Pumped up for the U2 concert in suburban Buffalo in September, I've been listening to The Joshua Tree quite a bit lately. The album has held up so well over the decades. I'd also say it's a great summer album. 70 degrees with a slight wind, chilling in the backyard, daydreaming, listening to "Trip Through Your Wires." Ooh, here's a steamy lyric: "I was thirsty, and you wet my lips." Granted, what I consider steamy is like PG 13 to the youngsters and in fact many oldsters, but I'm here to keep it honest. Well, this tremendous song doesn't leave much open to interpretation, it is fundamentally about desire, as we can see here: "You, I'm waiting for you...You, you set my desire, I trip through your wires." Here's the track in all it's seductiveness if you need it:
In listening to the song today, the maybe-steamy lyrics brought to mind the popular hit "Starving" by Hailee Steinfeld. This song has been on heavy rotation on Sirius Hits 1 for a long time. I'm more of a Sirius XMU guy, but the fam prefers Hits 1, so we listen to the station a lot in the car. I've taken a liking to this "Starving" tune. Anyhow, the lyric "I didn't know that I was starving till I tasted you" is rather close in effect to U2's "I was thirsty, and you wet my lips," if you ask me. Hailee (I dig that second E in her name, I must say) takes the desire up a notch in her song, though, especially with the lyric "you do things to my body." This is desire plus, I guess we could say.
One of the highlights of my recent semester teaching a Sexualities class for the first time was playing this song to see what students thought of it. I can't exactly remember the context. I like to mix popular culture into my courses. Maybe I was comparing then and now songs, and played Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing" video and then Steinfeld's "Starving" video. They were like, "Yeah, professor, that's super mild, like 3 on a scale of 1-10" or something like that. Getting old works for me but stay young, everybody!!!
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