It's the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)
by R.E.M.
- 103
- BPM
- G major
- Key
- 9B
- Camelot
- 39
- Danceability
- 3
- Acousticness
R.E.M. released Document in 1987, and "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" was its second single, out in November on I.R.S. Records. It reached number 69 on the Billboard Hot 100. A re-release in December 1991 reached number 39 in the UK.
Michael Stipe's lyric is a fast stream of references, including four people with the initials L.B.: Leonard Bernstein, Leonid Brezhnev, Lenny Bruce and Lester Bangs. Stipe said the initials came from a dream in which he was at a party full of famous people who shared them. Peter Buck agreed the song was in the tradition of Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues". It grew out of an unreleased song called "PSA", reworked and released in 2003 as "Bad Day".
Radio stations have played it as an apocalypse marker. WENZ in Cleveland looped it for 24 hours in 1992 to launch a new format, and again in 1999. Sales jumped from 3,000 to 19,000 copies in the week before the supposed Mayan apocalypse in December 2012. In March 2020 downloads rose 184 percent. James Herbert directed the video of a skateboarder in an abandoned farmhouse. The dog that wandered in was unscripted.
It's the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine) runs at 103 BPM, the tempo of mid-tempo pop, dancehall and indie. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.33 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 583 ms. It is in G major, Camelot 9B, which shares its notes with E minor and mixes cleanly with C major and D major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.