All of that gave the album a bright, original sound, but that’s not what made it so extraordinary. It was what the songs were actually about. “I decided that this had to be a record that was incredibly uplifting,” Stipe told Rolling Stone back then. “Not necessarily happy, but a record that was uplifting to offset the store-bought cynicism and easy condemnation of the world we're living in now.”

For Stipe, the shorthand for that dynamic optimism was “green.” In 1988, that word still had pretty radical implications. There were no green office buildings or green Chevron ads, and most Americans had never heard of the Green Party. In a 1988 press kit interview called Should We Talk About the Weather?, Stipe tried to explain what “green” meant to him: “Obviously, there's the political overtones, which I think apply more now than ever before. And certainly, there's the kind of nature side—because you think of green and you think of trees. That's simple. And I think ‘green’ pretty much defines the band and where we are now. We're kind of starting over. And we're all very aware of that.”

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When Green came out, I was in junior high school in a tiny town surrounded by cornfields in all directions. There was no Internet yet, and the nearest record store was an hour away, but my friends and I learned everything we needed to know about music from a late-night show called Postmodern MTV. We were partial to British New Wave bands like The Cure and Depeche Mode—it was good music for immersing yourself in teenage emotion, but not particularly helpful for figuring out your place in the world.

Then the video for “Stand” started showing up in regular rotation. R.E.M. has always cheerfully written off that song as a piece of “bubblegummy” pop. But the video was full of environmentalist symbolism: a globe, a bicycle, a hammer and nail. An old woman planted flowers and bundled up newspapers for recycling. With all that productive bustling going on, the words “Stand in the place where you live” seemed like a call to action, a new twist on “Think global, act local.”

What appealed to me most about the video was the buoyant energy of the band members themselves, leaping across the grass against a backdrop of autumn leaves. At the end, the camera lingered on Stipe as he tried to hide a smile behind his long, honey-colored hair. Whatever those guys were up to, I wanted to be part of it.

That supercharged positivity ran through almost every song on Green. R.E.M.’s music had always been upbeat, but the two previous albums had taken on issues like air pollution, McCarthyism, and nuclear war. It wasn’t an encouraging picture. The world was still going to end, even if the band felt fine.

Green was entirely different. To make sure no one missed the album's message, Stipe did something he’d never done before: He printed the lyrics to one of the songs in the liner notes. “It's probably the most political song I've ever written, and at the same time, the most personal,” he explained in the 1988 press kit interview. “I think to be able to read ‘World Leader Pretend’ as well as listening to it will help clarify a lot of the intention behind Green.”