At some point in the early to mid-90s Sheryl Crow gained some kind of brief foothold on fame, appearing on charts and playing on radios and so on. I’d forgotten about her, but I was in a café on the Southbank, chewing a mouthful of ham and cheese toastie, watching people people shuffle past through the window in early summer, and her 1995 hit ‘All I Wanna Do‘ was playing in the background.
I’d have filed it under ‘generic easy-listening pop music that won’t distract the customers too much’ and moved on, but the line ‘Billy likes to peel the labels from his bottles of bud’ sparked a memory of a lass I forget the name of now, who liked to peel the labels off her bottles of cider. She told me that, allegedly, this was a sign of sexual frustration, but neither one of us could figure out why. Then again, in the world of pop psychology, every act performed without a 5-year plan and philosophical treatise is apparently a sign of sexual frustration. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Unless the cigar is your mother.
Anyway, as I was sitting there finishing my coffee and some other song drawled on about something or other, the dots began to lay themselves out.
It starts with Crow sitting in a bar ‘at noon on Tuesday’, when the guy next to her suddenly announces that he’d like to enjoy himself, once, before death. Uh, OK, mate… He blurts out his name. Nobody asked, but points for effort, I suppose. She doesn’t believe him anyway, which, from a story telling perspective, is a nice detail.
Now, Billy could just be stating a desire to go to a theme park or a gig or whatever. That’s alright, but why hasn’t he done so? He is an autonomous entity and if he’s got money for beer he’s got money to go entertain himself. So why has he decided to badger some random lass having a beer and people watching? Given the sexual subtext running through the song, we might have to reasonably interpret Billy’s fumbling introduction as an abortive attempt to flirt.
Now, I’m no social guru, but William/Billy’s opener here leaves a considerable amount to be desired. It’s weird, it’s desperate, who the hell comes out with that? If you’re lonely and you want to talk to people, a basic rule is to not be weirder than the sisters during your introduction. Try ‘hello’. It’s a pretty solid option.
There’s an interesting overlap and tonal contrast with Blur’s assertion that ‘love in the 90s is paranoid’. All I Wanna Do is a laid back pop-country schlock tune, approaching sex from a position of observational apathy – even the suspicion that the guy who’s introduced himself as William is actually called ‘Billy’ is less a concern and more a bored musing. It contrasts against the bouncy Brit-pop laddish vibe of ‘Girls and Boys‘, released just a year before in 1994.
Blur’s hit frames sex against a backdrop of Brits heading to a Mediterranean seaside to get slaughtered and slobber at each other in cheap club somewhere. Sex in that song is a desperate haze of drunken escapism from a 90s corporatist landscape spiralling into social decay. The only respite is apparently a brief forgettable shag in a cheap Greek town. The vibe is ugly, a familiar forced enthusiasm propped up by drugs and booze, in which every participant is merely going through the motions and ‘following the herd’, pretending that this is where they want to be, whilst looking over their shoulders or wondering if they’ve contracted an STI. This is why the concept of the British displaying affection is always a bit of a joke — even when we’re getting our ends away it’s fucking bleak.
Then we have a comparison point of solitude. Billy’s solitude is unwanted, probably a side effect of his complete lack of charisma, but Crow seems to be there of her own accord. We can only assume she was minding her own business in the bar when this bloke sits down next to her and starts yapping. It’s possible that he was there first, but it doesn’t make a great deal of sense for her to sit next to him in the middle of an empty bar and him not take that as an invitation to strike up a conversation.
To be fair, this is in the era before dating apps and the subsequent general consensus that nobody should ever talk to anyone in person ever, because interaction is, by default, creepy. Before shuffling off to TikTok to make embarrassing videos about how lonely they all are. So it is possible that talking to people was once a normal human habit, but I am dubious…
Anyway, Sheryl explains that she desires nothing more than some fun until the sun comes up. I suppose it’s possible that she’s not making an innuendo here, but given the ongoing subtext I’m dubious. Either way, I suppose ‘fun’, whether it comes with fireworks or otherwise, is universally welcome.
She goes on to note the people washing cars during their lunchbreaks. Ballard noted that the automobile is closely tied with the concept of sex in American culture. He explored this motif in both Crash and its predecessor, The Atrocity Exhibition, in obsessive and uncomfortable detail. Thankfully, Crow spares us a utilitarian description of auto-erotic death-sex and just provides observations of people washing their windshields.
The song seems to back up the idea that cars are a typically American cultural symbol of sexuality. How many adverts have you ever seen, or image or motifs, featuring scantily clad women contorting themselves across bonnets and bumpers and seats? How many symbols utilise the humble mechanic to flag up signals of masculinity and virility — car grease and engine oil taking the symbolic place of human liquids? How about the mythologisation in American media of fucking in the back seat? Songs, films, books — the link between sex and automobiles is a staple of the American psyche.
The distance between herself and Billy is set in contrast to a brief dwelling on this happy couple dancing ‘dangerously close’. This in addition to the ongoing repulsion she feels towards the man she’s dubbed Billy, his ugliness and his tight frustrated movements, reinforce the impression that the easy going summer pop song is a musing on 90s sexuality in America.
Roughly translated, the song reads, “man, I just wanna get laid. Not by this guy, though…”
Words and Chaos 
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