Damn.
Totally, immediately immersive. Two seconds in, and you’re underwater.
Maybe there’s a torch song somewhere out there more feverishly evocative of pure, desperately unrequited feminine lust as felt in the lonely dead of night, but if so, probably best to just leave it well enough alone. Hard to believe, now, that this thing was melting the grilles off of boom boxes way back in 1992, sharing space on the charts with the likes of relics like Baby Got Back and Whitney Houston’s crooning of I Will Always Love You, the hit that launched a thousand bellowing Divas. This isn’t a song that belongs to an era. It doesn’t share a “sound”, or any particular place or time. It just is, all hot and bothered and fit to burst. They say it’s about lesbian longing, which I don’t know, maybe it is, but one things’s for sure, somebody else is dominating the one she wants, and she’d lie, cheat, steal and probably murder if it’d get her love object to kick that other worthless bastard to the curb. You can feel her frustration boiling over into something close to hatred:
That old dog has chained you up alright
Give you everything you need to live inside a twisted cage
Sleep beside an empty rage
I had a dream I was your hero
This is white hot. This is twelve million candlepower incandescent desire. You don’t play this in the morning. You don’t play it when you’re sober. You don’t play it in polite company. You don’t play it above ground, either – darkened basements only, preferably after midnight, and then you play it loud.
Maybe get a doctor’s note first.
the needlefish 