[Verse 1]
Your eyes are burning holes through me
I'm gasoline
I'm burning clean
Twentieth century, go to sleep
That is obscene
That is obscene
[Chorus]
You are the star tonight
Your sun electric outta sight
Your light eclipsed the moon tonight
Electrolite
You're out of sight
[Verse 2]
[Chorus]
You are the star tonight
Your sun electric outta sight
Your light eclipsed the moon tonight
Electrolite
You're out of sight
[Violin Solo]
[Verse 3]
If you ever want to fly
Mulholland Drive
Up in the sky
Stand on a cliff, and look down there
Don't be scared
You are alive
You are alive
[Chorus]
You are the star tonight
Your sun electric outta sight
Your light eclipsed the moon tonight
Electrolite
You're out of sight
[Verse 4]
Twentieth century, go to sleep
We won't blink
Your eyes are burning holes through me
I'm not scared
I'm out of here
[Outro]
I'm not scared
Not the only R.E.M. song to talk about Hollywood.
Except here Stipe is not being critical of it. He’s singing a sweet lullaby for the old dream-like world under him, pretending he’s one of the great stars from a time now gone.
All the actors referred to in this verse stared in car-related movies, fitting with the song’s trope:
Martin Sheen in the crime road movie Badlands…
…Steve McQueen, a known race car enthusiast, in Les Mans…
…and James Dean in the über classic Rebel without a cause, featuring the famous chicken game scene. Dean, by the way, died in an automobile accident, adding a tad of bitterness to the lines.
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/watch?v=u7hZ9jKrwvo
In 2006 Michael Stipe wrote: “The ‘really deep’ in the lyric is, of course, self-deprecating towards attempting at all, in a pop song, to communicate any level of depth or real insight.”
In an essay about Mulholland Drive and this song, Stipe wrote:
I really wanted to write a farewell song to the 20th century.
As the year 2000 dawned, all eyes were on the 21st century – the new possibilities it could bring, the excitement of living in the future! The 20th century almost slipped away unnoticed in all the excitement. But to forget it would be to do it a disservice – though it saw some of the most devastating wars in human history and new, more terrible methods of committing atrocities, it also saw a vast improvement in the plight of the common man and woman. Communication advanced from very basic telegraph messages to a torrent of audio, video and text; transport went from rudimentary petrol engines to interplanetary travel; for the first time, universal suffrage saw billions of people given a small but vital say in the way the world was run.
“Electrolite” celebrates the popular culture that bound all these hopes and dreams and brought the world together as one.
New Adventures in HiFi, on which this song appeared, was released in 1996, in the closing years of the 20th century. There’s a valedictory quality to the song.
The last line on the last song on the album. Again there’s that valedictory (goodbye) feeling.
This line was notably misinterpreted for a solid 25 years, as Michael Stipe’s pronunciation made it sound like “Plasticine”, a brand of modeling clay. However, the liner notes of the 2021 reissue eventually revealed that the actual word is “Pleistocene.”
The Pleistocene epoch was a period of prehistory which spanned from around 2.58 million to 11,700 years Before Present, encompassing events such as the last ice age and the advent of humanity. The reference to such an archaic point in time ties in with the song’s references to the impending end of the 20th century and third millennium: Stipe knows that just five years after the song’s release, people will look back on the preceding one hundred years as if they were ancient history.
The reference to prehistoric earth also obliquely plays off of the gasoline imagery in the preceding lines, as gasoline and other petroleum products are commonly referred to as “fossil fuels” due to being sourced from the compressed remains of ancient life.
Life is limitless, so if I want to drive down Mulholland Drive for no reason other than to feel the power of old Hollywood below and all the big dreams that came and went, well, I’m alive aren’t I?
Mulholland Drive is a notoriously steep and curvy road, famous as a great driving road (i.e. flying).
It also seems apropos to quote David Thomson paraphrasing Vladimir Nabokov in the introduction to Beneath Mulholland:
Beneath Mulholland there are bodies buried:
Ghosts, spooks, those flaming images so pale and filmy,
The intimates we never met. O how they stir,
Fretful, sleepless, and how steadily fond parents
School their young — it’s only an earthquake, dearest,
5.0 or 5.1.