This article was featured in the very first issue of LBW, which is now out of print. Read more articles here.

Enjoy!

She Brings Us Sugar

At the heart of our relationship with Tori is her music. We can admire her outspokenness, her work with RAINN, her political views, but ultimately it is a more metaphoric form of communication that has drawn most of us to her, that keeps many of us here. Her life's songs enter into ours sometimes in unforeseeable ways, forming connections that may be very different from what Tori intended.

Several people discussed their reading of Tori's song, "Sugar," with me. Brenda, 19, knew most of what Tori had said about the genesis of the song, but Amber, 14, and Jennifer, 15, did not. "Well," says Amber, "When somebody says, 'Give me some sugar,' they mean 'kiss me.' I think she's seeing some guy she shouldn't be, and her boyfriend, Bobby, is jealous."

"I think Bobby is the guy who brings her sugar," Jennifer says. "She's in love with this guy that she shouldn't be. He's, like, in a gang or something - like "hammers' could be guns. And he hits her. And she's embarrassed for everyone else to know how he treats her and that she likes him still."

And "get in with the bubble-gum trade." What does that mean? The girls speculate that it could be about trading gum (kissing) or blowing gum (oral sex).

This is probably not what Tori had in mind. In -Q- magazine (5/94) she said, "I was in love with this boy when I was five years old, and I knew we could really make it work. I was trying to convince him and he took this hammer and hit me with it really hard and, you're going to really hate me for this, but I was so stupid, I tried to get my dad, the minister, to invite them over because I wanted to see him and conquer his heart. I was going to give him bubble-gum and then he'd let me into his treehouse to play with his toy machine-guns. I just wanted to be with him so bad."

In concert she said a record executive (on whom she had a crush) inspired her when he asked whether she took sugar in her tea (Los Angeles, 8/1994). On the UK single of "Hey Jupiter"/"Professional Widow" she describes this: "And he'd been making tea for me for nine months... don't you think you can remember how many sugars a girl takes in her tea after nine months?" After she imagined Freddy Mercury singing the refrain, the rest came quickly.

Apparently Tori wasn't supposed to be interested in this man, perhaps because she was already involved. In a Prodigy mail-in interview, she noted that "Sugar" had gotten her into trouble because "I have Cleopatra fantasies, where she just falls for all these different men. And I meet so many interesting men that sometimes my little heart goes pitter patter and it's inappropriate."

Given this, Tori could well mean the song to indicate a woman's regret over what she's done to attract someone's attention - someone with whom she can only "get in" by a "bubble-gum trade." Perhaps a one-night stand after morning's come, but regardless, the woman seems to be as ashamed as Tori in the Q interview ("you're going to really hate me for this"), worrying what would happen if others "found' her "out," and also feeling let down with herself ("I was so stupid"/"I don't know me very well"). She seems a woman torn by a continued desire she understands too well ("I just wanted to be with him so bad"/"He brings me sugar"), one who feels incapable of stopping, perhaps of -desiring- to stop ("don't say it's up to me").

A woman who regrets her relationship with the wrong man--that's not far after all from what Amber and Jennifer each hear, even though their interpretations of the story behind the song are so different. The details are from Tori's story, but they correspond to things her listeners have experienced for themselves, and therein lies the song's power. It's not what Tori's saying that matters, but what they feel.

Jennifer's boyfriend has a temper. She's had to hide the bruises he's left her. She's done more than one thing she hasn't wanted to do to keep his love. "When he's not mad," she says, "he's really so sweet."

He brings her sugar.

As printed in Little Blue World Vol. 1, Issue 1. Copyright Angela Reid, 2001