Cannonball. The Breeders. 1993. 4AD/Elektra.
Near the end of Lovers Of Today, the Pretenders ballad about surviving love’s tendency to wound and scar, you hear Chrissie Hynde singing—forcing herself to be heard above the silence of the song’s fade out—“I’ll never feel like a man in a man’s world.” The gender distinction is crucial because it allows us to see, with poetic clarity, how our sexual natures, chameleonic and evasive to begin with, are often the final components we look to replace when repairing the disarrayed ego following a period of emotional tumult. We first heard Kim Deal as the voice of voyeurism back in 1988, watching “him walk her every day into a shady place;” possibly, following the dream logic of the rock and roll experience, the same shade where much of the sexual drama of Cannonball, five years on, unfolds. I like imagining that the Lovely Legs of Gigantic is the very same Last Splash of Cannonball; that is, the woman being watched on the Pixies’ debut LP is the same woman who no longer has to wish