“Wonderwall” – Cat Power

Given that the Gallagher brothers from Oasis resented and despised each other even more than the members of the Eagles and Beatles combined, it’s easy to overlook how much they hated everyone else in the world, too. As with their spiritual forefathers, they had a knack for packaging bile, jealousy, and selfishness in musical camouflage so radio-friendly that it seemed natural to sing along.

What I love about Cat Power’s acoustic cover of Wonderwall is that it strips away the song’s indignant-frat-boy-anthem aspects and lays it bare as the rambling of a manipulative, delusional misanthrope who wants you to know that you’re completely worthless and hopeless, your life is –generally speaking– an existential sham, and your love for him is literally the only thing that justifies your continued consumption of oxygen on this planet.

No one understands the intricacies of romance quite like a bitter asshole.

“Addicted To Love” – Robert Palmer

Your lights are on
but you’re not home
your will is not your own

Robert Palmer’s original Addicted To Love was a smirking, grinding celebration of shameless desire that —in retrospect— seems like an absurdly calculated, on-the-nose bookend to his 1979 cover of Moon Martin’s Bad Case of Loving You. When coupled with its iconic, misogyny-chic video —powered by a quintet of swaying, empty-eyed, interchangeable sex-mimes— it was right up there with the Flock of Seagulls haircut, Don Johnson’s Miami Vice wardrobe, and Robert Downey Jr.’s painfully prescient performance in Less Than Zero as an evocative artifact of pop culture in the ’80s.

But when Florence Welch got her claws into the song, she rifled through its guts and found the affliction hiding within Palmer’s addiction. She took his taunting of a pathetic, cock-drunk lover, and without changing a word, made it a resigned recitation of weaknesses chanted into a judgemental mirror.

Dear Bedtime

[CONTENT ADVISORY: Don’t ask, just move along.]

In privately relating her deepest sexual desire, a woman recently apologized for boring me with something “too tame”, and I thought it would be nice to publicly (albeit anonymously) reassure her that I found it far from tame. Like so many before her, she underestimates my ability to appreciate the special little depravities of others.

The way I see it, I’m not sure there could be anything technically hotter than making a girl sit down and write a “thank you” card to her rapist, admitting that —while he wrecked her life and left her a cracked little shell in a moment of profoundly evil selfishness— the memory of his cock inside her is still what makes her cum the hardest. There are probably many things equally as hot, but surely not much that could truly surpass such an act.

There would just be something so hypnotically, beautifully horrific about watching her scratch the words on to the card stock in a halting, tear-sodden scrawl, sinking in the realization that she’s conveying her most damning secret to the man who forced it inside her in the first place. Giving him, in effect, a gift; something tangible that he can hold, a surface for his fingers to play upon, as they once played upon her. Introducing him at last to the truest, darkest offspring of their vile coupling, for him to nurture quietly in the shadows of his mind. Knowing in her heart and cunt that she’s sending her pain home to meet its Daddy.

And later, there would obviously be the intense satisfaction of pushing her up against the street-corner mailbox, my hand in her panties and teeth on her neck, as she slowly, torturously slid the envelope into the slot…

Seriously, girls: never forget that you’re all equally fucked-up in my eyes.

I stayed up all night looking at your blog and I realized just how much I can relate to it. I have only ever been with the man I married and have been happy and yet I look at all these photos of these women and the captions you include and I can’t help but think that is exactly what I want. You have a gift for words. I look forward for more.

I like the way you tell me you “have been happy,” as if you can already feel it slipping away. It must be quite something, to suddenly feel your feet trembling on a tightrope you didn’t realize you were walking.

Look down. I dare you.