The music of the British alternative rock band Tindersticks is suffused with themes of love, longing, and heartbreak. All across songs like ‘Rented Rooms’, ‘Are You Trying to Fall in Love With Me?,’ and ‘Another Night In,’ the band explores the tender, the melancholy, and the complex facets of human connection; from desire and intimacy to disappointment and yearning. In this context, their song ‘Jism’, from their 1993 album ‘Tindersticks’, continues this tradition, but pushes further into the raw, erotic, and visceral dimensions of passion.
'Jism' (1993) by Tindersticks
Fig.1 Benoit Demoriane
Tender Lullaby
The song ‘Jism’ is neither a catchy, easy love song, nor a tender lullaby to intimacy. It is a confession of hunger, a declaration of desire that slips into the territories of obsession, dominance and vulnerability that shocks as much as it seduces. Its imagery, when read erotically, is drenched in the tension between surrender and control, between violence and tenderness, between the fragility of the body and the intensity of the other person’s claim upon it. The opening lines already give us a clear idea of what is happening between the pair in the song: 'I need to taste your pain/ For encouragement/ I need to taste your pain/ For accomplishment/ See, I can only take it out on you/ There's no one else I can trust/ See, I can only take it out on you/ There's no-one else but us around…'
At first I was drawn to the song for its hypnotic music, but as soon as I paid attention to the lyrics I was not only intrigued by how decadently sexy they are but also I started thinking of the matching visuals, whether in painting or in photography, that would embody the same type of eroticism, and I have found them in various works, from the photographs of Francesca Woodman and Benoit Demoriane, to the always chic paintings of Egon Schiele and the sometimes disturbing work of Francis Bacon.
These lines in particular I had in mind to visually connect with the following artworks are these: ‘Oh the deeper I go/ The further I fall/ The more I know/ The tighter your grip around me/ So easily broken/ Running down your skin/ And the pain runs into the blue/ If there's ever anyone else, I'll understand/ And kill him/ And I'll overflow your every inlet/ You will not cough and spit/ You'll welcome me in/ And I tell you with my tongue between your toes/ If there's ever anyone else/ Don't let them do this/ And I'll laugh and revel/ As you scratch and crawl/ If there's ever anyone else/ Just show them the ugly mess…'
Fig.2 Egon Schiele, Woman and Man (Alternately, Husband and Wife), 1911
Real Eroticism
The song’s most striking feature is its willingness to intertwine ugliness with beauty. Where some songs veil eroticism in euphemism, ‘Jism’ strips it bare, revelling in the sweat, the scratches, the act of crawling. It insists that intimacy is not always smooth and perfumed, but messy, animalistic, full of marks left behind. The line ‘Just show them the ugly mess’ feels almost like a manifesto: real love, real eroticism, is not an untouched statue but a scarred, lived-in body, scratched and bitten in the frenzy of longing. It is not sanitized but exalted in its rawness. To song ‘Jism’ implies that love is never just soft kisses and candlelight, but also teeth and nails, jealousy and fear, fluids and shame turned into beauty. It is to recognise that true intimacy demands the whole self, not just the polished parts, but the shadowed corners as well.
Fig.3 Egon Schiele, Kneider Weiblicher Halbakt Drawing, 1917
In Premium you can find the extended version of the essay including many more artworks that resonate with Jism's eroticism like the photographs of Demoriane, Schiele's paintings, Francis Giacobetti’s photographs of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, Francesca Woodman’s photographs, and Francis Bacon.
Click HERE for the the sensual drawings of the intensive voyeur Gustav Klimt
Let us know your thoughts on the eroticism in Jism in the comment box below..!!
