Michael Stipe - Interviewed by Christopher Bollen
(via interviewmagazine)
…
Bollen: What happened in 1983?
Stipe: I stopped taking drugs. 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. A bunch of people died around that time and she was one of them. I wrote a song about her-that was when I still did pull from autobiographical material. I didn’t really have my voice until after that. Also, AIDS had landed and I was terrified. I was very scared, just as everyone was in the ’80s. It was really hard to be sexually active and to sleep with men and with women and not feel you had a responsibility in terms of having safe sex. And this was the Reagan years, where they were talking about internment camps for HIV-positive people and people with AIDS. The straight community was freaking out because, in their minds, this was a “gay” disease, and bisexual people were passing AIDS from the gay community to the straight community.
Bollen: Do you think your development as a songwriter was heavily influenced by Reagan and AIDS? There is definitely an apocalyptic subtext to your songs.
Stipe: No, I think my apocalyptic feelings went deeper than that. I’m really at peace with how afraid I am. [laughs]
Bollen: What are you afraid of?
Stipe: I’m afraid of everything. I’m not a naturally courageous person, but AIDS really brought it home. I mean, it was right when I was 21 years old and came to New York and saw the first billboard about AIDS. It was like, “Holy shit. This is for real.” It was scary. It was right at the time when I was in a band. Suddenly there were all these people who were available to me-men and women-and I was really having fun. But then there came responsibility and feeling afraid and being afraid to get tested, because you couldn’t get tested anonymously. It was so fucked up… READ MORE
