This song has no title and is not listed on the track listing but I sing it everyday with my fiancee. I give Reckoning and Murmur 5 stars but Green is very close behind. "This world is big, and so are we. I stay up late to hear your voice."

Okay, "Stand" is admittedly one of the more annoying singles in rock history. But let's move past that and acknowledge that "Green" is still a pretty darn good album. Labelled "sellouts" by many of their hardcore fans, R.E.M. managed the tricky feat of going mainstream without compromising their artisitic principles. Great songs such as "Orange Crush," "Get Up" the untitled final track have plenty in common with earlier R.E.M. Overall, this is a solid album with some definite high points.

REM is pretty much the exemplar and paradigm of American Underground rock. They've pretty much gone the distance and stayed the course as far as rock bands are concerned, having been around for over eighteen years and are still releasing albums. In this case Green is one of their earlier albums, but that hardly means it isn't worth listening to. While many bands tend to experiment with disparet sounds and styles, as if they suffer from some sort of dissociative syndrome and can't connect with whom they really are, all of the songs on this album bear the distinctive stamp of REM's sound and style. While the non - rock historian and the non - REM fan may find little of interest here, most fans will find this an enjoyable and entertaining performance.

The music on this album perhaps does not deserve five stars. Doubtless, there are some absolutely kick-$#@ songs, but I think it deserves five stars more for what it represents as a sum of its parts. For me, this album harkens back to a time (even if it was only a decade ago) when a band could compose an album full of innovative and engrossing sounds and not worry about conforming to a norm, or concentrating on producing one of the three or four single kinds of music which is now played on the dreadful MTV. A band could compose something creative, different, perhaps take many chances, and still have an album be hugely successful. That does not happen anymore. Albums like REM's Green are the only memories from a once boundless musical time.

After 5 of the greatest albums in rock history (Murmur, Reckoning, Fables..., Lifes Rich Pageant, Document) + pre-Murmur EP's and singles, REM started on the downhill track with this one. The songs are dull and offer no compelling reason to listen. Before this album, I would automatically buy the new REM sound-unheard. After this one, I had to think carefully whether it was worth the money - now THAT's green.

I am a big REM fan, and I advise new fans to stay clear of "Green". I'm also old enough to have been an original fan of the Byrds, the Band, other great acts with whom they are often compared to, and I can tell you that REM is more interesting, more adventuresome and more versatile than the Byrds or almost any of the '60's bands to whom they are compared. But not on Green. For newer fans who wonder what REM was like in the '80's, choose Murmer or Documentor the sort of Greatest Hits,Eponymous. Also,I have nothing against good REM pop music, and for that, I like to Out of Time, from 1991, which sold millions and deserved to.Green's "Orange Crush" is a good rocker about a serious subject. Otherwise, totally disposable. Sounds like they owed the record company an other album.