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.
Over the weekend, Michael Stipe went on Bluesky, which makes perfect sense as his preferred social network, to clear up some things about the lyrics to "It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)." Naturally, he started things off with a Simpsons meme, bragging that he can sing those words. He might be the only person on the planet who can accurately make that claim.
I can
— Michael Stipe (@michaelstipe.bsky.social) August 30, 2025 at 1:14 PM
Stipe then helpfully told the world about the one that everyone always gets wrong. It goes like this: "Left of west and coming in a hurry with the Furies breathing down your neck/ Team by team reporters, baffled, trumped, tethered, cropped/ Look at that low playing, fine, then."
It’s ‘Left of west and coming in a hurry with the Furies breathing down your neck
— Michael Stipe (@michaelstipe.bsky.social) August 31, 2025 at 8:10 PM
It’s “Team by team reporters, baffled, trumped, tethered, cropped,
Look at that low playing,
fine, then— Michael Stipe (@michaelstipe.bsky.social) September 1, 2025 at 2:11 PM
This means that the "It's The End Of The World" lyrics listed on Genius, Songfacts, and at least one R.E.M. fan site are all wrong. Stipe used to perform the song with lyrics that he printed off the internet, so those performances sometimes included the wrong lyrics, too. Stipe said as much during R.E.M.'s MTV Unplugged performance. Some other places had the right lyrics. Spotify, for instance, has lyrics licensed from the MusixMatch database. So the song's lyrics aren't listed wrong everywhere -- just almost everywhere.
That was fine! It felt fine! It felt good, even. Not everybody has to know everything. Oddly enough, Stipe's clarification does not, in this case, feel like demystification. Instead, it feels like the man is simply stopping by to let us know all that we don't know.
UPDATE: Stipe has clarified more lyrics from the song.
