Last week was filth, this week goes a different way: but still with a fair bit of swearing and occasional filth, as it happens.

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/amodelofcontrol.com now has a Patreon page, at this stage purely as a potential way of helping to cover the running costs of the site. There is absolutely no compulsion to do so: if you feel you can chuck a small amount to the site each month, that would be appreciated.

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This week is all about jealousy in song: both the protagonist being jealous, and others being jealous of them. There’s anger, there’s resignation, and there’s some long-forgotten songs (to me) in here, too.

Thanks, as ever, to everyone who suggested a great list this week.

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A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details below).

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/Pet Shop Boys
/Jealousy
/Behaviour

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Although released much later, this was reputedly one of the first songs that Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe wrote together, back in 1982 (a few years before debut single West End Girls). Being a rather more subdued, darker song, it is perhaps easy to see why it was held back a bit, but like most of the duo’s earlier songs, it is still a remarkable song. From the point of view of someone left alone at home, their mind is working overtime as they catastrophise over the worst possible outcomes, that they’ve been abandoned for someone else’s affections, and that there is nothing that they can do to make it right.

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/Gin Blossoms
/Hey Jealousy
/New Miserable Experience

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One of those songs that entered the popular canon – and probably became something that obscured anything and everything else that they did – was written by the band’s original guitarist Doug Hopkins, and the (many) issues detailed in the song were, apparently, the reasons that he was fired from the band before this album was released (unusually, this song featured on their debut album, and then was re-recorded in the form everyone knows for New Miserable Experience).

It’s a song that’s an admission of failure: that while he’s drunk, can’t drive home and has clearly fucked up yet again, he’s asking his ex to forgive those failings as tomorrow will be better. The envy here is clearly his envy of his ex’s life, one that’s got it together and that he wants a piece of, whether he deserves it or not.

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/Charli xcx
/girl, so confusing featuring lorde
/Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat

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Now there’s a bit of distance from it, seeing Charli xcx finally become the globe-straddling megastar she seemed destined to be was great, and the rework Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat felt like a victory lap, bringing in peers for astonishing guest slots (Guess with Billie Eilish in particular) but also tying up a few loose ends. One in particular was the much-discussed girl, so confusing, which was obviously about another singer. The new version of brat answered it in style, with Lorde joining Charli xcx on a song that addressed the insecurities of being a woman in the public eye, unsure whether jealousy and envy has killed any chances of friendship or kinship, or whether the press and the wider world have simply poisoned everything with conjecture.

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/Olivia Rodrigo
/Obsessed
/Guts (Spilled)

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Olivia Rodrigo has a different issue on the excellent earworm Obsessed. On this pop-rock blitz – co-written with Annie Clark (St Vincent!), Rodrigo is spending most of her time in a current relationship obsessing with their partner’s ex-girlfriend: where she’s slept, what she’s done, how good she looks, even how nice she is to her. Clearly, she’s concerned she couldn’t possibly match up, and the ripping chorus unleashes every bit of anger and insecurity.

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/Paramore
/Misery Business
/Riot!

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The song that catapulted Paramore to stardom seems to have had a complicated legacy as the band considered their own positions over the years. Written when Hayley Williams was a teenager, it is something of a spiteful song about wresting a boy from another girl, with no little venom and jealousy about what, for a while, she couldn’t have. The triumphant nature of the song as Williams succeeds is, in retrospect, uncomfortable, and in later years, the band decided to retire the song such was their realisation that Williams was simply leaning into stereotypes as a youngster that society had shaped: and when they have played it again since, they’ve removed a particularly contentious line that refers to her love rival as a “whore”.

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/Meshell Ndegeocello
/If That’s Your Boyfriend (He Wasn’t Last Night)
/Plantation Lullabies

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This gloriously catty song is likely Meshell Ndegeocello’s best-known – and best – song, a funky R&B piece that has absolutely no regrets. Their occasional “booty call” apparently has a girlfriend, who has found out about the tryst and has got in contact – and the wonderful song title is, seemingly, the riposte. It seems that the view of the protagonist is that he isn’t getting what he wants or needs from his relationship, so he’s looking elsewhere, and the envy and jealousy is on full display in the exchanges…

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/Type O Negative
/Unsuccessfully Coping With the Natural Beauty of Infidelity
/Slow, Deep and Hard

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A late addition that bumped Rick Springfield‘s Jessie’s Girl from the list, and a Type O song (and album) that I’ve not listened to in a long, long time. Rather more raw and faster paced – at least in part, the dirge sound we know and love appears in time – than much of their later material, this is Pete Steele at his most unpleasant, wracked with jealousy and mistrust over an apparently cheating partner, for whom he has what he thinks is evidence. Of course, it’s impossible to tell whether it’s all in his head or not, and the insults thrown in the song haven’t dated well either.

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/Black Flag
/Jealous Again
/Jealous Again EP

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A different twist on relationship jealousy comes from the immortal hardcore pioneers Black Flag, with one of their early singles. A beleaguered man is frustrated with the jealous take on a friendship with another woman by his girlfriend, who doesn’t trust the interactions and is constantly assuming the worst with her partner. The song is a blast of frustration as a result, as they protest that there’s nothing in it, and that they have no intention of doing anything at all.

I’ve had jealous partners like this in the past, which ended up with me being all-but-forced to cut contact with female friends, and it was no fun. Those friendships endured, the relationship didn’t.

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/Fine Young Cannibals
/Suspicious Minds
/Fine Young Cannibals

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Obviously, the original was by The King himself, but I’ve always been quite fond of this mid-eighties cover by the quite brilliant (and under-appreciated) pop-soul band Fine Young Cannibals. This starts with a similar conceit to the Black Flag song above: a man dealing with their partner’s jealousy, but rather than anger, there’s a resignation instead that the situation is utterly untenable while there is so little trust…

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/Joy Crookes
/When You Were Mine
/Skin

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We close out this week with an intriguing song from a newer artist: one that perhaps made me crumble to dust when I realised the first love being talked about is in the “summer of ’16” (my first love was over twenty years before that…). A song rooted by time and place, in fact: the lyrics and video unmistakably are placed in Brixton, and the events there are different to many songs here. There’s jealousy, but also a realisation that people move on: as she sees her first love, long after they split, walking hand-in-hand with another man. There’s that fleeting feeling of what might have been, of where she might have gone wrong, but then the reality check that not everything works out, and it is time instead to move on and find your own happiness.