R.E.M. "It's The End Of The World As We Know It"

Have you ever wondered what the lyrics were to some song, so you Googled it and you ended up on one of those sites that posts song lyrics?

Did you see this in the news last week?

Live Universe, a web group that maintains some "lyric" sites, lost a lawsuit and now owes $6.6 million in damages, for posting lyrics without permission.

So that seems like the end of finding lyrics on the web as we know it . . .


Reading that story, I drifted back to the days before the internet made everything so accessible.

In college (late 80s), I lived with a bunch of guys who could play instruments.  And the newest friend in our midst was a Georgia-transplant who loved R.E.M.

I can remember one night early in the school year, where we decided we should learn how to sing and play "It's The End Of The World As We Know It."

The song is lyric-dense, and Michael Stipe was (and mostly still is) averse to making his lyrics available.

And that meant we had to figure them out for ourselves.

We sat in the lounge area with a pen and a notebook (there were no laptops).  And I held my tape recorder.

All night long (and no doubt with beer in cans), we played and stopped and rewound and played and replayed and guessed and did our best to phonetically figure out what the hell he was saying on that cassette.

It was a moment where we gelled as a group.  Something that bound us together for our college years.  A moment that wouldn't have happened if someone had just said "R.E.M. lyrics?  Let me Google that . . . here they are."

It's not the worst thing in the world to not have everything, all the time, at your fingertips.


Hear the song on Youtube.