It doesn’t always feel great to feel good – at least, not if you attribute it to something you’re terrified you’d never feel good again without. Such are the risks of transformative ecstatic experiences, without which life would hardly be worth its quotidian indignities and hassles.

Such exhilarating and terrifying before-and-after experiences often fit somewhere in the broad taxonomy of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. “Rock and roll” refers here to any excuse for communal catharsis and rebellion – not just guitar-rock music, although that’s what we’re working with today.

Sananda Maitreya, an aggressively stylish army brat born Terence Trent Howard, was best known, circa those magical years when I was most receptive to music, as Terence Trent D’Arby. TTD had a fleeting time in the sun (“the sun” being the mid-to-late 1980s) as the next great pop auteur, releasing the wildly eclectic album Introducing the Hardline According to Terence Trent D’Arby that promised a fractally bright future but proved his commercial peak.

Like Prince, my laziest possible point of comparison, he wove together spiritual and carnal themes, envisaged a firm command of an astounding array of musical genres and emotional registers, and drove some ham-and-eggers to conniptions with his pretension, arrogance, and disorienting hostility toward peers, the press, and anyone else who was handy.

At best, he was pop music’s Jeremy Strong, precious, quirky, and self-indulgent in ways that alienated some while also bringing unique, essential art into being. At worst, he was a creep to Miki Berenyi, which I struggle to forgive. His music, while brilliant, was maybe 1% as brilliant as he thought it was, which got him doused in Haterade the second he stopped moving units.

As the ‘90s washed in on a wave of distortion and tainted heroin, Maitreya found himself in a professional funk, if not an artistic one. When he wasn’t busy being a weird asshole to my first and last major rock-star crush, he released the frustratingly uneven Symphony or Damn. While not a full return to form after the universally confusing and disappointing Neither Fish Nor Flesh, the album did at least include two hot singles.

The ballad “Delicate” provided a wonderful example of the medium serving the message. Better yet was “She Kissed Me,” which got him some rock-radio play with its fat, fuzzy, Butch Vig-style ultra ‘90s production and lyrics celebrating the life-changing power of the best sorts of sword-swallowing, knob-gobbling blowjobs.

Of course, Maitreya – trust me, the stories behind his two name-changes do nothing to make him less ridiculous – wouldn’t make a song about blowjobs the way “Givin’ the Dog a Bone” and “Just Don’t Bite It” are about blowjobs. Those are essentially novelty joke songs. 

It’s hard to joke well about something unless you take it seriously, and, at least in his art, the artist f/k/a TTD takes everything seriously, insofar at it relates to him.

Kissing often leads to sex, which, in my experience, leads to love more often than the other way around. Sex and love are the forces of creation itself, representing our faint, final hope of breaking on through into a world beyond our own bullshit. Kissing, like dancing, is a way to test for physical and chemical compatibility, and, while it’s better than talking or playing bagpipes, will never touch the top of the list of things people do with their mouths.

“She Kissed Me” is about a transformative sexual experience of the sort that can lead one to grant terrible power to the person one credits with its creation. In this case, the “kiss” comes from an older woman whose personality and activities outside of mystically charged oral copulation are a swirl of red flags. But it’s easy to write a prescription for rose-colored glasses in the universal language of oral sex, much of which has no direct English translation.

Fortunately, it’s hitched to smart, propulsive, infectious rock track that reveals Maitreya’s dry sense of humor, which is always a relief. Yes, it’s super-dated. (Check out the ping-ponging fade-out, the sort of self-indulgent studio shenanigans enabled post-Nevermind major-label budgets as bloated as a Bush record). But it’s well-written and catchy and serves as the perfect segue between “Bound for the Floor” and “Burnin’ for You,” with its sinister undercurrent delivered tongue-in-cheek. (So to speak. Hey!).

Sex is also where we hide parts of ourselves we’d prefer not to associate with, and when we unwittingly fulfill desires we don’t understand, things can go tragically haywire – in the worst cases, resulting in no-shit abusive relationships.

“She Kissed Me (and It Felt Like a Hit)” is a titular switcheroo on “He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss),” by the Crystals, a song that makes the rest of the Spector-era ‘60s girl-group songbook sound like Bikini Kill. The Spiritualized song is nothing like that, but an insecure paramour might find it a tad insulting. In it, the narrator reveals – to little shock, considering – that the nicest thing he can say about a lover’s most tender affection is that it reminds him of drugs.

Spiritualized is, like many cult bands, so easy to love or hate, or both, that fans such as me are baffled by the indifference of almost the entire population of earth. It revolves around Jason “J Spaceman” Pierce, formerly of Spacemen 3, and makes ethereal, theatrical, hypnotic space-rock that, when it’s on, sounds like the beginning and end of the world. It can’t be reduced to one clear, consistent message, but if it could, it would be, “The way we feels about drugs – any drugs you have – is the way Led Zeppelin felt about underage groupies and Hobbits.”

In 1997, the band unleashed a thrilling, sweeping, swirling, psychedelic, cinematic, heart-stomping monster called Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, which belongs in any serious conversation about ‘90s desert-island discs. 

High on that success – among many other things – Pierce fired the rest of the band and recruited 128 new musicians for the overblown, eerily vacuous Let It Come Down. That gave his next record, Amazing Grace, a lot to live up to, which it did, mostly by not trying. It’s anchored in gospel and soul influences, of which “She Kissed Me,” the lead single, is not representative. 

Spiritualized has a self-plagiarism habit that’s either archly provocative or shamelessly lazy, depending on whether your love or hate is ascendant. (It’s a trip when people at shows applaud wildly for the new stuff until they realize it’s not the old stuff.) This one is a rip on Ladies and Gentlemen’s “Electricity” that’s loud, crunchy, sleazy, and right in Pierce’s lane. Like its inspiration, “She Kissed Me” makes a hell of a racket and gets excited without losing its morbid irony.

“Gonna shoot it up and get real high / Got a feeling it ain’t gonna die / Gonna fuck it up and mess around / Got a feeling it ain’t coming down.” This is the gallows humor of the addict. We know damned well we’re coming down, and the truth is, gradually and then suddenly, we become miserable wrecks when we’re high, too. 

The compulsive re-dosing and full-spectrum self-sabotage of full-tilt addiction have more to do with a terror of returning to baseline, which, in part because of the addiction, has become untenable, unbearable, and a horror even to think about. (If you’re druggin’ under prohibition and you’re not a trust-fund brat like Bill Burroughs, your shit is probably cut with fentanyl, rat poison, or literal shit, none of which are known to help with emotional regulation.)

“She Kissed Me (and It Felt Like a Hit)” is a crunchy, meticulously chaotic-sounding garage-rock throwback rave-up that captures the fleeting thrill of finding a foreign influence that brings out your favorite parts of yourself you’re unwilling to admit to yourself you have in you. It’s nothing profound or complex, but it’s fun as hell (for now!), and its hallucinatory energy and widescreen wall of noise mark it as vintage Spiritualized.

It’s also so similar to Maitreya’s “She Kissed Me” that this one is honestly a coin-flip for me. I’m giving it to Maitreya, if only because Spiritualized made much better stuff, and also because of the thousands of lives that will be improved through the second-order effects of the volcanic orgasms Maitreya experiences when he hears the sound of his own voice.

Home-study essay questions (Pick One):

1. Is egomania an impediment to the expression of genius, a necessary precondition, neither, or both?
2. Why climb the highest mountain when you can take a helicopter?
3. Are you ever going to shut up and kiss me, you fool?

Recommend If You Like is not owned or funded by a billionaire or even a millionaire. We do have a Patreon. If you can’t afford to become a patron, please sign up to our mailing list. It’s free and we’re asking here instead of a pop-up. Pop-ups are annoying.