Double Entendre: Thoughts on Hozier & the Language of Feeling
I never thought I’d have much to say about sex, at least not to strangers. To describe it beyond posture, to communicate beyond binary judgments how it makes me feel, to push past the flattening of meaning when one places words that don’t exactly fit into spaces. Sometimes, an experience lingers in the mind in search of the right language. “Sounds a lot like faith” is what a friend politely said to me. I’m still thinking about that.
In the absence of certainty, people tend to say things they don’t mean or fully understand. Sometimes, they don’t say anything at all. Sex and faith are slippery; words can’t always hold them for long. Hozier, whose musical project has consistently straddled both, mingles the language of one with the other, approaching a fullness of truth without being coy. He understands the impossible task that writing can be; intimacy is unwieldy. Hangups and uncomfortable associations that don’t feel freeing or progressive, tied up with guilt or sin or the body. They build. And the opposite, that which is withheld on purpose, in service of anticipation, of longing and attention. Those things build too. Fashioning desire into language can be disorienting because you must confront having desire to begin with, a sharpness in your mouth that you can’t describe, but want to. You find that you want someone else to want that sharpness too. So you tongue it, circle around it, dare to approach the naked center of it.
Hozier has spoken a few times about his fans’ misinterpretation of the lyrics to his song “Take Me to Church”, about the possibility of a euphemism or allusion to oral sex. In polite, understated fashion, Hozier denied that it was about oral specifically, just sex in general. The kinds of sex threatening to and condemned by the Catholic Church. The prospect of his ever writing a song about oral was never dashed outright. Instead, he enthusiastically emphasized his intentions, going from writing about sex in vague terms to doing so with specificity and humor. “Moment’s Silence (Common Tongue)” from the EP Nina Cried Power, is one of the results of this evolution, a song that is about oral sex, among other things:
A cure I know that soothes
The soul, the soul impossibly
A moment's silence when
My baby puts her mouth on
Me and my babe relaxing
There’s playfulness in the enjambment between “puts her mouth on” and “Me and my babe relaxing”, one sentence finding its conclusion within the beginning of another. This itself sounds like a euphemism.
Upon release, Hozier did what many other musicians are encouraged to do with popular music, which is to ruin the possibilities of interpretation by narrowing meaning. This is the knife edge of language, the line between naming that which you hope for others to see, and leaving enough room for them to grasp it and translate it as their own. To NPR, Hozier said, “I wanted to write a song that was hopeful and grounded in solidarity, grounded in love, in what can be achieved through organization, through the common respect of the dignity of people. It was the decision to write something that was not cynical, when it was so easy to write something that kind of rolled its eyes at global politics.” It’s a nice enough sentiment, albeit couched in generalizations. But sometimes, you write a song about head and there doesn’t have to be more politically to it than that.
For all the interviews he’s given about what his songs do or don’t mean, Hozier is an adept writer of a kind of sly reverence, especially about what people do behind closed doors.
Catching manic rhapsody
All reason flown, as God
Looks on in abject apathy
A swollen order means
A prayer in perfect parody
A moment's silence when
My baby puts her mouth on me
Church and Christian imagery, in general, are the connective tissue of Hozier’s music. It’s the fruitful source of his most provocative lines, railing against institutional prudishness by repurposing the same language. Fitting too, given the Church’s fixation on the flesh, on the body, on ecstasy and pain, on the breaking point between suffering and grace. In ways that have been lampooned and admired alike by the devout and secular, the Catholic Church is extremely horny at the same time that it is extremely conservative — a situation that, at its best, signals erotic anticipation. Sexual fantasies and porn plots revolve around priests and nuns and confessions and repressed desires for a reason. Desire in full view of piety is hot. Even hotter when the object of your affection is in front of you, beside you, touching but unable to be touched fully.
We begged for some
Now we lovingly
Let the reason come
In the common tongue
In you lovin' me
Oral sex has, for the longest time, contained a fraught, troubling dynamic to me. This has to do with a spiritually Catholic upbringing at the same time that it has to do with an adolescent Catholic upbringing. They’re not the same. On the one hand, there are the faith’s premarital prohibitions, and the continued preoccupation with whether and when they will produce children (“be fruitful and multiply”, but no one’s getting pregnant from head). On the other hand, my classmates’ unimpressed, largely uncomfortable experiences with oral. Among my classmates, every gesture from eating a banana to putting ketchup on a hotdog became inescapably phallic. For me, there was the simple fact that it must be gross to mime consumption without committing to it. I had imagined it entailed a lot of choking and spitting, a kind of chore for the person performing it that could carry no pleasure. In many ways, Christianity doesn’t prepare you for the physical components of pleasure. The love shared between two people joined in matrimony or holy commitment seems to be the Church’s only allusion to sex, and a weak one at that. Ironically, here, orgasm and spiritual rapture share the same conundrum: in the face of a thing so powerful that words fail, the Church throws up its hands and simply lets the words fail. There is nothing that is said about the dynamics or the experience of intimacy as felt through the body. Instead, there are stigmata, unrelenting psychological torment, and punishment of the corporeal. Nothing on other sacred moments, when people begin to seep into one another, when the body acts as a tuning fork of passion, when the urge to satisfy another overcomes and melds into the urge to satisfy one’s self. Such overwhelming, sensuous raptures and visions are often left to the Christian mystics, like in The Book of Margery Kempe or “The Ecstasy of St Teresa.”
Hozier contains and compresses all of these encounters and sensations within “Moment’s Silence”. He refutes the prudishness that the Church has historically maintained against practices it condemns but does not bother to understand. He savors reverence, makes foreplay the preview to a different kind of worship. He speaks in and of an irresistible tongue, makes it so that you have no illusions about what both people want. Which must be why “Moment’s Silence” is belted rather than whispered, sung with a smile, not a hint of shame.
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I never expected to have anything to say about Hozier. I avoided listening to him for months following the release of the single “Take Me To Church”. Its chorus was unavoidable, as so many pop songs on heavy radio rotation become, in parks or cars or bookstores or dentists’ waiting rooms. Young white women drew the song close to their chests; their fervor dovetailed with their love of all things with British and Irish accents. But last year, during a cold, rainy writing workshop on the coast, I found myself listening to Hozier. More than mood-setting, though that was certainly part of it, I found myself drawn to his lyricism and his voice. By the end of that weekend, I realized he was the only musician I had played, over and over. I still dislike “Take Me To Church”, a small price to pay for my fondness of Hozier’s other songs.
There’s an understated, unvarnished vision of the heart in songs like “Cherry Wine” and “In A Week”, both from Hozier’s self-titled debut. In the former, violent emotion and physical punishment are signifiers of abuse, rather than enduring devotion (proceeds from the song went to charities combating domestic violence). In the latter, that devotion lasts even after death, in the decomposition of the flesh and return to the earth. Capital-L love demands vehemence . Hozier emphasizes this belief by juxtaposing romance with violence, utilizing macabre imagery to illustrate a love that transcends death. The severity of the image speaks to a palpably intense emotion that’s concentrated in his follow-up, Wasteland, Baby! and its title track.
Hozier’s second album is, like his eponymous debut, more appealing to me in its back half than its first. Much of this has to do with Hozier’s attempts to distill his black musical influences into homages of authentic admiration that often result in songs that sound like minstrelsy. This tendency (less charitable people might call it a practice) did not begin, nor will it end with him. To Hozier’s credit, from what I can tell, he is attempting to channel and honor something deeply felt within him through the genres and voices he grew up listening to.
When you get past Hozier’s many attempts at different genres (with varying degrees of success), Wasteland, Baby! is expansive, simultaneously even more disjointed and more thematically focused than his first album. At once moving and uplifting, soothing and heartbreaking, it continues the musician’s compelling dialogue with the ever-shifting emotional landscape of romantic love, time, and religion. More than that, the album holds fast to stillness, revering wondrous moments through careful, poignant observation, even if those moments are fraught with fear.
All the fear and the fire
Of the end of the world
Happens each time a boy falls in love with a girl
Happens grace
Happens sweet
Happily, I'm unfazed here, too
“Wasteland, Baby!” could have easily taken the same route as most love songs, where happily-ever-after is the end of the story. In many ways, romantic love is about possibility and so is overly fixated on the future. With this song, Hozier fixates on a bleak future of collectively human creation, a wasteland whose origin is rooted in our terrible present. There is a sense that whatever future the singer and his beloved may have together is not long. Unfazed by an impending apocalypse, Hozier instead finds a different kind of permanence for his love. Like “In A Week”, death is not a closed book, but simply the next chapter. He’s okay with that. That Hozier finds himself unfazed by the end of the shared world he and his lover know, even if it’s only in the context of the song, speaks to a love that steadies, rather than unbalances. His contentment is the antithesis of the motion of love, all that falling and breaking.
And I love too
That love soon might end
And be known in its aching
Shown in this shaking
Lately of my wasteland, baby
I envy Hozier’s acceptance of a love that ends. I envy it because the end of love and the end of life are two things that I cannot let stand close to one another, and one is unbearable for me to think about. I am not so afraid of death that I can’t talk about its existence openly with others. I can imagine its tangible, disruptive reality in my life. Perhaps, it’s because I know loss creates ghosts of dead emotions as much as people.
Be still, my indelible friend
You are unbreaking
Though quaking
Though crazy
That's just wasteland, baby
Perhaps, Hozier is too clear-eyed. The needle-like pangs that strike during his delivery of “Be still, my indelible friend” feel too intimate to hear without sensing a deep echo of weeping within my belly, too intense because the intimacy he shares with his beloved is still so full, despite the calamity. I have a feeling Hozier is comforting his beloved, and “you”, because they are shaking at the idea of the end of the world. The end of love is another kind of cataclysm, an invisible disaster.
Something I’ve come to admire in Hozier’s myriad portraits is his awareness, always, of the effects that love can have on the mind. By considering love as grace, as a gift, he makes new use of more commonplace tendencies that glorify embodied destruction. This may be a remnant of Hozier’s religious upbringing. If so, I recognize such a love only as something that was spoken about in church in the context of divine and specifically familial love. But Hozier doesn’t hang his verses on the possibility of their religiosity. He scavenges for those words and phrases that can be repurposed into a language of flawed adoration, made more resonant by their proximity to the staid, hallowed religious sources they come from. And even better, Hozier doesn’t overcommit to this idea; loftiness isn’t upheld when it sacrifices honesty. Everyone has to come back down to earth eventually. In the liner notes for “Wasteland, Baby!”, a softly whispered “That’s it” is written as the final words of the song. Upon listening, these words sound more like Hozier’s confirmation of a good vocal take to the producer in the studio than a statement of clarity. It works as both.
Nicholas Russell is a writer from Las Vegas. His work has been featured in The Believer, Columbia Journal, The Point, No Contact Mag, Bright Wall/Dark Room, and Reverse Shot, among other publications.
