For a moment it seemed as if REM had been just a biographical aside for Michael Stipe. An unexpectedly successful project that came to a peaceful end for everyone involved. But now the actual artistic career was to follow. There wasn’t an interview in which the singer didn’t philosophize about the benefits of life afterward.
Of course, Stipe initially disappeared from the public eye. He grew a beard and a piercing, like hermits sometimes do. Then he flew back and forth between his adopted homes, including Berlin, drawing, painting and photographing. In the meantime, his pictures, which early on became part of his band’s visual universe (Stipe photographed the rugged desert cover of “New Adventures In Hi-Fi” from the tour bus), are being exhibited. With “Generation X” author Douglas Coupland, he developed an unusual photo volume that was intended to reflect the influence of digital on everyday life. But the beard is gone again. Lucky.
“Please no questions about REM,” is now the motto at every public appearance. Looking back on the past has always remained alien to the sensitive melancholic, who changed his place of residence countless times during his childhood. Nevertheless, he doesn’t seem to have anything against reactivating his band as a sparkling relic of a long-faded rock past.
No nostalgia
There will be no more new music from REM, he repeats that again and again in a friendly manner. Stipe doesn’t seem to have any doubts about his abilities beyond music either. Maybe because he never saw himself as a musician. But the old songs, including everything that can still be found somewhere in the archive (there isn’t much, because Michael Stipe and his colleagues Mike Mills, Peter Buck and Bill Berry always brought out the best and created little excess), are welcome appear again. For years, one album after the next has been released as a remastered deluxe version, most recently “Up”, the first album that was created after drummer Bill Berry left.
And then Michael Stipe tells us. About the more often difficult times in the studio. About his constantly refined songwriting, of which he is proud (U2 singer Bono rightly calls him a poet). But also about the power of friendship, which enabled the musicians to endure many arguments about the artistic direction of their formation.
Everyone got their own album, so they were able to put their own stamp on it. Stipe’s were the most reserved of them. “Automatic For The People”. But also “Around The Sun”. His texts thrive on improvisation; they string together words that sometimes don’t fit together at all. Stipe himself described some songs as vomit songs, such as the dark “Country Feedback” and the dreamy structure of “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It”. With just a few lines on the piece of paper, the singer simply got started and let out what was building up inside him.
Until recently, REM’s masterpieces worked according to this principle. At their core, they are based on powerful emotions that break through (“Let Me In”), on creaturely analogies (“Gardening At Night”, “Nightswimming”). They tend towards the mystical (“Find The River”) and repeat motifs almost obsessively. For example, images of liquids, rivers, seas, tears (“Undertow”, “Cuyahoga”). REM’s songs always make politics a question of humanity and inhumanity (“Ignoreland” “The Final Straw”). They are also often specific in a disturbing way (“New Test Leper”). The silent listener, Stipe collects stories he picks up and whittles them down into anecdotes that always give a hint that the world is reeling. But hope remains. “Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage”, as their best-of edition from 2011 is wonderfully aptly called.
Michael Stipe’s voice
What did REM, this small, conspiratorial gang from Athens, which in its first years hardly took a day’s rest and rode the bus through “Little America” non-stop and, according to many hateful colleagues, without deodorant, now become a success story? Michael Stipe is sure that it was his exceptionally nasal, slightly irritated, but deep-sounding voice. Actually a unique selling point. Nobody sounds like Stipe. Although Lee Ranaldo almost sounds like it.
Of course that’s a bit unfair. These are the inimitable, often puzzlingly complicated compositions of Peter Buck and Mike Mills, as well as many ideas from drummer Bill Berry, who ultimately retired early. Great melodies, peeled from sparse song sketches (listen to the demos included with the new editions of the old records!). The mumbled minimalism of the early years attracted the eccentric. Then the students came along as REM became a college radio phenomenon. After all, music critics around the world raved about a group whose singer remained strangely aloof, shy and out of tune.
But Stipe’s introspection, a strong reluctance not to lose his mind in these crazy times, remained part of the magic of REM until the last note that the musicians produced together. Many rock frontmen win people over with their virility. Stipe countered with his vulnerability and insecurity. Eyes wide shut.
In the first few years on stage he hardly looked into the audience and often looked down. His inhibition and “clumsiness” were not faked. But over the years, Stipe lost his inhibitions. He created a stage identity for himself, as all great singers do at some point when they become confident in their performance. Obviously the fight remained, but the inner tension still remained. Feeling Gravity’s Pull.
Sadness and comfort
Stipe danced like an electric eel when he moved. He regularly collapsed during “Country Feedback,” cowering in front of his microphone. The way Stipe moves his hands on stage, how he uses them to direct his emotions and those of the audience, remains moving to this day and is difficult to describe for outsiders. Yes, REM’s success, Michael Stipe’s charisma, rests on this electric connection between listeners and musicians.
Stipe may have sometimes covered himself in makeup, perhaps to protect himself from the public’s greedy gaze (and great expectations), but this was not to hide but to reveal. “Not everyone can carry the weight of the world,” it says in “Talk About The Passion” – and what are Stipe’s lyrics but dialogues with his and our passion. With what creates suffering. No other songwriter defied his own melancholy with so much consolation.
That’s another reason why it’s nice that Michael Stipe is making music again. Even though his first solo album has been announced unofficially for years now, and yet it never comes out. According to Stipe, he already has many songs up his sleeve, although not all of them are finished yet. He wrote it himself and wants to compose it independently. A new challenge for an artist who never saw himself as just a musician. But at some point even the last breeder will be overcome by the ambition to take on the world.
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