You - Intellectual

[Verse 1]

Let the sun beat through the clouds

Let me kiss you on the mouth

All my childhood toys with chew marks in my smile

Let me hold your syrup close to mine

And I want you, Hollywood and Vine

And I want you like the movies, touch me now

[Chorus]

I love you crazy, just keep on

I love you madly, just keep on

You wipe my lips, you turn me on

My attentions are turned to you

[Verse 2]

Did I dream you were a tourist in the Arizona sun?

I could see you there with Luna moths and watermelon gum

I woke up in the sleeping bag with nowhere else to run

You're standing in the bathroom telling me it's all in fun

[Chorus]

I love you crazy, just keep on

I love you madly, just keep on

You wipe my lips, you turn me on

My attentions are turned to you

[Verse 3]

I can whisper in your ear, I can write a calendar year

I can ring around your Saturn smile, a trial balloon

I have walked the tension wire line

And I learned to disrespect the signs

And I want you like a Pisces rising, key the move

[Chorus]

I love you crazy, just keep on

I love you madly, just keep on

You wipe my lips, you turn me on

My attentions are turned to you

[Outro]

You

From a fan Q&A with Michael Stipe:

I remember you introducing [“You”] as a ‘boy song’ – why was the main character wanting to hold his ‘syrup’ close to someone?
I’m guessing I said it was a boy song from the stage, around the time I was introducing “Tongue” with, ‘this song has tits,’ and just evening the field. I do think I wrote it to a man but no one real or in particular, just guy vibe. And syrup? C’mon!

There’s probably an erotic way to express the literal messiness of sex, this is not it. Again: a great turn of phrase, but an unsettling one.

Actias luna, or Luna moth, is a lime-green Nearctic Saturniid moth which is one of the largest moths found in North America.

“You” is a song that could be sexy, but Peter Buck’s pulsing electric guitar lines continually telegraph unease and dread.

And then there are Michael Stipe’s lyrics. They often start with a sexy or erotic idea and then veer into the uncomfortable, the obsessed.

In the first verse our narrator wants to kiss the one he’s infatuated with on the mouth– so far so good. But then that erotic declaration turns to the Freudian-tinged, nightmare imagery of kissing turning to mauling (“all my childhood toys with chew marks in your smile”).

The intersection of Hollywood Blvd. and Vine St. is one of Los Angeles’s most famous intersections. Historically it was an early hub of movie and radio production; by the ‘60s most of the production had moved elsewhere, but the intersection retained a glamorous/nostalgic patina.

On an album fixated with media and authenticity and sex, it seems fitting that Stipe would invoke an iconic bit of Hollywood history in this song about obsessive, unrequited lust. It’s doubly fitting that, in 1994 when the song was released, that section of Hollywood had fallen into disrepair and was particularly sleazy–so the reality of Hollywood & Vine vs. the romantic idea of that intersection are at total odds.

Two years later, Stipe would use the romantic mythology of a different legendary Los Angeles thoroughfare–Mulholland Drive–on another album closer, “Electrolite”.

This brings up imagery like a kidnapping – a sleeping bag isn’t a permanent place to rest, but having nowhere else to run sounds like the narrator has been taken away somewhere. The other, saying ‘it’s all in fun’, could be trying to downplay the seriousness of what they’ve done.