Black-Eyed

Album: Black Market Music (2000)
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Songfacts®:

  • This song about teenage angst finds Brian Molko singing: "Borderline bipolar. Forever biting your nuts." He explained to NME June 8, 2013 that the lyric "is him acknowledging that I'm an irritating little s--t at times" He added: "Winding people up the wrong way just seems to be part of my nature, even if isn't intentional. It's something that I do without trying. It's my cross to bear but I'm learning to live with it."
  • Molko on the song meaning: "This song says that it's time to take responsibility for your actions and whatever happened to you in the past, you have to reach a point where you stop moping and you have to keep going forward and you can't blame everything on your parents. But in many ways it's an autobiographical song and it's what could happen if I allowed myself to wallow in self pity."
  • Molko explained the album title, Black Market Music, to Vox in 2001: "In an industry, kind of an artistic scene where so much negativity is being promoted by massive corporations and so much disposability being promoted by multinational corporations, so much emptiness and not very much positivity is being pushed and marketed kinda heavily. It is almost as if music that is honest, passionate, truthful that says something about the human condition is marginalized. In a culture... a culture where music is homogenized, that often happens. Perhaps it's something you have to buy under the counter and perhaps forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge."
  • This is the fourth and final single from Placebo's third studio album. Although he later dismissed the album as being too somber and "monochrome," at the time he told Vox "it's the most accomplished, the most immediate and the angriest record we've done. The songs are better. We're just getting better at what we do."
  • This was the theme song to the 2001 German film Engel & Joe. Directed by Vanessa Jopp, it tells the story of a teenage punk rocker and his runaway girlfriend. Jopp also directed the music video, which was filmed at the Hurricane Festival (an annual three-day music event) in Germany and features the film's stars, Jana Pallaske and Robert Stadlober. Tim Wheeler of Ash also makes a cameo appearance.

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