Devils End Up Like You

Tori Amos “She’s Your Cocaine”

“She’s Your Cocaine” is a very late ‘90s sort of love triangle song in which Tori Amos sings from the perspective of a woman totally exasperated by her ex going off with some seemingly toxic woman who’s pushing him towards what she interprets as tacky self-destruction but to me just sounds like a cool androgynous goth vibe. The song revels in her pettiness without any apologies, the point isn’t that we’re supposed to side with her in this but rather that most anyone can relate to feeling like this burning “oh fuck them” resentment. This is an atypically heavy song for Amos, one that churns with an industrial glam aesthetic not too far off from what The Smashing Pumpkins and Marilyn Manson were up to around this time. She throws herself into the sound, playing up the spite of its relatively normie POV character while embodying the sexy menace of this other woman she finds so threatening. By the end of the song she shifts to just roasting this dude – “you sign ‘Prince of Darkness’ / try ’Squire of Dimness’” – and that seems like a healthy place to leave it. He’s fully removed from the pedestal she put him on, and he’s just something she can laugh at now.

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