Standing on the shoulders of giants leaves me cold...

#17- REM, Document (1987) In the interest of both completing this top-20 list and making significant progress on my dissertation, my posts are going to be rather brief from here on out. Celebrate or mourn as you will. This album was the soundtrack to my junior year of high school back in the 1993-94 era. I worked in the kitchen of a summer camp for a number of years in my early teens, and the college-age camp counselors were always wearing REM T-shirts, so in an effort to be "cool like the college kids" and growing weary of my Petra fetish (I had VERY diverse tastes in music in my high school years) I decided to check out some samples from Athens, GA's finest. "Shiny Happy People" scared the beejeezus out of me, so I looked to other albums. This tape had "End of the World..." and "The One I Love" on it, two songs I had heard before and liked, so I bought it from my local Disc Jockey mall chain record store. Though I knew the hits, it was the other tracks on this album that won me over to a lifetime of REM fandom. The straining horns of "Finest Worksong" melted my ears, the straight-ahead guitar chords of "Strange" tended to my need for music that encouraged me to put the accelerator of my '78 Chevy pickup through the floor, and the plaintive "King of Birds" taught me the sad beauty of singing in rounds. I cannot hear this album without seeing the barren landscape of southern Appalachia through the window of my truck as I drove back and forth to high school. There are better REM albums, but i bet if you pull this one out and give another spin, you won't be disappointed.