagan administration's foreign policy. They feared the spread of communism, and so they would fund military action against any groups left of their western neoliberal values. References to Reagan in particular are abound throughout the song. Reagan once famously called himself a former bleeding heart liberal. He loved jelly beans, and he used religious rhetoric in a lot of his speeches. At the end of the first verse, we get a direct look at how Stipe feels about his government. In the second verse, we get some images that are critical of the other side of the Cold War, the Soviet Union. Uniforms and book burning are symbols of authoritarian regimes. The end of that verse mentions a tournament of lies, an apt description of Cold War politics, driven by manipulation of the public on both sides. At the end of that verse, Stipe delivers one of the most telling lines of the song. In the face of a broken government and a world on the brink, alternatives and half-measures don't seem like enough of a solution. But we don't have time to think about this. We immediately kick into the chorus, the catchy, ironic line about the apocalypse. In a lot of ways, the chorus of this song predicts our current response to world issues. Through the tumultuous start to 2020, many people have been panicking, but online, the biggest universal response is memes. In the face of forces that we feel we have no control over, we often just resign ourselves to denial and distraction. REM don't really offer solutions for the end of the world, but they are clear as to what has caused it, people acting in their own self-interest without considering the wider world as a whole. There's a few lines throughout the first verse that get at this. Stipe sings that the world serves its own needs, twice, but encourages you to listen to your heart bleed the second time. That means listening to the empathetic part of your heart to relate to the struggles of other human beings and understand that we're all going through this together. If you apply these messages to our current situation, that means not hoarding toilet paper. It means respecting quarantine and social isolation. And that means getting through a pandemic and getting through the ensuing recession together with empathy to our fellow human beings. It might have felt like the end of the world in the late stages of the Cold War, when REM were writing this song. And it might feel like the end of the world now, but the world kept going, and the world is going to keep going now. So we need to be aware, we need to do everything we can, and we need to not just look up at the sky, see the world ending, and say, I feel fine. This isn't the first time that it's felt like the apocalypse, and it won't be the last. If you want to give yourself some perspective on these strange times, I recommend checking out Apocalypse World War I and Apocalypse World War II on CuriosityStream. Those two documentaries use stunning footage to tell the stories of our world wars. But maybe that's too grim, maybe you just want to distract yourself and learn something new, and honestly, that's totally fair. If that's the case, now is a great time to check out Nebula, the platform made by and for creators. All of my videos are there ad-free, as well as a number of other originals made by me and other fantastic creators. And if both Nebula and CuriosityStream sound interesting to you, then you're in luck, because if you sign up for CuriosityStream with the link in the description, you'll also get free access to Nebula. 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