10 Things (I Think) I Think About the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)

Introduction

When I was in college (a million years ago) I went through a short-ish phase of listening — pretty much exclusively, on repeat, much to the chagrin of my roommate and friends — to the R.E.M. song “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine).”³ If you haven’t heard the song, it’s a machine-gun litany of verbiage — elliptical, associative, and (at times) impenetrable. It’s also pretty delightful, catchy, and fun. Footloose and fancy-free insouciance. Which is a nice juxtaposition with the apocalyptic assertions in its title.

Michael Stipe, the band’s lead singer, mumble-sings throughout the song, so, lo those many years ago, I only ever registered snippets and phrases, and I absolutely heard some lyrics wrong. (This despite the obsessive and repeated close-listening.) Even now, reading the lyrics word-for-word,⁴ it’s clear Stipe is interested in a more gestural type of sense-making — something like a collage of ideas and images that, in turn, sparks free-association and new meaning-making in the listener. Meaning that is inherently informed by an individual listener’s own resonant contexts: intellectual, psychological, demographic, aesthetic, even spiritual, etc. Meaning that is also (as a result) messy, distorted, and imperfect.   

So what did this song mean to me then (asked no one in particular)? Why, I’ll tell you.

Although I must have originally encountered it at some keg party in my first or second year of college, it was clear to me early on that there was a significant intelligence behind the song. While Stipe was the band’s primary lyricist, R.E.M. rather famously chose to share songwriting credits from the beginning, so the intelligence I sensed in this song was essentially collaborative. And how intelligent it was: references to Lenny Bruce,⁵ Leonard Bernstein,⁶ and Leonid Brezhnev.⁷ Words like vitriolic, cavalier, and reverent. Lyrical phrases: “A tournament, a tournament, a tournament of lies” — what? Cool!

It’s not an exaggeration to say that this — not James Joyce⁸ or Jack Kerouac⁹ — was my artistic introduction to stream-of-consciousness. This was my Tender Buttons.¹⁰ And it was my first inclination that the relationship between language, meaning, and thought was more dynamic than it appears. Yes, that felt disorienting — and, yes, it may have felt like the end of something, but it was also clear that the “as we know it” part was every bit as important as anything else.

And that felt liberating. Footloose, fancy-free insouciance. Something was coming to replace the world we knew. And that was perfectly fine.  

If you believe Bill Gates¹¹ (et al), we find ourselves at an “end of the world as we know it” inflection point vis-à-vis our relationship to information, to creativity, to work. To just about everything that has shaped the Internet age (as we know it) — and therefore to a large portion of what we know as “contemporary humanity.”

I do believe Bill Gates. And I feel fine. These musings are my assay/essay into why that is.  

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