This was one of the big song remixes that used to be played in the San Francisco dance clubs in the late 1990s, with a great bass guitar riff that was so wonderfully danceable, especially when mixed with other drum parts by local DJs. And the repeating sample of her singing always sounded to me like she was saying: “I’ll only bring you your toast in life,” when heard through those enormous dance club speakers. (Listen to the attached song and tell me it doesn’t! I didn’t know the original song it came from, so I had nothing to go on: there was no YouTube then.)
So one time I was at a SF dance club, and this song was playing, and it sounded like it does, and so I said to some random guy next to me: “I’ll only bring you your toast in life? Is that what she’s saying?” And then the guy, totally off the cuff, gave me an absolutely perfect college paper thesis version of that line, saying: “Yes, what she’s saying is that, yes, you can marginalize her, and you can try to control her and make her into a subservient wife, but if you do that, you won’t get any of herself, nor any of her love, but rather, she will “only bring you your toast, in life,” like a servant from the kitchen, doing only what you tell her to do, but never anything that she wants to do of her own free will, and she will hate you for it, robbing you of everything you love about her and she loves of herself.” And then we both started laughing; not because we were making fun of the feminist view, but because we both knew he was winging it off this misheard lyrical clip I had just given him (which is not even in the song at all), and spinning a whole college paper thesis out of it right on the spot, like we were all trained to do in college.
That guy would make a good novelist, spinning so much from so little.
Here’s the song remix (the great bass riff starts at 1:14, and the repeating vocals I’m referring to begin at (1:44):
(BTW: “Professional Widow” must be one of the all-time great song titles.)
