Back in the day, R.E.M. almost never printed their lyrics in their liner notes. Michael Stipe famously did not enunciate those lyrics very clearly much of the time, which led to generations of listeners singing along with their own fill-in-the-blanks versions of his lyrics. That was especially the case with R.E.M’s classic 1987 college-radio smash “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” a blitz of rapid-fire cultural-reference non sequiturs that has remained fairly opaque for the last 38 years. The internet abhors a vacuum, so you can find plenty of transcripts of the “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It” lyrics online. But Michael Stipe, now finally breaking his silence, is here to let us know that those transcripts are wrong.
