The moment Michael Stipe wanted to quit music altogether: “I was huddled in the back corner”
We’re sold a lot of nonsense as children. Perhaps the biggest load of nonsense we were shifted, and is in fact being peddled even harder today, is that if you reach the dizzy heights of entertainment fame, all of your problems will go away.
It was a lesson Michael Stipe had to harshly learn, which was, of course, untrue.
No matter how hard the likes of Stipe or whatever talented musicians’ fame has gobbled up, they have crashed, it’s still a parasitical outlook within society. The baseless life of influencers has reignited a societal idea that exposure and stardom equals outright happiness. It’s undone years of social consciousness that many tormented artists have had to suffer for, and often leaves me bleakly demoralised about the future of entertainment.
Yes, you may be questioning just why I use Michael Stipe as an example over many high-profile musicians and entertainers who have suffered from the perils of fame and excess, but his experience speaks to something more acute.
You see, Stipe was not the sort of artist inspired by fame. Unlike, say, Britney Spears, Stipe’s suffering didn’t come from the realisation that fame wasn’t all it cracked out to be. Through the success of REM and Stipe’s songwriting, he became an adored figure in 1980s music. Suddenly, through the lens of his own creative passion, he became a widely publicised figure, not necessarily fit for the highly pressurised demands of fame.
Come the release of their second album Reckoning in 1984, it compounded and pushed Stipe to a position where he considered quitting altogether. He said, “I distinctly remember a conversation with my band in the van where I was having a complete meltdown.”
Adding, “It was 1984, I think, and I was huddled in the back corner of our van and saying, ‘I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I can’t do this.’ I didn’t want to play any more shows. I just wanted to stop. I went through this difficult time when we were making our third record where I kind of lost my mind. That’s when the bulimia kicked in. And that’s when I got really freaky.”
Stipe’s battle with bulimia was almost the tipping point in what had been a struggle over a period of years for the musician. Despite what the pursuit of the career may have told him and all of us as a society, the reality of his success was far different to what he expected. Pressure to create something commercially viable, along with fulfilling his own creative intentions, became overwhelmingly crippling, while underneath, a desire to remain aesthetically and culturally relevant manifested itself.
It’s proof that the pursuit of dreams and, in particular, fame is never as rosy as we might imagine. But of course, like most great artists, intent on creating a legacy stronger than flash-in-the-pan fame, Stipe fought back against his struggles and leaned into his art to cope.
Six years later, the band released what many consider their magnum opus in Out Of Time, validating Stipe’s strength to not give in.
