Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
Chicago Tribune
Christgau's Record Guide	A
Entertainment Weekly	A−
Los Angeles Times
Pitchfork Media	8.2/10
Q
Rolling Stone
The Rolling Stone Album Guide
Uncut	9/10

Document is the fifth studio album by American alternative rock band R.E.M. It was released in September 1987 a few months after their rarities collection Dead Letter Office appeared and is the last album of new material by the band released on the I.R.S. Records label. It is the first album on which the band worked with producer Scott Litt.

Document was R.E.M.'s first album co-produced by Scott Litt and the band, a collaboration that continued through Green, Out of Time, Automatic for the People, Monster, and New Adventures in Hi-Fi. The album's clear production and muscular rock riffs helped to move the band toward mainstream success and built on the work done by Don Gehman, who had produced their previous album Lifes Rich Pageant. This release not only launched "The One I Love," R.E.M.'s first Top 10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 (it reached number nine), but also gave them their first platinum album.

"Exhuming McCarthy" makes an explicit parallel between the red-baiting of Joe McCarthy's time and the strengthening of the sense of American exceptionalism during the Reagan era, especially the Iran-Contra affair. Starting with the click-clack of a typewriter, it also includes a sound clip of Joseph Welch's rebuke of McCarthy from the Army-McCarthy Hearings: "Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator ... You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

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Wikipedia