Clear the floor to dance, shake the rug into the fireplace

[venta]

It's Friday! It's three o'clock! It's time to Boogie At Your Desk!

Friday afternoons need a little something. I think they need a Top Tune. Something to make you shuffle in your seat and, if possible, Boogie At Your Desk. I'll be endeavouring to fill this gap on Fridays this year.

I'm not claiming that any track provided to enable At-Desk Boogying is one of the world's best or most profound pieces of music. It will, however, be a tune which makes me smile, and which has at some stage made me surreptitiously Boogie At My Desk.

Desks are not compulsory, of course. Feel free to boogie through your office, in your bedroom, round your lab, across your classroom, on the train - wherever you find yourself on a Friday afternoon.

If you like the track, go out and buy the album it belongs to - I'll try and recommend a suitable CD to purchase for any BAYD track.

This link will expire at some point in the future.

Today you were invited to Boogie At Your Desk to:

REM - It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

I have a very clear memory of an afternoon sometime in the very early nineties. I was in the Scout HQ (8th Darlington), leaning against a table in the back corner of the main hall. We'd just come back from a camping trip, and were talking about an exciting new band, REM, who'd exploded all over the charts with a song called Losing My Religion.

This drew yelps of indignation from a passing Senior Scout. Carl, and his elder brother, were our local musos. Festival-goers, followers of obscure bands, people who knew and whose indie credibility stuck out all over. Not that much older than us, but somehow entrenched in music in a way none of us were. REM, he spluttered, were not a "new" band. In fact, he'd been trying to get us to listen to them for years. I think we largely ignored him, and went out and bought copies of Out Of Time anyway.

My REM best-of, thought recently acquired, is an elderly affair released in 1991. At that point, still obscure in the UK, REM had already got a half-dozen or so albums under their belt. I'm firmly convinced that if anyone ever works out what music diplodoci listened to, it'll turn out to be early REM. One of the few tracks on my best-of which still gets a reasonable number of outings in the pubs, clubs and radiowaves is It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine).

As well as being eminently suitable for Boogying At Your Desk, this track is one of those songs with great piles of words. I love 'em. Huge, tumbling swathes of lyrics which have to be desperately crammed into the tune, and from which those without the dedication to learn can only pick out occasional phrases (all together now, "Leonard Bernstein!"). Besides, who can deny the songwriting genius of the man who crafted the phrase "Birthday party, cheesecake, jellybean, boom!"

I'm not really familiar enough with the band to recommend an album, but recently I've been rather enjoying the album from which It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) originally comes. Document is mostly a gentle, slightly melancholy album, owing a lot to the sound of The One I Love. Other recommendations welcome.

RIP Carl. Hearing REM still makes me think of you.

Comments

[zotz]

I read an interview with Stipe years ago. He said that he'd had three things he was writing and ended up merging them into one song. Part of it was based a dream he'd had about being at Lester Bangs' birthday party. Apart from Stipe, everyone there had the initials LB - hence Leonard Bernstein, Leonid Brezhnev and Lenny Bruce.

The album after Document is Green, and that's when they hit the big time. There are several big hit singles off it, and some very striking album tracks too (especially I Remember California). It's less wistful (although not entirely unwistful) and more stadium-rock. Very very good, though.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Eeek - you've just put my head into a very weird place.

I read "at that point, still obscure in the UK" and thought "What a load on nonsense, a friend of mine had a copy of 'Automatic for the People' in 1991 and she was soooo mainstream. I'll show Liz !".

A quick bit of research later and I find that it wasn't out until December 1992. But I saw it in her room in the Florey building, and she wasn't in that building after Summer 1992.

Very. Very. Odd.

Consider this a footnote to that thread about memory the other day.

[triskellian]

I don't even need to faff around plugging my headphones into my puter to Ba[m]D to that one, I can do it all on internal jukebox, and it gives me a tenuous excuse to reuse a favourite icon I wasn't expecting to use again :-)

(It also reminds me that I have a tape copy of Document, which I've never properly listened to, and that this needs rectifying immediately*.)

*That's the second time today I've typed the last two words in that sentence.

[phlebas.livejournal.com]

Leonard Bernstein!

[venta.livejournal.com]

:)

I do genuinely think that's the most obvious lyric (chorus excluded) of the entire song - would you agree ?

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Almost as if they'd employed some devilishly clever compositional trick to create emphasis.

[cuthbertcross.livejournal.com]

I've been an REM-appreciator for many a moon. I enjoy their Might-be-Giantesque lyrics, though they've occasionally fallen into the trap of "hey we liked that chord sequence and sound so much, lets use it again in another song!"
For example, Try listening to the song "It's Been a Bad Day (please don't take a picture)" without (and then with) yourself singing the chorus to It's the end of the world over the top. Freaky. You can almost squeeze in the verses if you're very good at singing quickly, too.

Album wise they have a knack of mutating just enough to keep you satisfied. I rather like Life's Rich Pageant. a 1986 album best noted for the 2 songs Fall On Me (happy boppy typical REM, addictive) and Swan Swan Hummingbird, a cheery little number about the Slave Trade.

[eostar.livejournal.com]

The REM albums I listen to most are Document, Green, Life's Rich Pagent, and Out of Time, I think because, for me, these are the best mix of wistful and not so wistful.

Apart from It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine), the other REM track's that always make me want to smile and sing-a-long are Imitation of Life, and The Great Beyond the chorus of which has a certain anarchy to it.

[uitlander]

Onr of my favourites. Like triskellian its been replaying internally since you posted. No need to download.

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

Good call.

I was listening to Automatic for the People last night - 'tis a good album.