Here comes day 11 of Mayhem’s 12 Days of Christmas series for 2025.. The ten posts so far have featured the Apocalypse Disco, Radiohead, Black Box Recorder, Shrub, the Postal Service, Tom Waits, Johnny Cash, Bring Me The Horizon, Muse and the Doors. Many of you will know by now that this years theme is not very festive and is almost certainly our darkest theme so far. But with all the crap in the world at the moment much of it driven by Diaper Donnie in the partly demolished and fake gold encrusted White House I thought I would celebrate Chrimbo this year with songs about the end of the world. These are twelve fabulous tracks despite the rather savage theme. Music has, and will always accompany me wherever I go, even if that is into the heart of the forthcoming (???) Armageddon! Maybe I need to make them into a playlist, what do you think? Some of you have contacted me with a resounding yes to the playlist. It will appear when we post the final installment a.k.a. day 12. There may be a surprise extra track on the day 12 posting too, keep checking in!
Today we have what some may consider an obvious choice for this series, it is “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” by the legendary and sadly missed R.E.M. It was released in 1987 and was the second single taken from their fifth album, ‘Document’. It reached 69 in the US Billboard chart that year and number 39 in the UK when it was reissued in 1991. In the 1990s in interviews with Musician magazine and Q magazine front man, singer and lyricist Michael Stipe said of the song which included a number of diverse references, such as a quartet of individuals with the initials “L.B.”: Leonard Bernstein, Leonid Brezhnev, Lenny Bruce, and Lester Bangs. that the “L.B.” references came from a dream he had in which he found himself at a party surrounded by famous people who all shared those initials. “The words come from everywhere, I’m extremely aware of everything around me, whether I am in a sleeping state, awake, dream-state or just in day to day life, so that ended up in the song along with a lot of stuff I’d seen when I was flipping TV channels. It’s a collection of streams of consciousness.” It certainly fits our theme, thanks to the title and general lyrical strangeness.
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