She Sells

NO comments. Wow. Surely I am living in the dark ages - surely the current epoch is owned by clueless philistines. Some day I will return here to attempt an analysis of this great ROXY song.

I finally understood, after years of loving this song, that the title can be interpreted as a Spoonerism for Sea Shells. Things I love about this song: The jaunty piano intro followed by Paul Thompson coming in with that great hi-hat/bass triple thump . . . the tempo shifts to a slow bounce at Nine-till-five / the daily grind. . . and then again shifts at 2:40 in the original studio version to an expansive majestic sound which ends the song. And the lyrics, like all Roxy lyrics, are poetically exciting, full of word-play and innuendo. Is it about a real-estate agent? A tailor doing alterations? A table-dancer at a gentleman’s club? A dealer in illicit stimulants? A Chinese ceramics collector? An Asian prostitute? Maybe all of that at once. Or maybe just a fantasy in the singer’s mind about his girlfriend. Who knows ? (only Bryan Ferry and God.)

OK I finally said why I like this song and found 3 versions of it to post along with the corrected lyrics:

https://connecthook.net/2020/10/18/she-sells-3-versions/

She Sells, with its convoluted lyric, seems to answer the question merely suggested by Duran Duran's Girls On Film: who has really got the upper hand, the voyeur or the voyeuree? The protagonist of the song is a cover girl, but the lyric is written from the perspective of the magazine reader, who is almost wondering if she’s looking back at him (“hold the frontpage up as a mirror. Are you reading me?”). We learn more about her, which actually tells us less (“she sells country and modern, ancient western song of oriental confusion”). She’s a shape-shifter able to embody any fantasy for your pleasure, and seems totally in control of it, leaving the on-looker confused, unable to see through her (“watch you walking in waltz time, a jigsaw puzzle in tune”). But, who cares about that? Here, as in In Every Dream Home a Heartache, is the commodification of sex, trying to infuse the elusive wonder of intimate human relationships in mass-produced knick knacks, all for profit. Love as chemistry and sex as mechanics (“auto-erotic, please”).

And so the focus is not so much in the act of looking, but in the act of buying. The easy answer would be then that the seller is the one truly profiting off this relationship. Is it though? The song, which up to this point had been backed by a springly piano courtesy of boy genius Eddie Jobson, suddenly changes it’s pace for the bridge. “Nine till five, the daily grind. Made-up lies, make up my mind. Same machine consuming me, consuming you”, which is probably the most overtly-political that Roxy Music ever got. She Sells comes to its claustrophobic yet realistic conclusion: there’s no ethical cons… I mean, everybody has got to get on with their lives. On one hand we have this girl that has to accommodate the buyer’s fantasies in order to make a living, and on the other we have the buyer, who fantasizes about her in order to make life more bearable. And so, we have Ferry lamenting “she sells, I need”. Simple as that.