LIT – “Lipstick & Bruises”
A guilty pleasure from last year. I’m not listening to it right now, though I hear the chorus in my head. As with a good number of songs I take a liking to, I’m left wondering why this track didn’t do as well as, say, “My Own Worst Enemy”. It’s a BETTER SONG, for the luvva – a souped-up hotrod with plenty of horsepower and cool racing stripes, kicking up lots of smoke and burning a good amount of vulcanized rubber. Sounds a lot like Sugar, actually (ah, THAT’S why I like it – the shiny geetars, the pop smarts, the nonsense-to-me refrains), except for the vocals, which uncover some sort of hellish sonic limbo lost between the rusty pipes of Paul Westerberg & John Cougar Mellencamp. But, again I ask, why was this worthy song simply dismissed by the general public? (Yes, “worth” is a relative term.) (And, no, I’m not about to believe my silly theory about the successes of Fuel & Lit somehow being symbiotically intertwined.) Well, there isn’t any swearing in the song (though the pain fetish is still there – substitute “kick the living shit out of me” with “kick me when I fall down”; hey, he’s found someone else to do the kicking!), and there’s no video featuring the nude baby-smooth hide of a Ms. Pamela Anderson Lee Rock. Instead, we have Mulletron, a shape-shifting robot blessed with the technology to turn any gauche coif into a radiant, resplendent, kinky mullet.
OK, maybe I answered my own question.