I hope the reader has already deduced from the heading of this post that this is a worthless piece of trash. But it’s my trash and there might be something interesting if you’re curious enough to poke around.
This song, which pretty obviously seems to be about having sex in a moving vehicle, took on a shiny new meaning for me a few years ago. Being a cis-het woman, I’d always just kind of assumed that Chino Moreno and Maynard James Keenan were taking turns singing to their own imaginary ladies.
It could also be that one dude is driving while the other bangs it out with a lady in the backseat, but the line in the chorus, “I’m your passenger,” kind of mangles that up for me.
What has changed since the album’s release in June of 2000 and now is that my perspective has been calibrated to try to account for what lies beyond the scope of the hegemonic. Why couldn’t this song have been written as a sizzling homoerotic experiment between Chino and Maynard?
Once I dropped into that gear, the whole song changed for me. It somehow became edgier, a little scarier, and thereby much more exciting.
Not really one for slash fiction but definitely into rooting out and challenging my own ignorance, I have to wonder if the “scary” element of this fresh emotional cocktail could be rooted in some residual homophobia, because there’s nothing scary about two dudes I always considered straight fooling around with each other. Really, I should be more scared by the fact that they’re doing it while one of ‘em’s driving.
“Scary” might be incorrect. Maybe it’s just shock – the common shock of one’s assumptions being challenged.
We can only ever guess at the intent of lyricists, who are notoriously unwilling to tell anyone what their intentions were because it 1.) violates their privacy and 2.) tramples their mystique. Besides, they usually claim in a boilerplate sort of way, the piece in question is about whoever and whatever you want. Rather than just being a flippant dismissal of our inconsiderate curiosity, which is appropriate, this position is the artist’s invitation to participate in the art itself by alloying our unique life experiences with theirs.
I have no support for my thesis here, other than a flimsy, stretchy reach that falls apart on closer inspection. To be clear, there’s nothing in the lyrics that contradicts the homoerotic interpretation; a whole world of LGBTQ+ listeners beat me to this read over twenty years ago. But the flimsy, stretchy connection that is surely the trashiest bit of trash in this trash heap of a post was my fleeting assumption that Depeche Mode’s “Never Let Me Down Again” might have provided Chino and Maynard with some inspiration.
I recently read on Revolvermag.com about Moreno’s favorite song from his favorite band, Depeche Mode. The lede was all I needed; it tracks that DM is one of CM’s favorite bands, as the influence they’ve had on Moreno’s output as an artist is obvious.
But the thread tying “Passenger” to “Never Let Me Down Again” was as random as my Pandora radio station, and just as dumb: Whoa, I thought, they’re both possibly about a dude driving around with another dude he’s really into. I wonder if there’s a connection.
The Depeche Mode track is generally understood to be about drug use, according to sources cited on Wikipedia, and that makes more sense than reading something gay into it, though it kind of totally invites you to do so:
Promises me I’m safe as houses
As long as I remember who’s wearing the trousers
A thinly veiled threat to heterosexual masculinity, or a helpful reminder to set an intention and make sure you’re in a safe environment before taking your next tab of LSD?
More likely the latter.
But I still prefer to think that “Passenger” is about two titans of millennial metal imagining together what it would be like to tempt fate, and each other, while joyriding on a wild spring night.
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