Did Leonard Bernstein Really Jam to R.E.M.? How ‘Maestro’ Hints at the Conductor’s Pop Culture Legacy

It is no surprise that the music of Ludwig van Beethoven and Gustav Mahler, as well as Leonard Bernstein's own compositions, are heard in Bradley Cooper's portrait of Bernstein, Maestro (out now on Netflix). It is a bit of a delightful shock, however, when we hear R.E.M.

It comes during a funny moment during the movie's coda. Lenny is now in his winter years, zooming around the Tanglewood Music Center in the Berkshire Mountains in his convertible Mercedes with the license plate MAESTRO1. It's 1989 and he's blasting the 1987 album Document by what was then-branded the "alternative rock" band R.E.M. The song in question is "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)," a catchy song with a memorable refrain, and also one of the all-time great tunes that required a thousand listens if you wanted to catch all the lyrics.

Lead singer Michael Stipe, one of rock's great mumblers, races through a stream-of-consciousness set of unrelated phrases in the song — ones that would send '80s kids into heated debates to decipher — until the instruments drop about and he shouts (for some reason) "Leonard Bernstein!"

The next line goes "Leonid Brezhnev, Lenny Bruce and Lester Bangs, birthday party, cheesecake, jelly bean, boom!" It took me a good 20 years to realize that all of the names have the initials L.B. (In case you aren't sure, Brezhnev was a one-time leader of the U.S.S.R, Lenny Bruce was the rebellious comedian you may have seen on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Lester Bangs was a rock critic, the one Philip Seymour Hoffman played in Almost Famous.) In an interview, Stipe said the image of the four L.B.s at a birthday party came to him in a dream.

There is, unfortunately, no evidence I can find that Bernstein did, in fact, tool around in his car blasting the pop song that so prominently mentioned him. But there is no reason to think he wasn't aware of the tune and wasn't tickled. Though Bernstein dedicated much of his life to "serious" music, he regularly used pop music as a touchstone in his educational Young People's Concerts to initiate them into music theory. While the old guard in the wings may have been dropping their monocles into their soup, Bernstein actually bridged the generation gap by playing excerpts from the Beatles, the Kinks and the Association without any didacticism.

In 1967, when kids were in the streets burning their draft cards and their bras, Bernstein hosted a CBS television special called Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution in which he practically does backflips over a key change in the Beatles' "Good Day Sunshine" and even finds merit in the dopiest of groups from the era, the Monkees!

As such, the R.E.M. moment fits in nicely at the end of the film — a nod that at the end of Bernstein's life, he was aware that his legacy would live on, and not just in philharmonic halls, but on pop radio.

Bernstein's catholic musical tastes are on display elsewhere in the film. A touching family moment shows the Bernstein clan dancing along to Shirley Ellis' R&B hit "The Clapping Song" (a tune later kinda-sorta covered by Tom Waits) and later Bernstein is seen cutting a rug with a young paramour as we hear the hit "Shout" by Tears for Fears.