The Woman With The Tattooed Hands

If you've never heard this song before, I recommend that you give a listen to it before reading the rest of this post.

When you first listen to it, it's hard to really get an idea of what Slug (Sean Daley) is really talking about. On the surface, the song seems to be about a beautiful woman. He explains that the woman is 43 years old and had never been with a man. The woman has tattoos on each of her hands; on the right had she had a portrait of a nude woman and she claimed it was what God resembled. On the left she had a portrait of the same woman, except this one looked like the Devil. Clearly, the tattoos epitomize the idea of duality in life. The struggle between what is good and what is evil. Slug gets intimately involved with this mysterious woman and shit starts going down. The woman begins caressing herself and the woman's tattoos smile as if inviting him to do so himself. Slug is being seduced by the woman with the tattooed hands. At this point "heaven" and "hell", represented by the woman's tattoos, come to life. The tattoos rise slowly up from her skin and climb up into her lady parts, as if to show him why she had never been with a man. The woman with the tattooed hands bit her bottom lip, presumably in both pleasure and pain, still attempting to entice the desires of Slug. Needless to say, Slug ain't playing that shit and he steps and leaves. He expresses that he caught a glimpse of religion and came that much closer to understanding the things that intrigued him the most. His experience with the woman did not turn him on in a sexual sense, but the experience turned him. It gave him a lot to teach, but even more to learn, so through himself he implores his audience to keep their eyes open and and take in all that they can from his experience with the woman with the tattooed hands.

"There's good and evil in each individual fire identifies needs and feeds our desires. As long as we keep our spirit inspired, she can bite her bottom lip all she wants."

All this is fine and dandy, but when trying to deconstruct this song for it's meaning most people face the same question: Who is the woman with the tattooed hands? Some would argue that the woman is the hiphop/music industry; the tattoos representing the duality between the good and evil things that come with fame and notoriety. Some would argue that the woman is Slug's muse; that the woman with the tattooed hands is an expression of the idea of creation. This idea follows the Adam and Eve template of falling into temptation and twisted adoration of the wrong principles and beliefs. Slug runs because he does not want to fall into the woman's trap. Slug emphatically tells the woman to bite her bottom lip all she wants. This line can give some the inclination to believe that the song is literally about a woman. Another easier explanation is that the song is about the duality of life. A man's surrealistic dream-like struggle between the forces of good and evil.

This is the beautiful part about music to me. There are an infinite amount of ideas out there, all waiting to be explored and expressed in whatever way you want to. I'll probably never know exactly what Slug is talking about in this song, but in the way that I perceive the song, I give it my own meaning and apply it to my own life. Not everybody perceives it in the same way, but that's the beauty of it. Music means whatever you want it to mean. We live life through the blinders of our own perspectives and thought-provoking music such as this helps broaden those perspectives. More than anything, what I get from this song is that we are not meant to understand everything. We take what we learn and what we experience and we make it our own. There's good and evil in everything, but as long as we keep our spirits inspired, she can bite her bottom lip all she wants . ;)