Combustion Location

 Song 657: This week the playlist comes around to Fireplace by R.E.M., written by Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Michael Stipe, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. On an evening in June of 1983, my band Victims of Technology performed as the first of two opening acts for a quartet that had given themselves a name which I thought slyly referred to the dream stage of sleep. I had only begun to hear their music, and I hadn't come to any conclusions about it before that show. After their set, however, I felt certain that I had to pay more attention to their sounds, which I soon did. When their Document LP came out 4 years later, I quickly had a copy in hand. This marks the fifth appearance of a gem from that disc among this collection, and I might quite likely feature 1 or 2 more in the next year or 2. The One I Love is Song 36, It's the End of the World is Song 322, Finest Worksong is Song 419, and Welcome To The Occupation is Song 571. As much as it might have seemed like a crazy crazy world and crazy crazy times during the mid-1980s, truth is much stranger than fiction now than it was 4 decades ago, so today we can ask the question about if we should shake the rug into the fireplace and/or should we believe that The U.S. Should Show It Can Win a Nuclear War (an April 2022 WSJ headline)? Even POTUS Reagan understood back in 1985 that the only winners of a nuclear war would be THE COCKROACHES, but today a national security advisor can openly advocate for ending human civilization, which is WAY CRAZIER than trying to throw the walls into the fireplace.