My personal history with R.E.M.'s "Radio Free Europe" begins with my seeing that it is number 379 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
Having never heard it, nor heard OF it, I go to YouTube and watch the music video they created for it. I can only understand 3 or 4 words in the whole song, and the video is giving me zero clues about its meaning: There's a guy, then two, and finally three guys wandering around a field and an overgrown lawn-and-garden outlet. Oh! And there's a guy sitting at a Bob Cratchit-style desk. Maybe he's writing about the guys in the field and overgrown lawn-and-garden outlet?
So I head over to azlyrics.com and read the words to the song.
This may or may not come as a shock to you, but I still have 100% no idea what the song is about.
So...it's off to songfacts.com. And it is here that I learn what I had been kind of suspecting all along:
There was a good reason for Michael Stipe's infamously indecipherable lyrics on this song: He hadn't finished them by the time they recorded it. In a 1988 NME interview, Stipe described the lyrical content as "complete babbling."
I feel SO justified!
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