The artist Michael Stipe constantly stole from: “Big influences”
Michael Stipe is one of the few musicians who has experienced almost every level of success, with a razor-sharp focus on both sides of mainstream accessibility and authentic artistic expression.
Stipe learnt the ropes early on after founding REM as a student in 1980, and over the years would establish the group as one of the leading forces in rock. Even now, we see REM as one of the few bands that mastered both cultish status and mainstream success, somehow providing a sound and style that lured in the masses without compromising on freedom of expression.
Most pinpoint 1991’s Out of Time as the pivotal moment that saw REM take the leap, with songs like ‘Losing My Religion’ crossing over into darker themes and ideas like obsession and disillusionment, specifically the idea of unrequited love and attempting to reach out to someone you desire, only to send yourself into a spin in the process.
Stipe had sprinkled darker and more cutting edges into REM’s music since day one. In fact, some of their best songs, like ‘Orange Crush’, ‘Country Feedback’, and ‘The One I Love’ hold a lot of melancholy. When you listen to a song like ‘Undertow’, it doesn’t take long before you’re pulled into the undercurrent of sorrow or resignation, as the song drifts towards an energy you can no longer resist, or being stuck in a place you can’t describe or even understand.
REM aren’t necessarily seen as one of the darker rock bands out there, but it’s always been there, probably because of all those that Stipe himself looks up to. In fact, one of the first people who made it all make sense for Stipe was the queen of darkness herself, Patti Smith. Once, when he discovered a photograph of Smith on the cover of a magazine, he was pulled into how gothic she looked, which set him on a path to his own artistic self-discovery.
As he recalled to Rolling Stone, “[Punk] was incredibly liberating. I distinctly remember the November 1975 issue of Creem magazine. Someone had left a copy in study hall under a chair. And I remember it had a picture of Patti Smith, and she was terrifying looking. She looked like Morticia Addams. And I think it was Lester Bangs or Lisa Robinson writing about punk rock in New York and how all the other music was like watching colour movies, but this is like watching staticky black-and-white TV. And that made incredible sense to me.”
He then recalled how he’d followed Smith through Horses, before getting sucked into Television’s Marquee Moon and Wire’s Pink Flag. “Those were the big influences,” he said. “Their whole Zeitgeist was that anybody could do it. And I took that very literally. I read that in an interview with Patti Smith, and I thought, ‘If she can sing, I can sing.’ No one’s ever really tied in how much I’ve lifted from her as a performer.”
One of Smith’s songs that especially impacted Stipe was ‘Birdland’, because it completely transformed his mindset around making music, allowing him to realise that he could actually pursue it as a creative path and excel at it, too. As he explained to Pitchfork, “I had this epiphany and realised that this is what I wanted to do with my life: learn how to sing and start a band.”
