people's party pt4: shiny happy people

"Shiny Happy People" appeared on R.E.M.’s 1991 album Out of Time and was released as a single in the same year. It was the first and only R.E.M. song to reach the top ten in the UK as well as in the USA. Although a top ten hit, it was excluded from the band's 2003 'Best Of' album In Time; this was reportedly a deliberate decision by Michael Stipe, who once mentioned his dislike of the song in an episode of Space Ghost Coast to Coast.The song is supposedly an ironic reference to a piece of roughly translated Chinese propaganda; and the massacre in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, two years before the song was released. The inference apparently compares the complacent favored insiders of the regime to the idealistic "revolting" unhappy students on the ground in Tiananmen Square. The song appeared in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 during footage of George H. W. Bush visiting the Saud family.