Well, I've resisted the obvious for the last two or three weeks, mainly because, as with "Kung Flu Fighting", I had some previous history with it. In the case of "Kung Fu Fighting", I've been using it as a somewhat improbable free-speech anthem for a decade or so; in the case of this song, I managed to turn it into the sub-title to a bestseller on demographic doom:
It's The End Of The World As We Know It
It's The End Of The World As We Know It
It's The End Of The World As We Know It
And I feel fine...
I didn't plan for that particular song to provide the subtitle of America Alone (personally autographed copies of which are exclusively available from the SteynOnline bookstore): As I wrote somewhere or other, I'd had in mind a book about "the end of the world", and a couple of years later somewhat late in a long telephone conversation with my editor at Regnery, he said, "How about this? We call it America Alone: The End Of The World As We Know It" – instead of some oblique, elliptical, obscure allusion I'd pitched to him. And I would have argued the point but we'd been on the phone about three hours and I was a little tuckered out. And about 90 minutes after the title was announced I was deluged with e-mails mocking me for channeling REM and accusing me of being an Eighties revival loser. Which makes a pleasant change from being accused of being a sad old showtune queen.
As it happens, I had no intention of channeling REM. To the best of my recollection, my only previous encounter with any explicitly political deployment of their song had been a few years back when David Asper, an executive supremo of CanWest Global, had referenced it in a speech in Oakville, Ontario - if that doesn't sound too thrilling to contemplate. The Asper family had just bought almost all Canada's metropolitan dailies from my boss Conrad Black, and young David, son of the company's patriarch Izzy Asper, was best-known for an ill-advised editorial attacking columnists of his own papers for their pursuit of the Prime Minister and his cronies' grubby business dealings in Shawinigan and elsewhere. I, in turn, did a big attack on David Asper and, as I like to think of it, pretty much left him for roadkill. Savaging my new boss's son got me a National Newspaper Award nomination (these things are very predictable).
But young David seethed and bided his time. And a few months later the Aspers went and did the unforgiveable, and inaugurated a new policy of running occasional "national editorials" from their corporate HQ in Winnipeg. Not terribly often. Once every month or so. But in the narcoleptic swamp of the Canadian media you'd think the sky had fallen, and suddenly the air was filled with shrieks demanding official investigations into this assault on freedom of the press and cries for a Royal Commission into the future of the newspaper industry. And, à propos of nothing in particular, young David Asper decided to fight back at an otherwise routine luncheon speech in Oakville :
'We are also distributing editorials written locally from one paper to others in order to promote understanding among the various regions in Canada,' he said. 'Readers in Victoria are getting a chance to see what is being written in Montreal. The Telegram in St. John's will run editorials from Edmonton, and vice versa. That is the hallmark of a good editorial page. It is part of what we consider to be a national mandate for the voices of the regions to be heard across the land, and we are proud to participate and even lead that national dialogue. To paraphrase the music group REM, I say to our critics, and especially to the bleeding hearts of the journalist community: '"It's the end of the world as they know it; it's the end of the world as they know it; it's the end of the world as they know it, and I feel fine."'
High-larious, as my former colleague Jonah Goldberg liked to say. Dunno what the lunch crowd made of it. When REM wrote their apocalyptic anthem, I'll bet they never thought its visionary message would prove so versatile it would be the perfect summation for a dispute over whether the daily newspaper in St John's, Newfoundland should run an editorial faxed over from Edmonton, Alberta. Goethe wrote that "the poet should address the specific and if there be anything about him he will articulate the universal." But to articulate something as universal as the end of the world and find that it addresses something as specific as Albertan content in Newfoundland and Labrador's daily papers is almost too weird an inversion. (By the way, Newfoundland folk-rockers Great Big Sea have recorded the song. Don't know whether any Alberta popsters have.) In fairness to Michael Stipe and his chums, whatever our political differences, my deployment of the phrase is at least on the same general scale as theirs.
REM wrote the song a third of a century back, in 1987, seven years after the quartet had met at the University of Georgia and formed their band. Murmur, their debut album, topped the Rolling Stone critics' poll in 1983, and one must at least acknowledge that they've retained more of their cool than the acts that placed Two and Three (respectively, Michael Jackson for Thriller and U2 for War). REM are credited as pioneers of the alternative rock crowd of the Nineties, but "It's The End Of The World" anticipated the 1990s in a more explicit way. It's odd to discover it wasn't exactly boffo on its release: it got to 59 on the Billboard Hot One Hundred in 1987, and 39 in the British Hit Parade four years later. But it seemed to deepen its hold on the popular consciousness as the last decade of the century advanced: the song has a pared down sound but an epic feel. REM's animated performance of it in Homer's garage on The Simpsons may in that sense be the defining rendition:
A few years ago, you'll recall, our Song of the Week #13 was "I Found A Million-Dollar Baby In A Five-And-Ten-Cent Store", which Billy Rose had retrieved from another song he wrote around the same idea a few years earlier. There are all kinds of examples of that in Tin Pan Alley. Irving Berlin's "Easter Parade" had begun life with the same tune but an entirely different lyric. Instead of "In your Easter bonnet/With all the frills upon it", it ran: "Smile and show your dimple/You'll find it's very simple." Half-a-century later, in a very different songwriting environment, the guys from REM did pretty much the same thing. "It's The End Of The World" arose from an earlier unreleased song called, "PSA", as in "Public Service Announcement". The two numbers are similar musically and also atmospherically – they have the same kind of end-times vibe, and when "PSA" was eventually released it was under the title "Bad Day", as in majorly bad day.
Michael Stipe said he got the idea for the song after dreaming one night that he was at a party peopled only with guests bearing the initials "LB". That scene turns up in the song:
Leonard Bernstein, Leonid Brezhnev
Lenny Bruce and Lester Bangs
Birthday party, cheesecake
Jelly bean, boom!
What no Lauren Bacall? Or was it a boys' night out? For an Eighties act, that's quite a squaresville idea of radical chic: rock'n'roll's favorite classical celeb, the decayed General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, a long-dead comedian and a more recently if just as prematurely deceased rock critic. "Lenny Bruce" and "cheesecake" always reminds me of my late BBC "News Quiz" confrère Peter Cook. Peter had a very varied career, until his partner Dudley Moore went to Hollywood and he took to staying in and calling up overnight radio hosts on LBC pretending to be a reactionary cab-driver. Anyway, at one point in the Sixties he ran a celebrated London comedy club called The Establishment for which he brought over Lenny Bruce, putting him up at the Ritz. The Ritz kicked him out, saying his room was full of syringes and hookers, so Peter invited him to share his flat in Battersea. At two in the morning, Lenny wakes him up and says he needs some heroin. So Peter, grumbling, gets up, gets dressed, goes out, wanders around town and comes back with some. It's now three in the morning, and Lenny's changed his mind: he now says he doesn't need heroin but he does need some chocolate cake. Britain's capital wasn't exactly a 24/7 service town in those days, and so Peter wearily explained to him that, while it was just about possible to procure some heroin in the middle of the night in London, there was absolutely no chance of procuring any chocolate cake at that hour.
Anyway, the point I'm making in a somewhat roundabout way is that the namechecks in "End Of The World" are the weakest point – and Lenny Bruce gets two, including smack (if you'll forgive the expression) in the opening:
That's great
It starts with an earthquake
Birds and snakes
An aeroplane and Lenny Bruce is not afraid.
Eye of a hurricane
Listen to yourself churn
World serves its own needs
Dummy serve your own needs...
And Lenny Bruce had been dead for twenty years by the time those lines were written. The rest is written in the preferred Stipe stream-of-consciousness style. And, as an impressionistic blur, it's pretty good – Bruce aside, it's vivid and urgent in the way it sets up total societal collapse for reasons that are never fully explained. Anthony DeCurtis calls the song "apocalyptic wryness", which I like to think is what both America Alone and After America are about. On my 2006 tour down under, I was described by one commentator as pioneering a whole new genre – "apocalyptic stand-up" – but I'm happy to settle for "apocalyptic wryness".
In the end, though, all the rat-a-tat imagery of "End Of The World"'s verses isn't why folks dig it. Like a lot of post-rock songwriting, its power derives from a hook – in this case, a big bold thought, repeated, and again:
It's The End Of The World As We Know It
It's The End Of The World As We Know It
It's The End Of The World As We Know It
And I feel fine...
Stadium crowds just love singing along with that. It's instantly recognizable, which is why it was used in Independence Day, just before the aliens invade, and indeed at a similar moment in Chicken Little. To be honest, if we have to have a go-to anthem for whenever anything bad happens, I'd far rather the all-star celeb galas ended with this rather than "Imagine". As for my own accidental evocation of it in America Alone, back when I thought of it as just a plain old end-of-the-world book, I found myself singing another song, a big hit for Skeeter Davis who happened to die as I was writing the thing:
Don't the-ey know
It's The End Of The World?
It ended when you said goodbye...
- which is perfectly fine for a country love song. But for "apocalyptic wryness" REM have it all over Skeeter. So, if you haven't already, do buy my end-of-the-world book and, if you find yourself singing along, try a variation or two:
It's The End Of The World As We Know It
It's The End Of The World As We Know It
It's The End Of The World As We Know It
And I read Steyn...
~Our Netflix-style tile-format archives for Tales for Our Time and Steyn's Sunday Poems have proved so popular with listeners and viewers that we thought we'd do the same for our musical features. Just click here, and you'll find easy-to-access live performances by everyone from Herman's Hermits to Liza Minnelli; Mark's interviews with Chuck Berry, Leonard Bernstein and Bananarama (just to riffle through the Bs); and audio documentaries on P G Wodehouse's songs, John Barry's Bond themes, Simon after Garfunkel, and much more. We'll be adding to the archive in the months ahead, but, even as it is, we hope you'll find the new SteynOnline music home page a welcome respite from the end of the world as we know it.
If you're a Mark Steyn Club member and you disagree with any or all of the above, feel free to have at it in our comments section. As we always say, membership in The Mark Steyn Club isn't for everybody, and it doesn't affect access to Song of the Week and our other regular content, but one thing it does give you is commenter's privileges, so go full David Asper. Please stay on topic and don't include URLs, as the longer ones can monkey with the formatting of the page
For a different kind of audio pleasure, don't forget our brand new Tale for Our Time, a classic of a very different kind, as Mark reads A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe. Part Nine will air tonight in a couple of hours right here, and continue every evening through the week.
