Courtney Love, River Phoenix, The New York Dolls: Who is REM’s 1994 classic ‘Crush with Eyeliner’ really about?
Transparency is a songwriter’s worst enemy.
While some are content to make the subjects of their songs rather overt, others seem to relish in the mystery and interpretation of it all. Carly Simon, for instance, got a good few decades of publicity off the back of people theorising the subject of ‘You’re So Vain’. In the alternative rock world, Michael Stipe achieved a similar feat.
It was during the tail-end of the 1980s that REM’s unique brand of alt-rock began to gain the kind of mainstream traction that it so richly deserved, elevating Michael Stipe to the position of being one of America’s defining songwriters throughout the 1990s. Acting in defiance of the complacency, bubblegum pop, and macho-centric mainstream rock of the era, Stipe’s output stretched across countless different avenues of inspiration. One song of his that has raised more questions than most, though, is ‘Crush with Eyeliner’.
Released as a single in 1995, the third to be taken from the mesmerising Monster, released a year prior, ‘Crush with Eyeliner’ wasn’t earmarked as a big hit by Warner Bros, but it nonetheless became a staple of college radio and the alternative airwaves. Inevitably, then, the question soon came over the identity of the song’s subject, and there were multiple contenders.
For starters, it is worth mentioning that ‘Crush with Eyeliner’ arrived after an extensive period of inaction from Stipe, who fell into a deep depression following the death of actor River Phoenix, who was a close friend and musical comrade of Stipe’s. Given that this was one of the first tracks the REM frontman wrote in the wake of that death, it is not overly egregious to suggest that the actor was in his mind when carving out the lyrical content of the song.
Another contender is Courtney Love, who has affirmed in various interviews that she “knows” the song was written about her. In fairness to the Hole musician, she and Stipe fostered a close relationship during the 1990s, particularly in the wake of Kurt Cobain’s suicide in 1994. In fact, Stipe even accompanied Love to the MTV Movie Awards that year.
For his part, though, Michael Stipe has denied that either Love or Phoenix were at the centre of that 1994 track. Instead, he has declared that the song was intended as a homage to the New York Dolls.
Admittedly, that subject does tend to fit with the theming of the track, particularly given the New York punk pioneers’ penchant for eyeliner. An essential group in the development of the punk and alternative rock landscape that first inspired REM, the Dolls weren’t quite glam rock, but they weren’t quite anything else either. With their abrasive, high-energy output and flamboyant stage get-up, they were unlike anything else on the scene at that time.
In the wake of records like ‘Personality Crisis’ and ‘Jet Boy’, budding young musicians across the United States, and even on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, found inspiration to experiment with their output, spurring the emergence of punk rock. Without the New York Dolls, then, there would be no REM.
There is, of course, the possibility that both River Phoenix and Courtney Love had some part to play in the inspiration of the REM classic, but the most obvious solution seems to be the one that Stipe himself has given credit to on multiple occasions: the New York Dolls are the subject of ‘Crush with Eyeliner’.
