‘Wet Dream’: Wet Leg’s retaliation against toxic masculinity
“Three, two, one! Let’s begin!” —’Wet Dream’ has always felt like a dancier Wet Leg track, filled with all the moving parts to get you singing along with the kind of jostle that makes you feel something. And it’s clear what it’s trying to do: bring you along for the ride, even if it’s unclear what we’re celebrating, heart out in a convertible, blissfully unaware of the utterly dark undertone bleeding through the speakers.
That’s the fun of most Wet Leg tracks, where you never really know what’s going on, just that you’re enjoying what you’re hearing in all its weird and wonderful glory. There’s also an endearing quality to the overly confident coolness of it all, complex and convoluted as it may be. But ‘Wet Dream’, the song most people come back to when listening to their favourite tracks, reaches for something a bit more meaningful than simple radio-level enjoyment, even if it is wrapped up in Britpop power.
While we can’t ever pretend that dark tracks can’t also be escapist, ‘Wet Dream’ has the kind of sneaky overture that might make it seem as though you’re about to feel your way through a journey of liberation. Notwithstanding those elements, as most of us will know from singing along to a track about heartbreak, betrayal or even annoyance, the driving beat at the beginning leading into Rhian Teasdale’s “here we go…” feels cathartic because it pokes fun at repetitiveness, whatever shape that may take.
In this story, though, it’s all about taking shots at any of those men who have ever made us feel cornered—exes and weird obsessors/stalkers who don’t take the hint that maybe they should stop bothering us. Going into a weird headspace post-breakup gets the better of most of us, but there’s a specific breed of men who freak out harder than the rest. So much that they send their exes texts about the dreams they’ve had, (probably) hoping it will win them back, when it (definitely) won’t.
“It’s got a little bit of my own personal breakup injected into it,” Teasdale told Apple Music, sharing an anecdote about an ex who messaged her to tell her he dreamt they got married, which then inspired a song “making fun” of the types of messages she and countless other women get from people who can’t and won’t let go. In the song, though, the playfulness is deliberately belittling, like raising eyebrows in amusement at the audacity, and thinking, “Now, why would you say that?”
It’s clear in the lyrics: “What makes you think you’re good enough to think about me when you’re touching yourself?” And then again, in a tongue-in-cheek way, she sings about the person obscenely climbing on the bonnet of her car, licking the windscreen, all to “make a girl blush”, when really it’s just laughable insanity. Not even the promise of watching Buffalo ’66 is enough of a pull, a gloriously pretentious proposition, even for someone existing in the cool world.
All jokes aside, this is also exactly why the song is so great: it pokes fun, yes, but it’s also a story of someone unsettled by the actions of someone else, crossing boundaries that have been firmly drawn. Most of us know what it feels like to wish someone away and feel powerless against it, but this track shows that feeling in control and even empowered can come from trying to find the humour in the chaos, as undignified as that may seem, given the reality of it. ‘Wet Dream’ propagates messiness as a virtue, even if it’s frustration that lingers behind the nonchalance.
