Mouth, the Stingray Remix (Bush)

Howdy folks, and welcome to the last instalment of me droning on and on and on and etc. about songs I like. This final one I’ve saved until now, because there’s no specific or definite meaning to the song. I’m going to tell you what it means to me.

I fell in love with the song the first time I heard it – which was during a screening of the boundlessly shite American Werewolf in Paris. There were only two good scenes in it. The first was when the werewolves all invite tramps to “La Luna” nightclub for free, before sealing the front doors and mullering them as werewolves for the entire night. Wicked. The second scene is when the main, protagonist werewolf suddenly develops a dog-like lust for sex and goes after a blonde girl, who presumably is turned on by his chat-up routine of crawling up to her and sniffing her feet or whatever. Later on the camera pans across a graveyard, with the “Stingray remix” of Mouth playing in the background, until it settles on them having sex in on top of a grave. Sex on a grave rocks.

After seeing that, I loved that track, and also tried to have sex with my girlfriend on a grave: We stole out, in the middle of the night, to a huge graveyard in Surrey (read: middle of nowhere). Removing our shoes, so as not to scrunch gravel and attract attention from the night’s watchman, we traversed the yard until we were surrounded by sarcophagi and tombs. We chose a grave out of the way and sat by it for a while, chatting – but didn’t do anything in the end. Because, well – it was a fucking grave with a god damned corpse in it. Anyway…

The lyrics were once a mystery to me, and some of the lines still are. But I have, at some point, developed a symbolism that I see in the words and music.

You gave me this, made me give, your silver grin, still sticking it in
You have soul machine, soul machine
The longest kiss, peeling furniture day
Drift madly to you, pollute my heart, drain
You have broken in me, broken me

The starting verse is about someone who isn’t necessarily a bad person, but is damaging him regardless. The silver grin reference is to do with her winning smiles and charms, which are getting to him emotionally, but don’t affect her at all. They’re just her personality, but to him it seems as though she can turn affection on and off without caring in the slightest. The longest kiss, in this song, is perhaps a single kiss – but which affects him the rest of his life. The rest is about how much damage he’s doing to himself, going back to her again and again.

All your mental armour drags me down
We can’t breathe when you come around
All your mental armour drags me down
Nothing hurts like your mouth, mouth, mouth
Your mouth, mouth, mouth

He sees her indifference as mental armour against him, or perhaps anyone. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. When she tells him sweet things, she might be leading him on, but we just don’t know. All we know, is that in his mind she is hurting him by saying and doing things but not feeling them.

We'd been missing long before, never found our way home
We'd been missing long before, we will find our way

The song carries on with much the same words as before, though the above two lines do feature at some point. I think they represent how he knows that they’d never got properly together before, but he’s determined that they will anyway. All her sweet nothings in his ear are convincing him of this, even though she is either playing games with him or genuinely doesn’t know how he feels.

All your mental armour
All your mental armour

Either way, the seemingly impenetrable fortress around her heart is fucking him up.

And your mouth, mouth, mouth, mouth, mouth, mouth, mouth, mouth, mouth, mouth, mouth, mouth, mouth, mouth, mouth

And he really doesn’t like her lipstick.

Meaning of the Song: Guy is led on by a girl, either for her own evil intents or because he’s reading too much into her, and is slowly and continually devastated by the fact he always wants to be near her charms but is always cut apart by her actual indifference to him.

The song itself, through the way it’s sung and the music its set to, takes that meaning and multiplies it by about seven trillion times. It’s deep shit, in all senses of that phrase, and it made the fiver I spent on a total crapfest of a film all worthwhile.

So that’s it from me and the contemporary music dissections. Hope you enjoyed it – if you didn’t, well… You know where to shove it, right? Normal ranting services will resume on Monday (or perhaps Tuesday, as we have a bank holiday Monday and I'll therefore be phenomenally hungover on that day).

In any case - have a fucking terrible weekend. *spit*