In this part of the world it's Track 2 Mess Around that is getting the most airtime on the radio, but Sweetie Little Jean is sitting pretty as Track 3 on the album and is hands-down the most important song from Cage the Elephant's most recent compilation. If you listen to the song without really paying attention to the lyrics, it has an old fashioned twang of a poppy unrequited love ballad. But when you actively listen to the entire song including full absorption of the lyrics, it quickly loses that initial vibe altogether. Take a moment here to listen to the song to perhaps fully enjoy its analysis:
I became marginally obsessed with the song after absorbing the lyrics. Who was sweetie little Jean? Why was she missing? How old was she supposed to be anyways? Why does there appear to be a duality in the singer and the song? It sounded like both a confession and a lamentation. I was intrigued and started listening to the song over and over again, endeavoring to absorb its story, its feelings.
It's a song about a missing little girl, the tone of the singer originally misleads you into thinking it is a croon about an adolescent love gone wrong, a little bit like Del Shannon's My Little Runaway - but no. It's not about a 16 year old teenager that ran away from home (one that was most likely abusive), who ditched her childhood dude friend--that probably never confessed to her how much he loved her--unannounced. Sweetie little Jean is little, she's sweet, her parents are freaking out she hasn't come home, there's a vigil on channel 4 for her, people are canvassing the neighborhood looking for her. Posting missing picture flyers and knocking on doors. So the tittle of the song is a tell, there's plenty of clues in the song that point to an abduction, but I can't stress enough here that it is the abduction of a child.
Eventually I found myself stupefied over the complexity of such simple lyrics, and fairly horrified as well. I went from going 'oh no, he misses his missing girlfriend who has either been abducted or run away' to having to Google the lyrics as my imagination with the song made me think about how the singer is admitting to killing a little girl, that's why there's an international vigil on TV and a door-to-door search, signs on every "mother loving" post--he sounded haunted and annoyed by that--the singer is whining about wanting her back, but by talking about her bones he seems to know she's certainly dead, how would he know that if he didn't kill her?
Also who is "we"? What are we "letting go"? How's he wanting her back?--out of guilt?--to relive his time with her?--bring her back to life? His only hope is lying next her bones?It began to strike me as a murder's melody, Jean is obviously very much so underage.
Ruminating deeper on the song, I began to think it might be about letting go of the Rape Culture that's fueling violence against women, which is ultimately about letting go of the macho male myth, the notion of entitlement and ownership over the female body, coupled with the singer's real viewpoint of lamenting that we're overlooking how many times sexual violence is in actuality getting committed and therefore embedded in American culture and how much longer is that going to be let go/overlooked? Perhaps what is wanted back is a restoration of the female as sacred?
In that context it's a pretty creepy song since it's about a missing girl that the singer seems to know is undoubtedly dead. Yet overwhelming powerful, especially in the chorus as it seems the singer as an artist is pushing the persona of a child murderer (that turned her laughter to tears after pushing and pulling...) into the true revelation of his real self, which is the artist as a man asking, pleading, suggesting, that perhaps, we let it go. We let our sick Munchausen society go. Start over, since what it has become, is a place where musicians are going to write songs about murdered little girls that may go overlooked because we are SO desensitized to the serial sexual violence committed against females, no matter their age, as plot devices and in actual neighborhoods.
This epiphany lead to researching the band and the meaning of the song.
I learned about the two brothers in the band, Matt and Brad Shultz. The muse for "Jean" was a real little girl and neighborhood playmate for the Shultz brothers in their shedding childhood. In July 1996, 7 year-old Morgan Violi disappeared from an apartment complex's parking lot shortly after playing with them that day, her small lifeless--no doubt, violated--body found by October later that same year somewhere in Tennessee. Her abduction and murder remain to this day, unsolved. Brad was 12 when this happened. Matt became "done".
I am so consumed by emotion, it's hard to write...Internet Kingdom, fans of justice and Cage the Elephant, please search for the animal that preyed upon not only the body of Morgan Violi but the developing minds of Matt and Brad Shultz. Please? Drive the killer out, haunt him with guilt, burn him out of his foxhole.
I wish I could hold them and take all that trauma, misplaced responsibility, and survivor's guilt they must feel, right out like a splinter.
I couldn't dismiss the song, I can't dismiss the reality either.
There is suffering in this world, but there does not have to be so. Inflicting any kind of pain is a choice. A badly made choice. All the selfishness and madness can cease. When pain is inflicted on another, be it an unkind word or a homicide, that pain ripples. Just as when an act of kindness is given randomly freely, we're told to pay it forward. Wilco sang in Jesus, Etc. "all of our love is all of God's money" - there is equally a negative covert currency of evil. We are horrendously capable of paying that forward as well. When we surly mustn't.
It hurts to be in a society, like a doll in a box on a shelf in a store, waiting to be noticed or better yet purchased, claimed, owned, taken "home" to be loved, hated, ambivalent against - or a mixture of all three. A plastic girl that melts as she ages. A toy to be toyed with until bored. And you can dress her with whatever is on the other shelves, be it white lace or black leather. Her feet are deformed from her shoes, her scalp hurts from her hairdo. Lead in her lipstick. She'll do dishes & fellatio. Her skin is never clear enough, smooth enough, hydrated enough, plump enough, young enough, and her hair is never silky smooth or shiny enough. She's never pretty enough, sexy enough, good enough, smart enough, emotionally even enough. These are the messages that females are assuaged with.
Now the capture and assault of young women are making their way into the artsphere of our culture. I think, not to normalize it, but perhaps shock those of you that are not morally awake anymore. Those of you that would perhaps even entertain that type of debauchery. But things like the movie 'Room' and the song Sweetie Little Jean, are not "entertainment" they are supposed to break the current holding pattern. As these "narratives" are based on actual real happenstances that are equally heartbreaking, the song on Morgan, the movie based on a book based on the three Castro-Cleveland ladies. Even that 'Lovelace' movie that came out a few years ago. The movie 'Eden', 'Compliance' -- all extremely terrifying prospects, all born of true real events, in the case of 'Compliance' 70 times.
These are all "stories" that can make you loathe a male by default if only out of mere self-preservation.
The unveiled mystery of sweetie little Jean, brought with it no satisfaction in the unknown becoming known. Only disappointed horror.
But I'll leave you with this: when a baby elephant is tiny and lives in captivity it has one of it's legs tied and staked down, so as it grows into this powerful lumbering beast, it will not fight against its restraint for as a youngster it had been conditioned to think it was imprisoned. The adult elephant will not attempt to free itself as it has been brainwashed that it simply cannot, so it doesn't try. A human's mind is like a caged elephant, it does not question its environment as a limitation and thereby never imagines to set itself free.
It is time to uncage the elephant.
