A Belated Birthday Wish to Michael Stipe
Celebrating the stalwart R.E.M. frontman’s 65th from the Kingdom of Outsiders
When we were children, we were all poets, but our poetry was not built out of words; it was our sense of otherness.
Then we found that there was nothing as sexy as finding someone who had read the same books as you.
Michael Stipe has just turned 65. To understand why this is an important occasion, please consider two things:
Once upon a time, there was a nation in diaspora called The Kingdom of Outsiders.
Next: Information was once an instrument of grace, not a utility.
We are children of the 1970s, lonely and loud, but the luckiest generation: (just) too young to be drafted, and (just) old enough to be the final generation to experience silence. (Only in a map-less land can you really discover yourself.)
It starts here:
To know this feeling: To be 13 or 14 and sitting cross-legged on the floor of your den, alone in a good way (it feels good to be alone); and alone in a terrifying way (will I always be alone?). There is Lipton (or maybe Swanson) in your bald tummy and still 10 hours until the too-cold-to-dream silence of the bus stop. And you watch The Naked Civil Servant and think, someone else out there is watching this. Somewhere, at this exact moment, another never-kissed teenager that gym fills with terror is watching this, and they could be my friend.
I am drinking information; if I drink enough, I will find you.
You are a child of the 1970s and a prince in the Kingdom of Outsiders, though you may not know that yet. Information was your flag, your flare. Information was precious. Information, mundane or exotic, was once the esoteric language of lonely children. Information was glee because it could yield rare jewels.
Information was the currency of identity.
We collected it because it made us fell less alone. We collected it in the hopes that it would allow us to send up a flare: We are here. I am interested in this, this, and this: I am here.
I did not seek to be different than all the others that I shared homerooms or sagged-seat schoolbus benches with, I swear; I just felt it, felt it in the same way I felt nearsighted or felt rashes when I hugged the cat or felt frightened of burglars when I heard the old house breathe.
I loved the Pan Am Building.
I loved reading about World’s Fairs.
I loved when the 4:30 Movie showed Singin’ in the Rain.
I loved these things for myself, before I had any sense that these things might create a currency which I could exchange for a flag to fly and find friends.
I was a resident of the Kingdom of Outsiders. I knew this instinctually, but did not yet know it was a Kingdom.
Soon, maybe when I was about 11 or 12, I realized the things I had been collecting in my mind, heart and bookshelf could be keys to identity.
Information was not always ubiquitous, it once was precious, yes? Information and knowledge were grains of sand, luminescence from the sea foam; it was that exotic. It was not everything at your fingertips and inside your head in an instant. (That has its’ advantages, but it also turns a planetarium dome into a white-washed ceiling, and it can never turn back.)
Once, knowledge was precious, and it could be acquired to arm yourself against loneliness. or even better, acquire an identity which might one day attract another seeker, another nonconformist in the age of Puka and Peasant Blouses, Farrah and Frampton.
Knowledge and information were not always a featureless winter white sky, without depth or finesse. Knowledge and information were once the sparkling high blue of a college football sky, or the shocking, impossible pinks of a halleluiah sunset.
(Imagine the sadness of a world where knowledge is stripped of mystery!)
Information was once sexy, not sex.
A handful of artefacts could give you the pride of identity. Once upon a time, you made a friend for life just because they had also heard of Klimt or The Goon Show, Marshal Efron or Albert Brooks, Rita Mae Brown or Bob and Ray. Libraries, record stores, PBS, the Late Late Show, every day they gave us clues, more flags to fly, more keys to the Kingdom of Outsiders.
Music, yes, Bowie/Bolan/Blue Öyster Cult Show Tunes were a big part of this, yes. Music was a mirror of our restlessness and curiosity, but it did not mirror us fully. Music was just one of the flags we would wave. While still in high school we listened to LPs of old radio shows and exchanged facts about Jewish Confederates, we traded cover-bent copies of Steal This Book and the Whole Earth Catalog, we tried to read Pound (and failed) and settled for deep words over diner fries about Dr. Strangelove, we defended Yoko and through her found Cage, I made a friend just because they, too, watched The Goodies. But we were still in diaspora, still a kingdom in exile; even while screaming through Bleecker Street on a summer’s day just before college began, we could still count the Princes and Princesses we knew on the fingers of two hands. And although this otherness was precious, it was still lonely; when would we find ourselves in a whole room full of people who had watched I, Claudius, or had stood in front of a mirror pretending to be Joel Grey in Cabaret?
As we exploded — almost literally — into the faux adulthood of college, this fool’s gold of fake independence, we found many more of us. So we followed the bird crumbs and freed balloons of identity. We converted the knowledge we had accrued on all those lonely nights into a box of flares and we sent these into sky, and attracted other wide-eyed seekers.
Around the time we met (I met Michael Stipe in the autumn of 1982; I was 20, he was 22), the constellations brightened, and other members of the Kingdom became visible, and greeted us with smiles sly and shy.
My god, it was an explosion of clues and flares, the friends who assembled under the flag you waved, the clues and seeds we broadcast across the sidewalks and the sinking, stinking, sweating piers of the great smashed city and the diner lands in between! This was the kind of thrill of recognition that I still don’t have words to describe.
We talked of Tommy Tune and Brautigan, Big Star and Wim Wenders, and the smoky windows of tobacco stained Grand Central, have you stared at them, too, and heard Gershwin and Patti in your head?
The Whitney, Eric Mendelsohn and Bobby Neuwirth, Robert Frank and McNeil Lehrer,
Quentin Crisp and Lance Loud, Linda Ellerbee until the end of time.
Robert Frank and Woody Guthrie, 13th Street where Iris Steensma strolled,
Did she stare through the steamed windows of Disco Donut like we did?
And this is how we ate our early twenties: We made lists of every river we crossed, and we shared these, and we noticed neon signs all over the country and exchanged notes about them.
This was our world, we sent up flares, they formed constellations, we stood in the pure blue light of those stars and waited for our princes and princesses.
This was our life in the Kingdom of Outsiders,
And you were the prince of princes, the one who raised the highest flag, and said, “All who felt alone but burning with curiosity, you may join me here, you will find a peer.”
And we found ourselves all in one room. We were there because of you and your band.
Teenage vulnerabilities stretching into adulthood: This is who we were in our 20s, because we had been formed by the Kingdom of Outsiders in our teens; and it is precisely this feeling that R.E.M. translated into sound in the 1980s. R.E.M. not only consolidated the college rock revolution that had been bubbling since the late 1970s, they became its town crier, its totem, its flag and its flag carrier. More importantly, yes, more importantly even than their extraordinary, resonant, ringing music (familiar yet explosive and rich), R.E.M. spoke for this giant and influential constituency who said, “We are different but user friendly; we are charismatic but full of the quirks of the bullied; we are the bullied, triumphant; we are the army of the charmed disenfranchised; we have taken every insult that has been shouted at us — Hey, Faggot! Hey, Devo! Hey, Punk Rock! Hey, Blondie! — and turned it into pride.”
As soon as we found our friends, as soon as the long-accrued flares of information and identity lit our acned and frightened and pompous faces, the insults were converted into armor.
Only the rarest artist achieves this: Only the rarest artist achieves us.
Many artists become gods, but how many artists make us into gods, empower our flaws, encourage us to wear our vulnerabilities on the outside?
And Stipe’s charismatic quirk felt like home. And we moved forward in our lives, emboldened and informed by the fact that we were no longer in diaspora.
Michael Stipe and R.E.M. waved a flag: “Sensitive Souls, Freaks and Geeks, welcome here.”
I am still in that land, but never again alone.
Happy Birthday, Michael Stipe, albeit belatedly.
(Dedicated to those who were there: Laura Levine, Katherine Dieckmann, Julie Panebianco, Tom Gilroy and Steve Fallon, to name just five. I also dedicate this to Deb Sprague and Kara Tucker, who fought far longer and harder battles to fly their flags in the Kingdom of Outsiders.)
- The Roots of Sunn O))) - April 15, 2026
- The Very Possibly True Origin Story of Geese - March 20, 2026
- Revisiting My Words on Springsteen - February 9, 2026
You May Also Like
-
June 8, 2018 -
October 30, 2019 -
