Michael Stipe, R.E.M., and the Anxiety of Influence

Michael Stipe’s “Infinity Mirror.” (Photo: Toby Tenenbaum/Brooklynvegan.com)

There was a time when art was cool—books, movies, music, paintings, sculptures—and you could love what you loved, proudly and without reservation. For me, as a child and then a teen from a small town, I wanted to pull all of it into me, to make it part of who I was or who I was becoming or who I wanted to be. And this feeling stayed with me right up until I made it to graduate school. Critical theory killed me, or nearly did, because it made it wrong to think was cool. Harold Bloom’s was a wrecking ball. “What we used to call ‘imaginative literature’ is indistinguishable from literary influence,” he writes in the preface. Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” was another. “To give an Author