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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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Michael Stipe
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: January 4
Actor
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Peace Activist
Record Producer
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Decatur
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John Michael Stipe
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More quotes by Michael Stipe
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
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
Sometimes before we make a record I go back and listen to a few. It's equally humbling and uplifting.
Michael Stipe
I stopped taking drugs [in 1983]. There were a lot of things that led up to it. One thing was that a lover died. An ex of mine died in a car wreck and I was really trashed when I found out about it and I couldn't cry. I woke up the next morning and I said, That's it, so I quit then. It was horrible.
Michael Stipe
I'm just not that fascinating a person to have had all those lives that I've written about.
Michael Stipe
I went through a period where I was really tired of seeing and reading about myself.
Michael Stipe
When we first started, we were a band from Athens and that was so off the map.
Michael Stipe
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
At the [teenage] time, I did have an inkling of my sexuality. And I had an inkling that I was different from other people in ways beyond my sexuality. But I didn't get into music because I thought, Oh, these people will understand me.
Michael Stipe
They always want me to play myself and that's a big snooze.
Michael Stipe
There is always something of the writer in the work but I don't think Melville had to be swallowed by a whale to write a great novel. If I had lived the lives of all the characters of the songs I've written, that would truly be an extraordinary story.
Michael Stipe
It was '86. We were a big enough name and we had enough cache that MTV wanted to play us, so, along with Michael Jackson and Madonna, they played our upside-down, black-and-white, backward, single unedited footage of a rock quarry with orange letters over the top of it and called it art.
Michael Stipe
There was never a golden era of American radio as far as I can tell.
Michael Stipe
Frankly I'm not great with heroin addicts. I tried heroin, but it was by accident. I'm not great with that level of substance abuse.
Michael Stipe
My feeling is that labels are for canned food... I am what I am - and I know what I am.
Michael Stipe
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
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
Our generation was supposed to be about trying to deal with nuclear concerns and environmental disasters.
Michael Stipe
I'm tired of being this solemn poet of the masses, the enigma shrouded in a mystery.
Michael Stipe
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
