Lyrically Speaking: the powerful meaning of ‘Salad’ by Blondshell
Amidst Blondshell’s self-titled debut album and its multitude of tales of modern love, deadbeat boyfriends and bad friends sits a bomb. Blowing her usually witty and fun lyricism into the sharpest of shrapnel, ‘Salad’ will cut deep. “I would take a gun out / Put some poison in his salad / And it wouldn’t be so bad / it wouldn’t hurt the world,” Sabrina Teitelbaum, or Blondshell, begins before the guitars and an off-kilter piano boom the song to murderous life.
Even before the story truly begins, there is something off here. Immediately so much darker than any other number on the album, ‘Salad’ casts off her usual 1990s rock influence for something heavier. Taking note from Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads or the rage stored in the most raucous riot grrrl tracks, it’s a song out for blood and one that lets its intention known in every little detail.
Other tracks on the record, like ‘Joiner’ or ‘Sepsis’, ponder feelings. It’s a deeply self-analytic album from Teitelbaum as she considers her saviour complex in places and analyses her romantic kinks in others. But on ‘Salad’, the gaze is turned directly outward. As the instrumental roars to life, everything about the effort becomes a pointed finger or a fist as the singer delivers one of the most nuanced and powerful takes on sexual violence in recent years.
Throughout the track, the lyricism seems to go through every stage of grief as sexual assault victims do. Spiralling from bargaining as she asks, “How does someone end up with a stone in a chest cavity?” into the outright rage of the song’s bridge, ‘Salad’ avoids the trap of falling into an unhelpfully upbeat “it’ll get better” take on the topic. Its intention doesn’t seem to be empowerment, nor does it seem to be worsening the feelings of helplessness that follow such an event.
First comes the revenge fantasy. “Look what you did / now in my sleep I am a murderer,” she sings as she imagines being able to get back at her abuser. Pulling from the same emotional pool as films like Promising Young Woman or Gone Girl, the voice at the start of the track is cold, calculated and somewhat unhinged. Every time the music swells, it sounds like Teitelbaum stabs the knife again and again in a murderous rage.
But the song doesn’t stay there. Instead, it sadly finds a more realistic path as the story enters a courtroom and into the realm of the devastating lack of justice victims regularly face. As she describes the perpetrator getting off scot-free and then catching him laughing about his courtroom vindication afterwards, the violence of the chorus comes back in, but this time, it feels sadder.
“It doesn’t happen to women I know / I put it in a box in a TV show,” the chorus goes. Perfectly capturing the voice of doubters and misogynists who refuse to believe victims, Teitelbaum weaves a bath between rage and helplessness, strength and sadness as the track goes on.
All those feelings come crashing to a crescendo on the bridge. What starts as a whisper turns into a wail, providing a moment for the audience to join together and howl their pain. A nuanced snapshot of the desire for true justice and vengeance, but being chewed up and spat out by a legal system that was never set up to support such victims, she says so much by saying so little.
In one simple phrase, Blondshell embodies all of the mixed emotions that come with lack of justice; “I don’t know how to do that within the framework.” Unable to truly get closure, unable to respond with the rage the situation deserves but still being forced to grapple with the trauma that comes with assault, that one line is perhaps the most tragically realistic take on sexual violence in indie music history.
