Words Are Enough: Michael Stipe

The work of Michael Stipe has been variously described as "art-fuck", boring, incomprehensible, lazy, nonsensical, pretentious, vague and worthless. Knowing that this is how rock reviewers tend to respond to deeply emotive and evocative songwriting, and somewhat identifying with those epithets anyway, I (among countless others) embrace Stipe's lyrics with, well, arms of love, and have held tight for 26 years.

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Vague? Try "chameleonic." Stipe is equally at home in Plaintive Country ("At night I drink myself to sleep and pretend I don't care that you're not here with me"), bookish prattle ("I looked for it and I found it / Miles Standish proud") and lyrical pastiche (we all know the words to "It's the End of the World As We Know It", right?).

And as for "boring," the loins of millions of '80s children beg to differ: when he wants to, nobody mind-fucks like Michael. As Jefferson Holt himself acknowledged, with Stipe's lyrics, "There's always a little something going on below the waist." Consider Reckoning's flawless "Pretty Persuasion":

"Cannot shuffle in this heat / It's all wrong / Cannot wear that on your sleeve / It's all wrong / She's got pretty persuasion / He's got pretty persuasion / God damn / Pure confusion"

Or, more than a decade later, "You," from 1995's Monster:

Did I dream you were a tourist / In the Arizona sun? / I can see you there with luna moths / And watermelon gum / I woke up in the sleeping bag, / With nowhere else to run / You're standing in the bathroom / Telling me it's all in fun.

In short, you can keep "I Want Your Sex."

The fractured naturalism of Stipe's imagery is at once the finest and most frustrating aspect of his lyrics. His more linear drivin'-and-cryin' songs (the aforementioned "Don't Go Back to Rockville," for one) are great college-radio fare, aching with rue but still playfully countrified as all of these Jaw-juh boys' tracks prior to Monster. Still, "cubist" is another snooty adjective often applied to Stipe, and it's true: few lyricists even approach his ability to paint a picture with words, to churn up a complicated mire of emotions, to articulate everything that's impossible to put into a sentence that scans. He is especially deft with complexity of feeling, confusion, compunction and the bittersweet. The excruciating "Country Feedback" is nothing less than a precise expression of helpless pain, the more agonized for Stipe's halting, sonorous delivery:

This flower's scorched, this film is on / On a maddening loop / These clothes / These clothes don't fit us right / And I'm to blame / It's all the same / It's all the same ... A hotline, a wanted ad / It's crazy what you could have had.

The crazy thing is how bad Stipe's words hurt when you're in the right (or wrong) mood. In all his art-fucking, pretentious, vague glory, Stipe is the guy who keeps writing songs about you, whether you like it or not, and I hope he never stops.

— Eve Adams (ultimaluz at gmail dot com)