you for a while

Music and Lyrics by: Tori Amos

Instrumentation: Drums, Bass, Big Rock (?), Melotron Flute, Weird Sounds & Vocals

Brief Summary: According to Tori (see below), She’s Your Cocaine is told by a woman, let’s say a jilted ex-lover, who is watching her old beau fall for and become completely manipulated by this empty shell of a woman who is just using him as a toy for her amusement. Now, there is a soap opera for you! The narrator, Tori, is utterly shocked and dismayed that this fellow that she used to have a thing for is now an empty shell himself (i.e. no longer the Prince of Darkness, but the Squire of Dimness) because he’s lost himself in trying to please this unpleasable woman. Could you imagine being Tori Amos…Tori freaking Amos…and watching a man you once loved fall for, oh…I don’t know…a Cordelia Chase from Buffy the Vampire Slayer type? She must have been quite amused if not utterly pissed.

Tori’s Comments: “There are three characters in that song–a he and a she and the girl singing it. I haven’t quite figured out if the girl singing is really pissed off that she isn’t special anymore, or if she is just horrified that she put this guy on a pedestal and he’s now he’s chosen this thing. This girl who wouldn’t even be let into a real girl’s party. This black hole of nebulai.”

Fan Comments/Interpretations: Again with the Trent-Courtney Love-Tori love triangle mess. Several people on the boards label She’s Your Cocaine as another Tori-hates-Courtney-for-stealing-her-rock-star song. Perhaps. Others say Cocaine is a song about control…about a woman sucking the “manness” out of a man, feminizing him, in order to garner some of that control herself. That’s a good one too. Cross-dressing is another possible theme…yes, I said possible.

China2Ny’s Comments: I skipped She’s Your Cocaine a lot when I first got the album. It was so much farther away from any Tori Amos song I had known at the time that I rejected it at first. I could even find some remnants of the first three albums in Raspberry Swirl…but I couldn’t in Cocaine. However, when Venus came out full to the brim with electro-Tori-ness, I went back to Cocaine and now its one of my faves. The Squire of Dimness line is pure genius.