When Fame Goes Underground

Quite arguably, R.E.M., since its formation in 1980 in the college town of Athens, Georgia, has become the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed rock band in the United States. That is a heady accolade for four fellows who merely set out to be one more "underground band" in the post-punk Athens scene.

Of course, the 1981 independent recording of "Radio Free Europe," subsequently followed by R.E.M.'s legendary debut album Murmurs (1983), gave "those with ears to hear" clues about what was to come. The band's asymmetric folk-rock, driven by an irrepressible passion and a lyrical impressionism bordering on the avant garde, broke all the rules about what was supposed to work for pop music.

A graph charting the history of R.E.M.'s record sales looks like the steps ascending a steep pyramid - remarkably, each album has met with incrementally greater success. In 1987, the band released a radio-friendly Top Ten single, "The One I Love," helping Document to become the first R.E.M. album to sell a million copies. The follow-up, Green , gave birth to another popular single, "Stand," and with it a broader based audience that extended well beyond the college-radio crowd and the alternative press that had served the band so faithfully in its early years.

However, it was their seventh album, Out of Time, that elevated their popularity to a completely different level. Out of Time sold a million copies in its first 10 days of release, then camped out for several months on the top of the music charts.

Ironically, the first person to crank down the volume on the hype over the band's success is John Michael Stipe, the voice behind the sound. Once describing R.E.M. as a "bunch of minor chords with some nonsense thrown on top," the Atlanta-born Stipe treats the cult of fame as if it were the plague. Certainly, he wishes for the band's work to have as broad a listening audience as possible. Yet he refuses to make his own personality the medium for his songs; in that regard, perhaps he is the antithesis of Madonna.

Stipe rarely speaks about his own private life and incessantly denies that his lyrics are autobiographical. "Writing the songs and performing them in front of live audiences already is revealing enough of my persona," he explains.

What little Stipe makes known of his personal life is that, as the son of a career military officer, he grew up "on the road." The fact that he is from both nowhere and everywhere adds to the mystique that surrounds his story. While enrolled at the University of Georgia as an art student, he befriended guitarist Peter Buck, who at the time was the manager of a used record store. They soon hooked up with two other students at the university, bassist Mike Mill and drummer Bill Berry, who had attended the same high school in Macon, Georgia. On April 5, 1980, only a few months after their initial rehearsal, the four made their concert debut - without a name - at a free show in an old, converted Episcopal church in which Stipe and Buck were then living.

With no market out there awaiting them, they created an alternative club circuit that catered to fans disillusioned with the formulaic arena-rock spectacles of the era. Playing endless strings of nights in front of 20 to 50 people paid off with the allegiance of devoted fans. Though not intended as self-identification, Stipe's lyrics for "These Days" nonetheless express the attraction of R.E.M.'s message to a generation disappointed by the broken promises of materialism and individual advancement: "We are young despite the years/We are concern/We are hope despite the times."

More important, Stipe walks the talk. He has worked with Greenpeace to stop the production of toxic wastes and nuclear weapons materials, become an important voice in the animal rights movement, spoken out loudly on behalf of land rights for Native Americans, pushed voter registration drives in the South, and lobbied for the cessation of U.S. miliary intervention in Central America. Additionally, his non-profit film company, C-00, produces creative public service announcements on AIDS, racism, and homelessness.

Despite this political résumé of activism, Stipe is no self-righteous ideologue. In fact, the decidedly self-effacing manner he revealed during our conversations frequently brought to mind a few particular catchy lines from "Losing My Religion": "Every whisper/every waking hour/I'm choosing my confessions/Oh no, I've said too much/I haven't said enough."

An authentic prophet of justice, it has often been said, need recognize first his or her own vulnerability to participate in injustice. On that basis, Michael Stipe certainly is eligible for the role.

DAVID BATSTONE is founder of Central American Mission Partners, a professor of religion and culture at Santa Clara University, and the author, most recently, of New Visions for the Americas (Fortress Press, 1993).

David Batstone: How do you go about writing songs? Is there method to the madness?

Michael Stipe: There is very little method. lt all just seems to come together when the time is right. You would think after 12 years that we would finally have it down, but it just doesn't happen that way.

Batstone: Do you set out to articulate a specific message through your music or, more particularly, your lyrics?

Stipe: I am more able to survive if I do not continually try to dissect the work that we are putting out. I very much rely on my intuitions and how I am feeling than trying to think out a specific message that I want to communicate.

Batstone: Then it must drive you up a wall always to be asked by journalists and fans, "What were you trying to say in such-and-such a song?"

Stipe: Yeah, I would much prefer if they would come to me and say how they understood a certain song. I deeply believe that once a song is released to the public, it's as much theirs as it is mine. If they are able to see a meaning that I had not intended, it is certainly now part of the meaning of the song, for them, regardless of what I think about their perceptions.

I don't think music is just about words that are put to song. In other words, it is more than a rational thing. Music is a piece of art; it loses its power when it is broken down. If I listen to a Viennese concerto from the 17th century, its beauty and feeling are apparent to me though I know nothing about how it came to creation.

Batstone: It is fascinating that with a piece of classical music we often do not suppose that we must know the author or the intention of the author to appreciate it, whereas we do seem to be obsessed with the personality of the messenger in contemporary popular music.

Stipe: Though it had been building long before the '60s, in the pop art scene of Andy Warhol and his contemporaries we see reflected the American obsession with celebrities. But I really don't think that to understand or appreciate a good book it is first necessary to know who the author is. What you do need to know about the author is already contained in the work.

Batstone: Of course, there is another side. For instance, at different points of your songwriting career didn't you become so frustrated with the inability of the musical world to understand the meaning behind, say, "Flowers to Guatemala" and "Welcome to Occupation" that you began ghostwriting your own press releases? It appears you had a message in mind there, a condemnation of U.S. intervention in Central America, and you were not satisfied that the message was being received.

Stipe: I guess it is a bit of a paradox. lt seemed so obvious to me that those songs were about oppression, yet no one was getting it.

Batstone : What is the role of lyrics in a song, then? Though you do not want them to be seen as the be-all and end-all of the work, you do want them to have an impact at some level. And that effect is wrapped up in the meaning those words convey.

In that context, it is fascinating to chart the journey of R.E.M. In some of the earlier albums, it is difficult to make out any of the lyrics, even if one is making a real effort. But in the more recent albums, there seems to be a greater clarity of sound and an attempt at more straightforward images.

Stipe: What you are describing is a part of growing up. I am really embarrassed about the lyrics from the first three albums. Of course, they were written to correspond to the music that we were creating back then. But like the rest of our music the lyrics have grown in the process. Not to say that I have now mastered the art, but it is a craft that I have learned through practice.

Just as a writer would hate to have an essay that he or she wrote as a sophomore in high school held up as an example of their more mature work, I find it humbling that people are still looking at our early stuff as indicative of what we are trying to do today. Certainly, they can listen to that early stuff if they would like to; I find it difficult to go back to it, though.

Batstone: That is the difficulty of saying anything on a widely cultural level; if you do not use heavily politicized, ideological language, which in many respects has its own bankruptcy, then your message is often absorbed into the worldview of the interpreter. But if you do use politicized language, then you are put in a straitjacket.

Stipe: And once you are labeled as a political figure, the danger is that everything you write is interpreted through that lens. Even the simplest songs can be taken to be insidious. For instance, many people think that "Shiny, Happy People" was a cynical statement. But it really was meant to be a happy song, to say something positive. The same happened with "Get Up," which was never meant to express "get up and do something." It was truly meant to be upbeat.

For that reason, I really don't necessarily want to come across as someone who is "political." I am a musician who is simply trying to write good music. I am glad that we are seen as compassionate people, human beings that support a number of causes, publicly and privately. But basically I think that music and politics are like oil and water. Then again, whenever I say that, I turn around and contradict myself.

At least what I can say is that there are real limitations to the degree to which politics can be communicated through song. Of course, it is somewhat dependent on the style of music you adopt; rap can do a lot more with its structure than that made possible by pop music, even though artists like Billy Bragg, Natalie Merchant, and Peter Garrett do an exceptional job speaking politically through pop. That is something you cannot teach.

Batstone: I do want to be aware that we are using the notion of "politics" in a very restricted way. During the last two decades of conservative administrations in Washington, D.C., even the ways that we conceive of love and happiness - what they are and how we enter into them - became a form of politics, though at a very deep level. In that respect, I discover hidden within your "love songs" a hook that sneaks up and challenges me to take another look at how I understand and practice love and compassion. I might even call it subversive.

Stipe: Yes, and seeing it that way requires redefining politics to include a wider scope. There is an intense beauty to moving in a subversive way from within. I would say, however, that most artists, including myself, do not come to those places directly through a political consciousness.

We are all largely desensitized by cinematic shock to watch tragedy in an unemotional way. However, because of the privilege to travel, artists often see things that break the bubble surrounding our small world. That might lead some of us to criticize elements of culture that may pass by others unnoticed.

For instance, if you travel to areas of the country where there are Native American lands, you see the conditions of the reservations and how people are treated, observe children walking around without shoes. That makes you think. You cannot help reacting to a situation like that.

Batstone: And then you become a celebrity social critic!

Stipe: Right. My understanding is that what little we do is not extraordinary in the least. I really shy away from the media hype on entertainers and their causes. I just think it boils down to each person responding to the immediate needs that one meets everyday in their own lives.

Batstone: I was very impressed with the CD insert for Out of Time, particularly the cartoon work. One of the cartoons depicts the front facade of a building, with three steps leading into the lobby, and the caption reads, "When, after 75 years of use, the marble steps leading into the lobby of this building become worn, they are not replaced or rebuilt, but covered for protection with plates of corrugated iron."

What struck me about that imagery was that it reflected our modern ambivalence regarding history. Maybe that is one implication of being "out of time"?

Stipe: Though it's not an idea unique to me, I do think that the people who write history are the winners. In other words, limited interests tend to color the books that we read in school and the stories that get passed down from generation to generation. What we receive is often an appropriation of bits of history that suit a particular agenda, no matter how broad or specific that agenda might be. We rarely hear the story of those who were steamrolled by those agendas. The other factor of life in the 20th century, of course, is the minute-to-minute update of a powerful media that gives us a sense that history is what happened yesterday. And that is not going to change because, for better or worse, the media will be with us for the rest of our lives.

Batstone: Your work indicates that you have done some serious thinking about the dangers of denying memory. For instance, in the song "Cuyahoga" off the Pageant album, you address the tragedy of how Native Americans have been treated in this country with the lyrics, "Rewrite the book/Remove the pages.../Our father's father's father tried and erased the parts he didn't like."

Stipe: It seems that we always are tempted to run everything through our own experience. For example, until 1989 I firmly believed that U.S. intervention in Central America began in 1960, even though I had nothing on which to base that idea. Then I realized that 1960 was the year I was born and I had arbitrarily decided in my mind and in my study of Central American history to ignore everything that came before my birthday. That kind of attitude leads to real political problems.

Batstone: Whenever a society comes under authoritarian rule it often seems to fall to the artist to be the voice of memory and the dream-weaver of a subversive past.

Stipe: That can even be seen in Shakespeare, the notion of the performing arts playing an important role in the political life of the nation, even if it merely takes the form of mocking those who are in power. So there is an undeniable precedent for that type of activity. Memory is a combination of the fantastic and the real, and when it gets channeled it always has tremendous potential for either good or bad. I really don't think we can overestimate how important memory is to all of us. At the end of our lives, it is all we've got.

Batstone: For that reason, I fear that our contemporary culture suffers from a state of collective amnesia.

Stipe: That amnesia in the United States is probably a thing more of convenience than it is meant to be intentionally evil. We just do not want to admit to the things that we have brought onto ourselves, that we are responsible for.

Just look at the newspapers and it becomes obvious how we demonize events that seem to be out of our control, like the Falklands War or the whole Saddam Hussein debacle, rather than facing issues that are closer to home. We do not take responsibility for racial tension, problems of the homeless, women's rights, and the oppression of marginalized peoples generally throughout our country. lt is easier to point the finger at someone who is far away, who can easily be turned into a satanic figure.

Batstone: That denial also is maintained by fear. Several friends of mine who have suffered abuse as children speak of the fear of bringing those events out of denial, because there is no guarantee that there will be healing for the guilt and shame on the other side.

Stipe: We're essentially a brutal race! Actually, I do believe that there are many things intrinsic to the human nature that are good and positive. Yet, at the same time, education and a strong moral and ethical grounding are incredibly important in our development. I don't want to come off as a preacher here, but those are often the influences that prevent us from womping each other over the head with baseball bats everyday.

Batstone: Going back to your roots for a moment, the punk rebellion in the late '70s was an important influence on the early formation of R.E.M. Was punk not an intense dissatisfaction with the ways that life was explained in a middle-class bubble, a deconstructing, if you will, of the dream for more, bigger, and better?

Stipe: Probably in my teen-age years as a punk rocker I picked up on the energy of the movement more as a channel for my own feelings of rebellion. But in other respects punk was incredibly liberating. It was all about the freedom to experiment and make your own music: you didn't need a perfect voice. Literally, anybody could do it.

Batstone: I was amazed when I read somewhere that you had never written any music before R.E.M.

Stipe: I don't even think we wrote a real song until two years after we got together, when we came up with "Gardening at Night" [on Chronic Town]. We did have a catalog of maybe 40 songs by then, and they were building blocks for what we were later to produce. But I distinctively remember when we finished "Gardening" I thought to myself, "We have finally written a real song." I had never really felt that before.

Batstone: In following R.E.M.'s musical journey, it would be hard to miss the obvious transition and growth between the time of Fables of the Reconstruction and your subsequent album, Life's Rich Pageant. What was going on for the band at that time?

Stipe: At the time that Fables was being written, the band was probably at an all-time low. We weren't really certain what we were doing and where we should be going. I think the record really reflects that. By the time of Pageant, on the other hand, we had passed through that stage and were more sure of ourselves.

As far as the material goes, however, I think all of us feel that the music we wrote for Fables is probably the best songwriting we have done to date. But the experience of it was so bad that it took a lot of pain to produce.

Batstone: Doesn't melancholy often provide a very creative space? I think of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska.

Stipe: Certainly. As far as I'm concerned the blues represent some of the best that music has to offer. It serves as a catharsis for a tremendous amount of pain. Nebraska is brilliant. We're still waiting to write an album like that.

Batstone: Michael, how do you feel about live performances? The first time I went to a stadium rock concert was not until I was in my mid-20s. I remember being exhilarated by the energy but also overwhelmed by the fearful notion that 100,000 people were hinging on every word and every movement of the performer.

Stipe: It's just as frightening from up front. I distinctively remember the moment when I felt like I had a sufficient amount of power that I could really wreak havoc.

The whole gang mentality is quite awful. You put someone in a large room with a lot of people who have paid money to see them, amplify every sound, put lights on them, and keep it dark everywhere else, and people will be like moths and look only at the lights. It is a very unhealthy power dynamic. You have to be really careful with that kind of trust.

Batstone: It is not uncommon for the purists of the "alternative music" scene to feel somewhat betrayed by R.E.M., that you've sold out. How do you respond to that type of criticism?

Stipe: I think it comes from people who probably don't realize that we have grown up, while they wanted us to stay as we were. The hypocrisy they don't recognize is that they have grown up, yet are expecting us not to. "Purists" want a group to be wildly popular, very accessible, but very street. The notion of an "underground" band then becomes a contradiction.

I can say with a sense of integrity that we haven't bought into anything at all. We are continually trying to grow and keep fresh in our work, and feel a real freedom to move as we will.

Batstone: Recently I was reading a music journalist critique Ice-T for the violent images he uses in his lyrics. Ice-T basically responded, "Hey, I'm not creating a message; I am a mirror for the things you don't want to see."

His point is well taken, yet at some level it must be asked whether he is not more than simply a reflection for what is going on in his community but also, through his public image, a powerful voice of what should be or, if not that, at least a potentially negative model.

Stipe: I am sure there are some good reasons for him to put those images in his music. On the other hand, whenever it becomes an influence encouraging younger people to promote violence, then it has to be viewed critically. Though in many ways I don't like saying that, I do believe that people who are public figures have a degree of responsibility to their audience.

We all have to consider that very carefully whenever we make sweeping statements about things. Of course, that doesn't mean musicians have to act like they are running for office!

Batstone: Ice-T and a lot of other rappers explicitly and proudly write out of the experiences of their own community and ethnic heritage. For a number of reasons, most white people in this country do not typically think of themselves as coming out of an ethnic heritage, and if they do it goes little beyond reference to their family tree. Have you ever thought about whether you write out of any specific culture?

Stipe: Boy, that's a tough one. I suppose I consider myself a fiction writer. When I am writing music, I draw from every conceivable source, and not just what has been a part of my own experience. It's an insult to me when people insinuate that my material must always be autobiographical or that as a writer I cannot speak to anything outside of my experience. One of the greatest capacities of a good writer is to put yourself into the shoes of someone who you are not, or to put yourself into the midst of a situation that is experientially unknown, and somehow say something insightful from that place.

At the same time, however, the words are secondary to the melody itself. As I've said before, the feeling that comes out of a song is much more important than any analytical picking apart of its meaning. After all, at the end of the day, it is only a pop song!