That Was Just A Joke About The Money

Helium “XXX”

“XXX” is a revenge fantasy in which Mary Timony sings from the perspective of a prostitute who murders her johns. (Which is, of course, very much the opposite of how things typically go.) The song is effective in large part because Timony is so good at conjuring a sound that is as provocative and seductive as the image of her street walker vigilante: The guitar tone is totally lurid; it actually sounds like the male gaze. Her voice is overtly sexualized in the song, but her deadpan affect twists the knife at just the right moments, bitterly deflating masculine fantasies and ripping into the emptiness of her objectification: “You want to have me / you watch me like TV / you want to hold me / collect me like rubies / talk about me like a movie.” She’s never a real person to these men, just something to conquer and possess. So if her existence is meaningless to them, is it so different if their lives are meaningless to her? What’s the real difference between made to feel dead inside and actually being killed?