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My feeling is that labels are for canned food... I am what I am - and I know what I am.

Michael Stipe

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Michael Stipe
Age: 65
Born: 1960
Born: January 4
Actor
Composer
Film Producer
Guitarist
Musician
Peace Activist
Record Producer
Restaurateur
Singer
Singer-Songwriter
Television Actor
Decatur
Georgia
John Michael Stipe
JMS
Stinky
Canned
Labels
Food
Feeling
Feelings

More quotes by Michael Stipe

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I was vulnerable every day. Every night that I stepped on stage I was laying myself open.
Michael Stipe
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And I don't expect anyone can bring about a revolution in the way that Bob Dylan did - and really didn't - in the 1960s.
Michael Stipe
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Peter was sick of being a pop star, the guitar god, and so he decided to teach himself other instruments. Among the instruments that he picked up was the mandolin.
Michael Stipe
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For every great thing we did, there is a very public moment of falling on our faces. But everything that came through us as a band was a distinct vision of R.E.M.
Michael Stipe
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By the time I was 18, I had absorbed punk rock from America, Britain, and the West Coast. All of it was so dark and weird and different and cool and hot and sexy and rebellious. It was a fist-in-the-air kind of rebellion that I wasn't getting from the '70s mainstream.
Michael Stipe
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In fact, a lot of critics seemed to consider R.E.M. the first American music since the '60s to break out on its own and develop a stand-alone sound.
Michael Stipe
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I went through a period where I was really tired of seeing and reading about myself.
Michael Stipe
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I remember traffic jams Motor boys and girls with tans Nearly was and almost rans I remember this, this ... At the edge of the continent
Michael Stipe
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The artwork for the record is kind of an homage to that. It's a collage, which rhymes with homage, I just realized. It's an homage to this kind of almost like a teenager's idea of what the future might look like, if he were using a Xerox machine and cut-and-pasting it together. Which is exactly what we did to come up with the artwork.
Michael Stipe
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Punk-rock records came out and you bought whatever you could find. But Devo didn't happen for another three years. Sex Pistols didn't tour the States until '78. At that time, for me, it was really about CBGB, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, the Ramones, and Television.
Michael Stipe
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For me, as a music fan, visuals kind of steal away the purity of the song. My instinct is not to provide a visual to go with a piece of music. But here's MTV. It's really powerful.
Michael Stipe
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I've never written a song that's hopeless. I'm not a hopeless person. I'm crazily optimistic. I crazily see the good in people. I crazily see the way out of a terrible situation. I crazily try to be the diplomat. If there are two warring factions in my life, I want them to agree to disagree at the very least.
Michael Stipe
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There tend to be two different drives that lead young people toward music. One is that music provides an escape it takes you away from the unhappiness or torture of where you are and makes you feel less alienated-you believe there is a place you fit in somewhere else. The other is a sort of transcendent, spiritual feeling in the purity of music.
Michael Stipe
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Sometimes I'm confused by what I think is really obvious. But what I think is really obvious obviously isn't obvious.
Michael Stipe
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They always want me to play myself and that's a big snooze.
Michael Stipe
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I was a teenager, we were pretty much fully indoctrinated, thanks to sexual scare tactics. I remember so many public-health commercials with a B-actor in a fake alley background warning us to use protection or telling us the only real safe choice was abstinence. We were highly frightened of sex from day one. There was no free-swinging '90s.
Michael Stipe
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If you disagree with me, fine! Because that's the great thing about America, we can disagree!
Michael Stipe
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By nature I will find hope in everything. Even if it's the most incredibly hopeless situation or circumstance. That's just me... I'll never be able to see things any other way.
Michael Stipe
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I was doing that [a collaboration with Kurt Cobain] to try to save his life. The collaboration was me calling up as an excuse to reach out to this guy. He was in a really bad place.
Michael Stipe
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The song Sing for the Submarine presents my dream world, which is way different from my waking world. It's set in the future and it's post-apocalyptic.
Michael Stipe