Portions for Foxes: Tanya Donelly

"Portions for Foxes" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song by a woman or a band led by a woman. See the introduction for more.

Some of the songs in this series are more personal - ones I've listened to for years, thought about a lot, full of lines that take up space in my head. This is one of those.

I've written about Tanya Donelly before here - as bandleader of Belly, as part of The Breeders, maybe as a solo artist, too. This is one of my favorite songs of hers: maybe the favorite from her solo work. It's one that almost made it onto last year's list, to be edged out by a Belly song.

This is Mysteries of the Unexplained, a 1997 song that I think references specific things I've never quite wanted to run down and nail to the wall, a song about a feeling of being in a world that isn't right in fundamental ways...but is still worth it, in the end.

Well, maybe:

And anyway I predict the next meteor to hit will be a monster
And I for one am looking forward to it

It's about a media landscape - the first verse is clearly the music industry, with a song that gets played all the time because "the greaser sent them t's and toys." The second is about a movie "where everyone got killed, and the crowd went wild." The singer doesn't like the landscape, isn't happy with the choices, doesn't believe in that at all. But the world is bigger and more interesting than media:

'Cause sometimes
It rains fish from the sky and the statues all start to cry
And someone writes another beautiful song.

So even media is redeemable - sometimes. Maybe. 

It's the chorus that's lived in the back of my head, on and off for almost thirty years: All of your heroes are whores.

That's still talking about media: all the pop stars, movie icons, reality TV-stars. Add in influencers and whoever else for the decades since: they all count. And it's not "whores" as a generic insult; Donelly means it specifically. They are whores because they're putting out their inner selves, deliberately making bad art, to please the "tinkertoy world."

Good art is still possible; it happens. But the world is full of sad songs on WSUK and movies where you can't spot the good guy. All we can do is watch and hope, remembering all of our heroes are whores, and think of how it could be:

I had a dream: a shining bright city, perfect and clean.
I made a wish for a sky full of fish.