#59, "My Curse," Afghan Whigs (1993)

150 Favorite Songs: #59, "My Curse," Afghan Whigs (1993)

Afghan Whigs frontman Greg Dulli gets a rap sometimes as a sleaze in his lyrics, and I get why he does: The depictions of relationships he offers are often ugly, and he his male narrators are gleefully cruel to the women in their lives. You get lines like "please allow me to present you with a clue / if i inflict the pain, then baby / only i can comfort you" and "angel, come closer / so the stink of your lies sinks into my memory," and they are unkind and dismissive. But what always stood out to me about Dulli's writing was that he never really reveled in the first person-ness of that writing; the songs are from the perspective of a shitty, perhaps cruel, maybe outright misogynist man, but the way he writes those men isn’t intended to prompt the listener to identify with him. It’s rather the opposite—we’re offered the opportunity to see that sort of character as a character in a psychodrama, exploring the damage he inflicts on himself and others.

(One exception to that, which I find fascinating in a completely different way, is the 1990 Whigs’ track “You My Flower,” released when Dulli was 24 years old. Let’s digress for a minute to look at that before we get to “My Curse,” because it’s one of my favorite examples of how a dull piece of writing becomes infinitely more compelling with a change in perspective.

So the song is a fairly standard “look how bad she treats me” alt-rock number where he sings a verse that starts with the lines, “better get myself a drink / better get myself a couple so i can look you straight in your face / and tell you that i think of you / almost as much as you think of you.” It’s a pretty bland punchline—she’s selfish, you’ve been wronged, etc, etc. Who knows what song she would sing! But by 1996, when the band was on tour promoting their album Black Love, he flipped the line when they played the song. It became: “better get yourself a drink / better get a couple so you can look me straight in my face / and tell me that you think of me / almost as much as much as i think of me!”

And wow, does that change everything. The line is much crueler when delivered that way, but also much more impactful—instead of a grunge-era whine, it’s very intentional, a song from a person who knows he’s causing pain someone who cares for him because he’s so selfish, and treats it like a hilarious joke. The “I” in the song is no longer its protagonist, even though he’s the one whose perspective it comes from, which is something Dulli explored in his songwriting later on much more explicitly.)

Okay, so let’s get out out of the parentheses now and back to "My Curse," which is where he really first explored the power of perspective in a breakup song in real time. It also comes with the added bonus of Marcy Mays' absolutely tortured vocals. Because Gentlemen is a vicious portrait of a failing relationship, one that tells a fairly coherent and linear narrative. (The liner notes don’t say “recorded in Memphis,” but rather “shot on location in Memphis,” which is pretentious but an effective statement of purpose.) Gentlemen never sounded sexist to me because it’s extremely clear that we were never supposed to identify or sympathize with Dulli's narrator. You don’t introduce a character with the line, "Ladies, let me tell you about myself / I got a dick for a brain / and my brain is gonna sell my ass to you" if you want us to feel for him later. The album spends its first seven songs depicting a broken relationship and a spiral of addiction and shame and mutual betrayal, all from the man’s perspective.

Then, about two-thirds of the way through, after you've heard Dulli's narrator make his case for those seven songs, you get the counterpoint. Suddenly, the sad song isn't sung by the man who's screaming about the betrayals he's both suffered and inflicted; now, instead, we get her point of view. Marcy Mays' voice, which is not anything that could be described as "pretty," starts singing the missing piece of the puzzle—the endless reconciliations, the unending deceptions, the way that these things are reciprocal. They go both ways. Gentlemen isn't Pinkerton, or even Blood On The Tracks—one of those one-sided accounts of a bad breakup that privileges the voice of the person doing the singing. It's a portrait that makes time for a counterpoint.

What that means is that Gentlemen is honest in a way that very few breakup albums are, and it's because of "My Curse." When we hear Mays sing about the relationship, too, we check it against everything that Dulli had told us. All of the ugliness and cruelty in Dulli's songs have to match up with the depiction of the relationship in "My Curse," or we don't believe either of them. 

It's a remarkable trick, and one that convinces me, at least, that Dulli's songs are much more of an exploration of cruelty than an example of it. There's no good guy here, no one to root for. Gentlemen, like a lot of the songs that Dulli's written, is about the way people hurt each other, and "My Curse" makes it abundantly clear that in a broken relationship, everybody's guilty, and that guilt is nothing to celebrate. When Marcy Mays boasts of how she pulled off her end of the betrayal ("zip me down / kiss me there / i can smile now / you won't find out, ever"), it's no better or worse than anything Dulli's narrator admits. That's the whole point.