This song was brought into my life a few years ago by my Mum, a reliable source of excellent music. It’s a blues standard, but my preferred version is Elmore James’ 1962 recording, with his incredible voice and slide guitar.

While It Hurts Me Too is superficially about a man’s love for a woman who loves another (highly unpleasant) man, to me it could as easily be about platonic love as romantic love. I’m bringing my own experiences to bear of course, but to me it sits on the same shelf as Strawberry Switchblade’s Let Her Go or the Dresden Dolls’ Delilah. It’s about watching from the sidelines, furious and helpless as someone you care about gets hurt, over and over again. For me it is inescapably about abuse.

While the song is old and has been re-interpreted time and again, when Elmore James recorded his version he made some lyrical changes to the hit version recorded by Tampa Red in 1949. Comparing the two there’s a subtle shift from a reasonably upbeat song imploring an object of desire to leave a cheating no-gooder, to a heartbreaking lament for the trap in which a loved one has been snared.

For example, Tampa Red sings:

That man you love, darlin’
He don’t want you ’round
Whyn’t ya make love with Tampa, darling?
And let’s jump the town
When things go wrong, so wrong, with you
It hurts me, too

And James sings:

He love another woman, yes, I love you,
But, you love him and stick to him like glue.
When things go wrong, oh, wrong with you
It hurts me too.

What I like best about it is that unlike many other blues standards (and plenty of mainstream pop songs – see Jimi Hendrix’s Hey Joe, The Beatles’ Run For Your Life, Tom Jones’ Delilah), It Hurts Me Too is a song about empathy, not jealousy. The singer claims no ownership over the woman, it’s her suffering that pains him, not the fact he can’t have her. For me, it works as an antidote to the musical tradition of the jealous murder of women by men. I believe it’s a song about love in the truest, broadest sense: what you feel, I feel.

It Hurts Me Too  by Elmore James

You said you was hurtin’, you almost lost your mind.
Now, the man you love, he hurt you all the time.
But, when things go wrong, oh, wrong with you, It hurts me too.

Now, he better leave you or you better put him down.
No, I won’t stand to see you pushed around.
But, when things go wrong, oh, wrong with you, It hurts me too.

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Super Sexy Woman – Sufjan Stevens

A far cry from the dulcet tones of Seven Swans (and this was well before the madness of The Age of Adz) – this is Sufjan Stevens’ description of a ‘super sexy woman’.

Snore?

But then that’s the weird thing – she’s ‘super-duper smart’, complete with ‘super-power lovin’ and ‘superhuman thighs’. This is also a woman who ‘shoots a super fart (the deadly silent kind)’ and has super-powered lips for ‘super suction’. Perhaps conveniently, she also has ‘super-powered hips (for super reproduction’). Not just for reproduction, though – she also wears spandex underwear – and to me this has always felt like a glorious hymn to a woman in all her flawed and genuine glory.

And it’s funny.

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It’s a Creatures single from ’99. It’s an acquired taste. But I like it, for a few reasons.

Exterminating Angel was released on a late Creatures album, Anima Animus, in 1999, and was still a dancefloor mainstay in the early-to-mid-’00s in the kind of sticky-floored goth clubs I liked to frequent in my late teens and early 20s.

It’s a weird track in the context of the rest of the album, nearly all of which is gentler, and none of which has the same relentless, malicious, jagged electro edge. It’s the track you remember the most, with its Biblical, apocalyptic theme and pounding percussion. The rest of the album’s tracks kind of have to be coaxed out from a musical cupboard-under-the-stairs where they’ve hidden from its sweeping bite. After picking up the CD – the day after it and I collided on one of the aforementioned sticky goth dancefloors – I spent some months hitting the repeat button on Exterminating Angel, disappointed that it wasn’t all like this.

Why I’m submitting it to BadRep’s Jam in particular, though, is this: it is entirely from the point of view of the Old Testament’s Angel of Death, on a mission to kill the sons of Egypt, as per the Bible story. But it’s not just about that. Maybe it’s just Siouxsie’s delivery, or the fact that the lyrics are both about a story where only the sons of privilege count, and disdainful to the back teeth of that fact (“poor little rich thing”) – but I think the angel is very much coded as a vengeful female voice, enacting all the grisly, monstrous, destructive urges that are enshrined as natural in so many men and rarely if at all in women. “For the hell of it,” in fact. (VH1 asked Siouxsie not to perform it because it contains references to menstrual blood. Oh, and piss.)

It’s one of the Unwritten Rules of Siouxsie Sioux that on lyrical face value, one is often only ever half sure what she’s actually on about¹, but I think Exterminating Angel is a uniquely beautiful and ugly track. It resonates with me on a deeper level than the Banshees’ single Cities In Dust, which is about the destruction of Pompeii and is similarly Big, Ancient and World-Ending in scope.

I Googled “angel of death female” to compare gendered representations of the angel in the story. Wikipedia popped up first, and helpfully listed several countries where folklore representations of Death more generally are female (death is a “she”, for example, in the folklore of some Slavic communities). But most of the results on my first page weren’t about the Bible story, or the angel figure, at all.

Instead, they were mainly about other things we apply the phrase “angel of death” to in a female-gendered way. Female serial killers abounded, along with headlines about women in the nursing profession (so often referred to in things like Marie Curie Cancer Care literature as “angels”) who ill-treated their charges. A few “sexy nurse – evil angel of death version with black dress!” fancy dress costumes completed the picture.

There was nothing particularly mythic or powerful about the way any of these women were framed by the “angel of death” phrase, though some were dangerous. And although the gender of mythic death personifications does vary worldwide, the overall tone of my research online about female iterations of this particular mythic and Biblical figure, taken as a whole, was often merely patronising. To get to anything useful, one needed a pair of Sexism Waders.

I think that says it all, really, about why this song mattered to me when I heard it. Female violence is so often either downplayed or fetishised – witness how long it took women to get to box at Olympic level – where in men it is normalised (at least as a cultural idea if not a legal reality). And Siouxsie’s angel is a sort of horrible challenge to that idea. There’s precisely nothing nice about her whatsoever. Hers is a grand cry of “Piss on it, I’m sick of it” – and although I’m generally a friendly sort who’s about as murderous as a bag of Haribo Starmix, I have a great many days when, re: the patriarchy at least, I can certainly get behind that sentiment.

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1. For example, Christine. “Now she’s in purple, now she’s the turtle”, anyone? Yeah. This is coherent by comparison.