Why did Michael Stipe try to make REM “wallpaper music”?
The idea of music being background noise is a somewhat unfortunate reality in the world of short-form video and lifestyle soundtracking. “Vibes” is an arbitrarily thrown word that encapsulates a rather facile aesthetic of a particular environment or moment and the artistic sentiment within the song gets lost.
We all know this isn’t why musicians wake up in the morning. The goal isn’t just to provide a feeling but to provoke them and inspire engagement on a deeper level. With a career spanning 15 albums, REM, a band, pursued that aim doggedly. Regardless of your opinion, they’re a band who committed wholeheartedly to whatever genre they experimented with, be it new wave, folk round or grunge. Combined with the lyrical complexity of Michael Stipe, the band pressed forward with an artistic vision that aimed to achieve the aforementioned, creating art that engaged.
During a 1985 interview with Bill Holdship for Creem Magazine, Stipe spoke of a multi-layered approach to the record Fables Of The Reconstruction and the complexity of dealing with those expectations: “There’s this whole process you have to go through in the studio, using it as a tool, and it’s combined with this really deep, heartfelt, emotional desire to get across what it is you’ve created. I use that term ‘creative’ in its most base form”.
He added: “I’m not making any kind of claim to greatness or anything like that. I mean, you could create mudpies, and that would be great, too. But I think we really took quite a few chances on this record, some of the more obvious things being a string section and horns. I went into the studio knowing I wanted to have at least 16 different voices on the record, and there’s one song in particular that’s got at least four different ones on it”.
In a decade transitioning from analogue to digital, the fear of losing texture within the digital vortex would have been understandably daunting. With the rise of MTV and music demanding a multi-platformed approach to its release, a forward-thinking Stipe understood the requirement to temper expectations about the ways in which consumers listened to records.
Nonetheless, it was surprising to hear him refer to wallpaper as the band’s artistic intent: “My ideal music is the kind where I can be reading a book or washing the dishes and have this music playing in the background like wallpaper. And the best thing is that you can suddenly tune out what you’re doing, listen to part of the music, and it’ll come out at you and be very clear. With REM, it’s kind of like you can focus on one part or you can focus on another, and you can get all these different ideas or interpretations of what’s going on in the song. I like that. I kind of like the idea that people have to involve themselves in our music, even if it’s on a wallpaper level”.
Is an unusual approach to inciting active listening, but it’s undeniably forward-thinking. Of course, Stipe didn’t perhaps foresee the modern landscape of music consumption, where MTV and music videos have made way for thirty-second reels that foreground a song’s virality. With a rather dystopic leap being made within the thirty years since this interview, it would interesting to know what one of the sharpest lyrical minds would think about wallpaper music and whether it needs to be stripped off for something more appropriate.
