Word: stipe
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...called With the Food of Your Choice, I Will End Your Life Tonight, he gets the audience to suggest foods to be used in disturbingly intricate murder scenarios. As a member of Corky and the Juice Pigs, he performs rock parodies on Fox's Mad TV. His mumbling Michael Stipe is perfect, and his one-man duet between Neil Diamond and Stephen Hawking of You Don't Bring Me Flowers may be his best bit. Or at least his most offensive...
...faith is a guessing game. Oliver Stone publicly conscripts Tibetan "wrathful deities" to fend off his detractors; Courtney Love is said to be a practitioner, while Harrison Ford simply supports Tibetan freedom (his wife Melissa Mathison wrote Kundun's script). Composer Philip Glass, yes. REM singer Michael Stipe, maybe. And in one of the more peculiar occurrences along the Hollywood-Lhasa axis, action-film star and all-around surly guy Steven Seagal was recognized by the head of the venerable Nyingma Tibetan lineage as the reincarnation of a 15th century lama...
...relentless poppiness of much of the album begins to seem ironic when juxtaposed with such truly innovative, unnerving songs as the fifth track, "E-bow the Letter." This song is brimming over with lyrics; words literally spill from line to line. Stipe mesmerizingly free associates about how he can't understand "the star-thing," which seems to refer to the way young kids get fixated on their media heroes. "E-bow" has weight enough to cast the more poppy songs on the album into perspective; in the context of this song, all the various pop genres toyed with...
...roll heroes fit neatly into other cliches of popular music. The third track, "New Test Leper," is a low key ballad complete with the type of jangly acoustic guitar which seems to typify radio candy marketed towards teenage girls. On this track, and on the ballad "Be Mine," Stipe's voice takes on the sticky sweetness one would expect from Evan Dando, and his lyrics the groveling desperation of Matthew Sweet: "I want to be your Christmas tree...
...reason the issue of persona and role-playing becomes oddly important on this album is the extreme emphasis placed on Stipe's voice. Most songs seem engineered so as to push Stipe's vocals right up to the front of the music, with the instrumentals forming a more distant, solid layer of background noise. Stipe's style and diction has also changed somewhat from previous albums. He sports a breathy, melodic fullness, especially on the single "E-bow the Letter," which is a departure from the stylized, wavery thinness on which his career was built. Certain pronunciations also seem peculiar...