Cursed Male

Album: Porno For Pyros (1993)
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Songfacts®:

  • In this musically adventurous Porno For Pyros song, lead singer Perry Farrell draws on his experience living in Los Angeles, which has a culture of vanity. With tongue firmly in cheek, he sings about how men are cursed: When they get the money and cars needed to impress the babes, they're too old to enjoy it.
  • Porno For Pyros wrote this song along with "Cursed Female," which precedes it on the album. The females are cursed for very different reasons: They're preyed upon by lecherous guys.
  • Porno For Pyros formed from the embers of Jane's Addiction, with frontman Perry Farrell and drummer Stephen Perkins - both from Jane's - bringing on guitarist Peter DiStefano and bass player Martyn LeNoble. This song is a good example of how they differentiated themselves from Jane's Addiction by using jazz structures. In a Songfacts interview with DiStefano, he explained how it came together.

    "We wrote most of the songs acoustically on a nylon-string guitar," he said. "Perry had a house in Venice and I think we wrote those two in his house. I would just sit there with a guitar and he'd write lyrics, and I'd just start strumming chords and melodies.

    'Cursed Male' has a lot of chord changes. I like to use sevens and nines like jazz chords. I wanted to make us different than rock and use more jazz scales more jazz chords - coordinate stuff.

    Plus, Perry had such a great range, I wanted to write songs all over the neck, so I did think about that. I wanted to take advantage of his vocal range."

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