An Interpretation of "Evidence" by Faith No More

People have odd rituals when they're drunk. Whenever my best friend in Dunedin had imbibed more whisky than he should have, he would wrap himself in the Welsh flag and watch Braveheart. My own ritual was simpler. Whenever I got drunk, I always felt compelled to play two songs on the stereo: "Come Together" by the Beatles and "Evidence" by Faith No More. This latter song has remained important to me throughout my life and so, in today's post, I thought I would try to interpret it. I hope I am doing the right thing in attempting to spell out what I think it means.

The lyrics are as follows.

Evidence (by Faith No More)

If you want to open the hole,

Just put your head down and go.

Step aside the piece of the circumstance –

Got to wash away the taste of evidence.

Wash it away.

Evidence, evidence, evidence,

Got a taste of evidence.

I didn't feel a thing,

You didn't mean a thing.

Look in the eye and testify:

I didn't feel a thing.

Anything you say we know you're guilty,

Hands above your head and you won't even feel me.

You won't feel me.

Evidence, evidence, evidence,

Got a taste of evidence.

I didn't feel a thing,

You didn't mean a thing.

Look in the eye and testify:

I didn't feel a thing

"Evidence" is a fantastic song. When when interpreting it, we need to start somewhere and the first thing to say about this song is that it is about sex, that it is set, so to speak, in the bedroom. The first couple of lines are surely about cunnilingus and the line "Hands above your head and you won't even feel me" is undoubtedly a sexual image. But to go deeper than that, it is about a man who suspects that the woman he is sleeping with, his partner or wife, has been unfaithful to him but has no solid evidence for this suspicion. He imagines though that he can literally taste her infidelity in his mouth.

Supposing this song is autobiographical, as I believe it is, and that the woman is Mike Patton's wife, the question arises, did he suspect her of cheating on him with a man – or with a woman? I would argue the later and in fact I think this the key to interpreting. A man who suspects or knows his wife is a lesbian may feel he has to play a woman's part when having conjugal relations - "to make love to her like a woman" as a friend of mine who was in the same position as Patton once told me. Hence the reason for an image of cunnilingus. The line "Hands above your head and you won't even feel me" suggests strongly that Patton's partner wasn't that enthusiastic about fucking a man, wasn't that into it. Rather than enjoying sex, the two are just going through the motions. This reading of the song, that it is about sexual insecurity and a crisis of masculinity, seems supported by others off the same album, King for a Day, Fool for a Lifetime, the songs I'm thinking of being "Take this Bottle" and "Just a Man".

It is conceivable that Patton, his wife and another woman had a menage a trois but I won't pursue this possibility in this interpretation. 

If we read the song in this way, that it is a song describing sex between a man and a woman who he suspects of having a lesbian affair, how do we interpret the chorus? It seems that Patton is taking his wife's crime upon himself, rather than attributing it to her as he should; he seems to be erasing the distinction between him and her. One approach is to suppose that Patton perceives his wife's infidelity as a personal injury: he is saying to the other woman that she is insignificant and trying to reassure himself, trying to say, in effect, that the adultery might as well have never happened or didn't mean anything even if it did. In other words, it is a cuckold's rationalization. Yet he is still conflating himself with his wife and this is a puzzle that needs further elucidation.

The best songs are often ambiguous and "Evidence" does have interpretations other than the one I have suggested. The ambiguity springs from the chorus. A second interpretation of it is that it is Patton himself, not his wife, who had had the homosexual experience. When he says "It didn't mean a thing" and talks of testifying, he could be defending himself rather than his wife, saying, yes, it was he himself who had some kind of homosexual experience but it meant nothing, didn't count. This raises a strange and mysterious problem. Why does Patton willingly confuse himself with his wife? Is it him or her who has committed the crime? And if he is suggesting that it was he rather than her who had the homosexual experience, is it possible for a person to have a homosexual experience unintentionally, involuntarily, by accident as it were? And for it not to be rape?

To resolve this ambiguity, we need to sail into deeper waters. If a man suspects his wife of having a lesbian affair, it may cause him to doubt his own sexuality. This is a deep truth that few people consider. Add to that the possibility of gossip circulating about Patton's wife's sexuality or extra-marital relationships and we have a recipe for profound psychological distress. After all, the cuckolded husband is himself out of the loop, the last to know, imprisoned in a cone of silence; he suspects but has no proof. And such rumors inevitably cast doubt on the sexuality of the man as well as the woman. Some clues that this is what happened to Patton can be adduced from another song off the same album, "The Gentle Art of Making Enemies" (and there is sill another track on the album, not one I can know so well, called "The Last to Know"). Such mental anguish can drive a person a little mad, can manifest in dreams and hallucinations - in other words, it is possible for a person to imagine that he has had a homosexual experience when literally he hasn't. Such a hallucination happened to another friend of mine, not the one I mentioned above, and it happened to me as well, in early 2010 to be precise. It need not occur as the consequence of one's wife having a lesbian affair but this is definitely a viable antecedent.

Patton I feel prided himself on his masculinity, his sexual prowess, and the situation he found himself in I think resulted in a kind of spiritual or religious crisis hinted at in the song "Just A Man". Perhaps Patton himself had such a dream or hallucination.

I would propose that an experience something like this also happened to the novelist David Foster Wallace when he was in college, was the reason for the "spiritual crisis" (as he himself described it) that he suffered then but never talked about, and that nearly led him to take his own life. I have tried to tackle this difficult issue before in an earlier post "An Appreciation of David Foster Wallace". In the film-biopic about Wallace, The End of the Tour, Wallace (or to speak more accurately, the actor playing him) talks of "experimenting" when he was younger – but I believe the film does a disservice to Wallace in presenting him this way, is pandering to those who think they know Wallace better than he knew himself. Talk of "experimentation" or "bi-curiousity" implies volition and the type of experience I am describing is avolitional. I do not believe Wallace "experimented" when he was young; I believe if he suffered such an experience, endured such a delusion or hallucination, it was 'by accident', was non-consensual, if we can use the term 'non-consensual' when no other partner exists. Wallace may perhaps have been the victim of false gossip and perhaps this calumny preceded the experience. I admit this is speculation. However I might say one more thing about it: one might describe this type of dream or hallucination as a kind of rape but the word 'rape' also seems inappropriate – unless a person can be said to be raped by his or her own subconscious mind (or, to give credit where credit is due, raped by the world, by the stupid or the cruel who comprise the victim's milieux).

I know this discussion might make some of my readers uncomfortable. I feel sometimes that I am excavating the secret history of the world. I might finish by saying just this: that although I have loved "Evidence" since I was a teenager, it is only in the last couple of years that I have felt that I knew what it was about and, only now, that I have decided to share what I think it means.