Me and My Snake” was a modest hit on the modern rock charts and even made it to #2 on the country charts, but most critics derided the piece as a joke. As the song itself puts it, “I’m talkin’ about that ol’ snake that’s in my craw.” At first the song makes good lighthearted fun, but with every repetition it takes on darker connotations, as when the narrator promises to kill the snake to “crush that bastard so he won’t be a threat,” or sings a little parody of the snake-in-the-boot legend: “My heart went cold, then hot, then cold again/When I looked into your eyes and saw that pretty brown snake.”
To me, this is a perfect illustration of how art can be either an effective vehicle of propaganda or a subversive act, depending on the context and the viewer’s predisposition. It’s a song about a guy in denial about his own sexual attraction to a woman who he wants to date but doesn’t have any desire for a romantic relationship with her. On the surface it seems to glorify her as the sexually attractive object of his desire and envy. The song also celebrates his own phallic power over her, with the refrain “We don’t need to whisper to each other” and the promise “I’ll put you in your place.” But read the lyrics more carefully and you can see that he’s actually trying to protect himself from his own feelings of sexual jealousy, guilt and insecurity. He doesn’t want to see her as a sexual person at all, but instead as a passive object of his own desire, which the song makes a self-abasing joke about in the chorus: “Take it off, I wanna see you naked/I’ll stare at you ‘til you’re embarrassed to be there/I don’t want nothing, but I’m still scared to say that/That’s just the way I’ve learned to get my kicks.” Even if the song were being sung tongue in cheek, his words would still be a denial of female sexuality and objectification—a denial of his own self-hatred.
When you take the song as a joke, and thus ignore the message behind the joke, it’s a joke. But with each time the song is played you start to notice that there’s more to the song than meets the eye. You can hear it becoming a prophecy, as if all the singer is doing is imagining a worst-case scenario for himself and imagining it as funny because it seems like it would never happen. Of course he’s a guy who needs help with his emotions—that’s a key element in the joke. And we know he’s a guy who can’t keep his dick in his pants, because we know he’s listening to this song.
These days there’s a popular image of the “Napoleon complex,” a term used to refer to a perceived need by some men to be “King of Everything” and control and punish women, but I’d argue that the song is about a kind of reverse Napoleon complex, in which people project these fantasies of total control onto actual others, for reasons that include jealousy and a fear of being rejected. We hear about the fears and insecurities of these men as though they were incontrovertible facts. So the song is not a joke so much as a satire of another kind of joke, in which we’re supposed to laugh at men who feel they can’t express themselves to the world. There’s a reason that the title of the song is so dark—“Just Because I Love You” should really be “Just Because I Hate You.”
In the original version of the song, before it was released as a single, the man at the beginning sings about how he’s got a woman in every port and so he can’t decide whether to go back to the East Coast or not. He does, however, say he’s going to go there. So I have a feeling this guy is going to end up in the East Coast at some point, but I think he’ll do it on his own terms.
In case you think that because I disagree with you, it makes me stupid
The term I’ve come to rely on to explain and explain away the bad ideas and bad people in my life is, not for the first time, the Bible. But what’s most interesting about this process is that I’m turning to religion as a response to someone else’s bad ideas. In this case I’m looking for understanding—of bad ideas, of myself, of other people—in my religious books. I’m seeing those books as a template for understanding my relationships with others, past and present, which, of course, they are.
Anyway, what’s odd is that instead of finding understanding, I find justification for myself, justification for my existence, and justification for my bad ideas. My religion convinces me to see myself as the victim, to deny the harm I’ve caused other people and to deny the harm done to me by other people. It convinces me to hate myself for being hateful and to hate others for being hateful. The more I see the Bible as a justification for my actions, the more I see myself as justified in them. I don’t want to argue with anyone who considers the Bible a piece of literature, and I certainly don’t want to argue with those who see in it a metaphor or parable, but what I feel is an almost physical compulsion to contradict them. And when I read the Bible it feels like I’m being forced to look at myself as badly as possible. In the process I am, of course, reinforcing my bad ideas. I’m not doing myself any favors here.
When I look at the Bible in this way I have to admit that I’m acting as if there is something else in life, something which I have not yet come across, which gives meaning to the bad ideas and bad people in my life. And that is this strange belief that everything has a reason, including the bad things that have happened to me. In other words, this is a kind of existential argument that we don’t come across very often, because most of us are too busy ignoring the bad stuff that happens to us and getting on with our lives. We don’t even have time to think about why we’re here. And when someone tells me I’m in Hell or that I was created for this job or this reason, it sounds good, but I have no way of knowing if they’re telling the truth or not.
In a way the Bible makes it impossible to think clearly about these things because it is presented as a source of wisdom and as a repository of history, and so it becomes something that can be taken seriously even though I can’t figure out whether its wisdom is true or not. But these are the things it tells me that people are saying about me, and I take them seriously, so, of course, I do. And I look for ways to defend myself against what is being said about me.
In short, religion has the effect of turning a bad idea into a self-fulfilling prophecy. It makes me feel justified and important and that I deserve what I’ve been given, which is the worst kind of feeling a person can have. I wish I could say that’s the worst of its effect on me, but I’m not sure that’s true. What worries me most about religion, both mine and anyone else’s, is that it allows bad ideas to make themselves unquestioned and uncontradicted. And it allows them to affect those who are foolish enough to believe them, like me.
You may think I am mad when I tell you that a song sung by a small child can be a message of menace. Yet, the song is important because it is telling us, subtly, what people who are afraid of girls want to see happen to them. If you look at some children’s books for girls you will find that many of them end on a disturbing note. Just like adult women, little girls have been, for too long, depicted as being “inconstant, fickle, and inconstant.” They have been taught to be vulnerable and fearful, and in this way they are taught to be weak and incompetent. Even now I see little girls treated by adults as things to be ordered around or as things to be taken care of, even when they are young children. It’s as though it is not the parents’ responsibility to be responsible, but instead the children’s responsibility to make sure they are in control, and so they are not allowed to be children.
I don’t blame children for being taught this way. Every child is taught to be someone who is safe by people who are not strong enough to deal with their own fears. The problem is that when a child says something or sings a song that could be taken for an invitation, an adult will often see that invitation as something else. But I think this is important for people to see, because when a child is afraid of something that happens to them, they often try to control it. Sometimes the easiest way to control it is by writing about it and singing about it, especially when it’s something that’s happening all around them. So I want you to listen to the song with a very open mind and not allow yourself to become distracted. If you get lost in the music, you will be more
