Jennifer Paige

Crush
Edel / Hollywood, 1998

In the film clip for Jennifer Paige's song 'Crush', which spent a fortnight at the top of the Australian charts about a decade ago, Paige drives around in a convertible on a sunny day with a group of men in open shirts who drag their arms across her and recline backwards over the ridge of the rear seat to show off their hairless and muscled chests. Perhaps deliberately, it cuts between that fantasy and a far more wholesome one without the subtle implications of group sex. In the other sequence Paige is pictured sitting on a swing in the forest being pushed by a comparatively mature man wearing a grey vest and a buttoned-up shirt who never gropes or flirts with her the same way as the others do. Kind of like he was her father or something.

If it sounds like I'm reading too much into the video clip, keep in mind that it is a particularly sexual song – even more so than the parade of thinly and not so thinly veiled odes to physical pleasures that march through the pop music charts and into the bedrooms of young girls and boys each week. The memories of my own that it recalls are just as lascivious, though nowhere near as showy – driving around town at night, sneaking alcohol into pool halls and having fumbling teenage sex with girls who lived in colourless and menacing industrial suburbs. For one reason or another they are always set at night. The closest thing to Paige's video clip fantasy the song ever approached in my own life was the tacky glow of neon.

Two years after 'Crush' was released it was covered by creative indie-rock band The Dismemberment Plan, who slowed it down to half the original speed and stripped away all of the instrumentation except for a guitar that chimed like clanging metal. It's an excellent cover. Without anything else to distract from it, the melody becomes hypnotic and the words take on a very different meaning. Singer Travis Morrisons sings the denials of the chorus ("It's just a little crush/ Not like I faint every time we touch") in a sort of piercing drawl that can be painful on first listen. It's the exact opposite of the original – not a celebration of lust and flirtation but the torture of tension without release.