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Don't you wanna know how they keep starting fires?

"We’re just a funny bunch of guys, and we’re also very cynical. We’re doing dance music because we’re the furthest thing from a Studio 54. We just sit around, eat pizza, drink canned beer, and fart."
Interview with Dick Valentine.

Electric Six are a Detroit sextet that formed in 1996. The band began in earnest as "The Wildbunch" until a similarly-named group from Bristol found out and complained. They're best known for their single "Danger! High Voltage!," a dance-friendly duet with a mechanic who won a contest to sing with the band because he was the only person to enter, and its associated video which involves the lead singer making out with a middle-aged woman on a stuffed moose, and all of them have glowing crotches. The video for their single "Gay Bar" also received viral-type attention on the internet for its very unique take on the White House cabinet of US president Abraham Lincoln. Members of the band are also involved in such listen-worthy side projects as Evil Cowards and the dairy promotion campaign White Gold.

Their music is often described with words such as "disco," "metal," "new wave," "dance," "punk", "rock" and "fairly ridiculous" with influences ranging from KISS to Devo to The Doors to Captain Beefheart. While practically unknown to the general public in their home country, they were well received in the UK, which is rather ironic for a band that could be described as remarkably American and aware of it: their lyrics routinely reference US politics and have Shout Outs to their home town of Detroit. The singer and head songwriter, Dick Valentine, is noted for his unique and emphatic vocal delivery and his extensive lyrical use of both So Bad, It's Good sexual innuendo and humorous pop culture references.

Current Lineup

Studio Album Discography

  • Fire (2003)
  • Señor Smoke (2005)
  • Switzerland (2006)
  • I Shall Exterminate Everything Around Me That Restricts Me from Being the Master (2007)
  • Flashy (2008)
  • Sexy Trash: The Rarities, Demos and Misfires of Electric Six (2008)
  • KILL (2009)
  • Zodiac (2010)
  • Heartbeats and Brainwaves (2011)
  • Absolute Pleasure (Live Album) (2012)
  • Mustang (2013)
  • Human Zoo (2014)
  • Bitch, Don't Let Me Die (2015)
  • Fresh Blood For Tired Vampyres (2016)
  • How Dare You (2017)
  • Bride of the Devil (2018)
  • Streets of Gold (2021)
  • Turquoise (2023)

Electric Six provide examples of the following tropes:

  • Affectionate Parody: The video of "Body Shot" parodies old porn videos.
  • A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The titular device from the song "Broken Machine". As the lyrics go, it doesn't care if it tears us apart. It also suffers from erectile dysfunction.
  • Album Title Drop: Fire was so named because the band noticed that the songs had an abundance of the word in them and decided to roll with it.
    • Likewise, KILL was named from the song "Egyptian Cowboy", as well as being the overall 'feel' of the record.
    • Flashy has "Flashy Man".
    • Human Zoo comes from a line in "I'm the Devil".
  • Alliterative Title:
    • "Pulling the Plug on the Party"
    • "We Were Witchy Witchy Witchy Witchy White Women"
  • Angst: Examples include "Rubber Rocket" about the protagonist lamenting that he'd jerk off to internet porn rather than go back to a particular woman and "The Band in Hell" involving a failed artist lamenting his apparent one-way romance with someone... and is now forced to play at a seedy bar in Hell with a band that has Adolf Hitler in it to suck for all eternity. Yeah.
    • They make it all dance-able and non-serious, so fret not.
  • Animated Music Video: "Chocolate Pope".
  • Anti-Love Song: Examples include "Lenny Kravitz", which is a rather curt lyrical dismissal of a one-night stand, "Infected Girls", which is extolling the singer's desire to mate with STD-infected women due to being infected himself, and "Kukuxumushu", which is about how much the singer got dumped repeatedly, was stalked by different women and pleads with his girlfriend to NOT make him write her a damn love song, they're only fuck buddies.
  • Arc Words: Fire (hence the album title) and Nuclear War on the album Fire. Devil on every album. On the album Mustang, Dick had a real thing for the word Dragon, it is used in several of the songs, most notably in the scaly anthem "Jessica Dresses Like A Dragon".
  • Arms Dealer: Whoever's singing "Naked Pictures (Of Your Mother)".
  • Artistic License – Biology: "Every barracuda starts out as a guppy."
  • Auto Erotica: Played straight in a spoken word snippet of "I'm The Bomb." Off the same album, "Getting Into The Jam" repeatedly mentions the narrator's plan to "make it in my car" with a woman.
  • Badass Boast: "But you can't ignore my techno."
    • The party leader in "Down at McDonnelzzz" boasting that "The leader's gonna make you party/Preventing you from departing."
    • "I invented the night", "you must obey the dance commander", "you know that my suit costs more than your house", "I will freak you like you've never been freaked before"... and those are just examples from Fire. Suffice it to say they're very fond of these.
  • Bar Brawl: One erupts as Dick passes by a bar in the video to "There's Something Very Wrong With Us Tonight."
  • Beneath the Mask: The band has stated that they play disco dance music because it's "exactly what we are not."
    • This is touched on in "Gay Bar, Pt. 2", when Valentine sings about how surprised people are to learn he likes listening to Peter, Paul, and Mary.
  • Big "NO!": Dick Valentine's riposte to Jesus asking if everyone could just get along and shit in "I'm The Devil".
  • Brick Joke: The "STOP...CONTINUE" gag in "Improper Dancing" is treated as this when performing live, in that the brief silence on the track is when the band plays an entirely different song, before then cutting back to the rest of "Improper Dancing".
  • Burger Fool: In the lyrics of "Down at McDonnelzzz" a guy shows up to hold a parking lot party at a McDonald's McDonnelzzz because "his people need a place to go." The video plays the trope straight thematically: a Sunglasses at Night centaur with a Vanilla Ice haircut, a DeLorean and plastic toy katana and his clown-dressed friends hurl burgers at a Burger Fool, interrupting his training video, before breaking out the 40s of malt liquor.
    • "Boy or Girl" suddenly switches to the narrator welcoming someone to Big Burger. Can he take your order?
    • "Pleasing Interlude I" has the man walk down to Monty's Grille to get a burger. Things go awry.
    • "Telephone Conversation" deliberately averts this, which is why the song wasn't released on an album. It namechecks Koo Koo Roo, a Michigan restaurant chain. The band didn't want to change the lyrics, but didn't want the chain to sue them, so the track was eventually self-released on Sexy Trash.
    • "Late Night Obama Food" is a nonsensical song about having to eat fast food out in the city.
  • Calling Your Attacks: Most of Fire would have Dick announce the SOLO!
    • In "Riding On a White Train", he repeatedly announces the solo while it's playing.
  • The Conspiracy: "Formula 409" features the band, circa the lineup of Flashy, being abducted by men wearing suits and T. rex masks and brainwashed with psychotropics into literally cleaning up Detroit with spray cleaner and rags.
    • For the former trope, "Germans in Mexico" qualifies, wherein American Fighter Jets snatch Mexican women for sale in Berlin (or are called upon to stop said sale) and German spies attempting to take over the world are in love with the president's daughter.
  • Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Just try reading any of Dick Valentine's lyrics, or better yet, the blog on the band's website.
  • Concept Video: Most videos they've shot qualify. Notable ones include "There's Something Very Wrong With Us So Lets Go Out Tonight", with its twist ending, and "Dance Commander" which, due to having two completely unrelated concepts smashed together and cut between, also qualifies as a Surreal Music Video.
  • Cover Album: Streets of Gold, which also closes with re-recordings of their two most famous songs.
  • The Cover Changes the Meaning: The band chose to cover "I Got The Six" by ZZ Top to deliberately invoke this, where the 'six' in the original title was a penis reference (the song being about 69ing), it now comes across as Dick using his status as the leader of Electric Six to convince someone to sleep with him.
  • Creepy Monotone: The distorted voice in "Lucifer Airlines" and "It's Horseshit!"
  • Crowd Chant: Human Zoo opens with a crowd chanting the band's name, before it segues into "Karate Lips". It reappears in "Gun Rights".
  • Darker and Edgier: KILL.
  • Dead All Along: The singer reveals this to be the case at the end of "Transatlantic Flight." The vocoder chorus even hammers it home by repeating "Everybody's dead" over and over again at the end.
  • Death: The narrator in the video for "There's Something Very Wrong With Us Tonight".
  • Department of Redundancy Department: "Put a little mustard on that mustard!"
    • Señor Smoke ends with a song titled "Future Is In The Future."
  • Downer Ending: "Cheryl vs. Darryl" for Mustang as a whole, given the subject matter.
    • For another surprisingly serious final song, "White Eyes" caps off Kill with a song about the narrator being haunted by a white-eyed ghost who makes them go blind. Or it's from the perspective of a hallucinating drug addict.
  • Dr. Feelgood: The singer of "I Buy The Drugs."
  • Ending Fatigue: Invoked in "Improper Dancing":
    STOP...(beat)... CONTINUE!
  • Exactly What It Says on the Tin: "I Am a Song."
    • It watches you masturbate and hits on women. A very naughty song...
    • "Formula 409." You can clean your kitchen, baby. Make it look good every time. You can use a little Mr. Clean, or...
  • Fan Disservice: Tina Kanarek, the woman in the "Danger! High Voltage!" video, was 70 at the time. Having the voice of Jack White doesn't help.
    • The naked porn star grandmother in the video for "Body Shot".
  • Functional Addict: Played with in "Feed My Fuckin' Habit", and presumably who the narrator in "I Buy the Drugs" is talking to.
  • Genre Throwback: "Heartbeats and Brainwaves", a throwback to '80s synthpop.
  • Girls' Love: "We Were Witchy Witchy White Women" talks of two lesbian witches.
  • Groin Attack: Dick is nearly bitten in the dick by a dog at the end of "Formula 409." Luckily, he punches it away.
  • Historical Hilarity: The video for "Gay Bar", starring an entire White House of gay Abraham Lincolns.
  • Hot-Blooded: Dick Valentine's style of singing is so over the top it probably never even knew a top existed.
    • He lets up a little bit on some songs: "Steal Your Bones", "Chocolate Pope", "Jimmy Carter" and "Watching Evil Empires Fall Apart" are examples. However his distinctive wacky accent is impossible to disguise.
  • Intentionally Awkward Title: "She's White" and "Randy's Hot Tonight". Whether the songs are actually about a white woman (instead of her just being being "white-hot") and a crush on another guy respectively is... ambiguous.
  • Intercourse with You: If it's not a Silly Love Song or angst.
    • Zig-Zagged: Given how alternately serious and non-serious the band comes off as.
  • I Am the Band: Dick Valentine is the only person left of the original Wildbunch since Fire. Eventually getting switched around, people have been hanging about since Switzerland and Señor Smoke. He also is the primary music and songwriter for the band, with only the most recent albums featuring songs penned and composed by other members.
  • I Love the Dead: "Alone With Your Body" is described as "the feel-good necrophilia anthem of the summer."
  • It Came from Beverly Hills: In "I'm The Bomb" the subject of the singer's affections is cited as "a superstar living in the three-one-oh," which is the area code that dominates most of the upscale Los Angeles neighborhoods. The singer being thought of as "just another sucker perpetrator living in the two-one-three" is yet another Shout-Out to Detroit.
    • "I Buy The Drugs" says the drug dealer operates out of the PO Box of FOX Broadcasting's LA headquarters.
  • Large Ham: Every. Single. Song.
    • Special mention should be given to the word 'Devil'. Every time Dick says it he does it in a way that makes him sound like an over the top cartoon villain - "Deh Ville". As he loves saying the word, this happens a lot (especially in the Wildbunch period).
  • Last Note Nightmare: Exaggerated in "It Ain't Punk Rock". It goes from a regular E6 song to some sort of nightmarish industrial-ambient thing for almost half of the track.
  • Letting the Air out of the Band: "(Who The Hell Just) Call My Phone" ends like this after suddenly bringing an accordion into the instrumentation.
  • Lounge Lizard: Dick Valentine's stage and lyrical persona — the full-blown Casanova Wannabe version, but it was especially prevalent in Fire.
    • "Taxi To Nowhere" is a fast-paced lounge piano song (complete with sounding like it was an amateur recording of a lounge singer in a hotel somewhere) about being stuck in a moving taxi without any money.
  • Lyrical Dissonance: "Jimmy Carter" reuses a chorus line from "Backstreet's Back", except that it's sung in a very serious and somber tone, used in a very serious and melancholy way, and juxtaposed with depressing quotations from William Butler Yeats.
    There's a lion out in the desert
    Slouching towards Bethlehem to be born again
    Backstreet's back, alright
    • "Iron Dragon", off of Mustang, is a sombre break-up song... that also talks about wizards, dragons, knights, medieval warfare, and betrayal.
    • "Alone With Your Body" is a cheerful, upbeat rock song about wanting to fuck corpses.
    • "Hello! I See You!" is about the apocalypse and Satan punishing the wicked, set to an apparent 80s love ballad.
  • Mall Santa: Word of God says the title character of "Big Red Arthur" is essentially this, to the degree where he's too incompetent to properly slide down a chimney, resulting in him falling to his death. Not that he really minds.
  • The Man Behind the Man: In this case, the Woman behind The Guy Who Rules the World in "Watching Evil Empires Fall Apart".
    • There's also the smoking cat in "Formula 409"'s music video, apparently commanding the T. rex suitmen.
    • The narrator in "There's Something Very Wrong With Us, So Let's Go Out Tonight" sees everything the policeman sees...
    • The narrator of "American Cheese" is a rich, powerful playboy who has made a fortune off of... well... American Cheese. Subverted when the outro reveals he's quite powerless, and his bragging was a meaningless time waster.
    • The title song of How Dare You discusses movers and shakers who're on par with the Mafia, making money and killing haters.
  • Minimalistic Cover Art: Bitch, Don't Let Me Die, to the point of not even having the title on the cover.
  • New Sound Album: Heartbeats And Brainwaves is essentially an Electric Six take on Synth-Pop.
  • No Mouth: The bride in the Psychic Visions video.
  • Not Afraid to Die: "Big Red Arthur", if only because his death means he can leave the awful world he lived in behind.
  • Ode to Intoxication: "I'm On Acid," from the Wildbunch days and "I Buy The Drugs," from the viewpoint of the enabler to the intoxicated.
  • Out-of-Genre Experience: "(Who The Hell Just) Call My Phone" is, for the most part, similar to a song you'd expect from the "disco" side of Electric Six. But near the end, the same riff plays out, but with the bass and drums replaced with an accordion, before Letting the Air out of the Band.
  • Performance Video: "I Buy The Drugs" has them performing at Detroit's only existing frat house, in a sort of Animal House-style.
    • "Rubber Rocket" is the band doing a Detroit bar crawl.
  • Piss-Take Rap: One pops up in "It Gets Hot", for some reason.
  • Place Worse Than Death: "Escape From Ohio" portrays being in Ohio as a fate worse than death.
  • Porn Stache: The video of "Body Shot" and their cover of "Radio Gaga", featuring Freddie Mercury cosplay.
  • Product Placement: Parodied in "Down at McDonnelzzz", especially in the music video. The burgers held by the lusty women are even black-bar censored out as they sexily eat them.
    • "Formula 409". Even better than Mr. Clean!
    • The Flashy Man: The Xbox to your Atari. Several years before Cee Lo Green made the same analogy.
    • Subverted with "Infected Girls." At the end one can hear a girl reciting part of "Pleasing Interlude I" from Señor Smoke in Croatian. The only words understandable to an English speaker, however, are what sounds like "chocolate and a Coca-Cola" which makes it sound like she's just listing products.
    • The line about Druid Fluid from "Clusterfuck", which is an actual beer. May be unintentional.
    • Mountain Dew, extolled by the Devil in "I'm the Devil" as death in a bottle (dew dew dew dew)
    • "Dark Angel" has the singer telling a girl to be "[his] Capri-Sun."
  • Refuge In Absurdity: Read their lyrics sometime.
    • The press releases they write up for new albums are completely ridiculous. The one for Zodiac has them deliberately name dropping Glenn Beck, Lady Gaga, and Robert Pattinson to increase its chances of getting Google hits. The press release for Flashy featured a several-paragraph-long "Shaggy Dog" Story about communism.
  • Rape as Drama: "Cheryl vs. Darryl" has the eponymous ex-couple's breakup begin with a casting call for a rape scene. When all's said and done, their romance is completely destroyed by it, even if it was simulated.
  • Relax-o-Vision: The "SIT-BACK-RELAX" in "Lucifer Airlines" attempts to be this. Whether it's successful in the context of the song is up for debate, considering where the airline goes.
  • Rhyming with Itself: The first verse of "Dark Angel" begins with Dick rhyming "street" with itself three times in a row... and then rhyming "torture" with itself right after that.
  • Running Gag: In "Showtime", the repeated references to "putting a little mustard on it".
  • Serious Business: Inverted. The band has a very light-hearted and casual attitude towards their music. As a result the group has often been written off as a novelty joke band by critics at home and abroad. Valentine's response: "Some people take music very seriously, and then they see us, and they want to take it seriously but they're too afraid the joke is going to be on them."
  • Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll: Subverted. The members establish an image of being party-crazed rock star barflies but then, when interviewed, admit they're doing it simply because it's a fun change of pace from their normal lives.
  • Sexophone: Used in a number of tracks. "Dirty Looks" is a good example, as is "Formula 409".
  • Silly Love Songs: If they're not vaguely angsty songs or songs about sex metaphors, they're this. Pumped to eleven.
  • Shout-Out: Enough to probably deserve their own page.
    • "Gay Bar, Part Two" references a lot of Fire, Senor Smoke, and Switzerland, and in turn is a jab at people's claims that they only ever wrote a handful of songs worth listening to and people who never bothered to check anything past Fire.
    • From their Wildbunch days, "I Am Detroit, you are Mars. You've got red sand, I've got cars."
    • "American Cheese" reuses "Vengeance and Fashion"'s end beat. Either a Call-Back or the musical equivalent of Lazy Artist.
    • As with Affectionate Parody above, Down at McDonnelzzz is a Shout-Out to '90s-era MTV videos.
    • Top Gun is part of the brainwashing program in the "Formula 409" video.
    • The song "Boy or Girl" has "Hi, welcome to BIG Burger. Can I take your order?"
    • "Doom and Gloom and Doom and Gloom" musically references, of all songs, "The Great Gig in the Sky" and "Baker Street".
    • "Pulling the Plug on the Party" includes the lyric "We dropped turkeys out of planes just to fill up the sky\And they know damn well they can't fly."
    • Flashy Man, who Dick says is "the Xbox to your Atari".
    • "Absolute Pleasure".
    • As already noted, "Escape from Ohio" is a Take That! to the whole state, but does also give positive mention to a couple of prominent bands that hail from there (Devo and Guided by Voices).
    • The man the narrator talks about in "The New Shampoo" is obviously The Man Your Man Could Smell Like, and namedrops various brands, like Head and Shoulders and Setsun Blue.
    • "Alone With Your Body" cops the "Crack open a cold one" quip from Criminal Minds (see the quote page for I Love the Dead).
    • The "pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty girl" line from "Nuclear War (On the Dance Floor)" references The Rolling Stones' "Beast of Burden".
    • The cover for Bride of the Devil is a reference to Dawn of the Dead.
  • Spoken Word in Music: Some appropriate voice clips are used to set up "Flashy Man". There's nothin' wrong with likin' a flashy man.
  • Spooky Painting: Several in the "Danger! High Voltage!" video.
  • Spot The ImposTOR: "Pleasing Interlude I" is a bizarre skit wherein Dick accuses the cashier at his local Greasy Spoon of being "THE IMPOSTOR" for not remembering his order.
    • I... woke up on the Main Page again... and I needed something to write about. So I went down to the fora. "What'll it be?" Said Fast Eddie, sporting a wry grin. "Just give me the usual, Eddie," I said. Fast Eddie scratched his head. "What was that again?" The usual was a heaping of TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life, with SugarWiki fritters And a Diet Coke. Fast Eddie knew that! I had been editing here every day for the past four years! Then I began to realize... The troper standing behind the server was the IMPOST-OR.
    • ...
      • DANCE EPIDEMIC TONIGHT!!
  • Stage Names:
    Interviewer: So, with the band, it seems like pseudonyms are important for you guys—
    Dick: I wouldn’t say they’re important.
    Interviewer: So then why use them?
    Dick: Well, it’s a kind of escapism, I suppose. It's another security blanket. We're all terribly weak people, so we need something.
  • STD Immunity: Averted with "Infected Girls", about having sex with, er, STD-infected girls.
  • Surprisingly Gentle Song: Generally once or twice per album;
    • "Synthesizer" from Fire is remarkably softer than the rest of the album, and yet still manages to both rock and hold a dance beat. "I Invented The Night" does both, it is a ballad for the verses and goes into rock for the bridge and chorus.
    • "Jimmy Carter" off of Señor Smoke is an oddly beautiful acoustic ballad stuck right in the middle of an otherwise dance-heavy album and features some of the most bizarre Word Salad Lyrics they've ever written. "Pleasing Interlude I" and "II" and parodies of this.
      • "Taxi To Nowhere" is piano jazz on Senor Smoke, although the original Wildbunch version of the song has a rock guitar arrangement.
    • "There's Something Very Wrong With Us, So Let's Go Out Tonight", although "Surprisingly Sinister Song" would be more accurate, on Switzerland, as well as "Germans in Mexico". "Chocolate Pope" is much more gentle and light-hearted for the album, as well.
    • "Watchin' Evil Empires Fall Apart" from Flashy, which, while still a rock song, is more ballad-ish and contemplative than the others.
    • "Immolate Me", "One More Time", "People Like You (Don't Like People Like Me)", "The World's Smallest Human Being" and "Cold Future" from Sexy Trash.
      • Many of their Wildbunch songs ("Jimmy Carter" is a remake of one such song from those years).
    • "Steal Your Bones" from KILL, a melancholy, slower-paced song about the narrator promising their friend — who they are obsessed with — that they'll "steal your bones" once they are dead.
    • "Doom and Gloom and Doom and Gloom" and "Table and Chairs"/"Talking Turkey" from Zodiac.
    • "I Go Through Phases" and "The Intergalactic Version" from Heartbeats and Brainwaves, though the entire album is gentle, compared to some of their others.
    • "Iron Dragon" and "Cheryl versus Darryl" from Mustang, which are also both very mehlancholy songs.
    • How Dare You has two: "Dark Politics" is a slower, mostly serious song about the state of unstable politics and how we're in it for the long run if we don't die, and "The Hotel Mary Chang" is the singer lamenting his self-exile inside the titular hotel.
  • Surreal Music Video: Videos not mentioned elsewhere on this page that qualify include "Mr. Woman" which features a giant couch stalking Dick Valentine, "Infected Girls" with Dick dressed as a cowboy in hell, dancing men in hazmat suits and fellatio on the steps of a Buddhist temple, and "Synthesizer" in which Guy Perry waltzes through a number of completely unrelated scenes naked and sporting a keytar sent from the gods.
  • Take That!: There's a few.
    • "Rock And Roll Evacuation" from Señor Smoke was recorded in the middle of president George W. Bush's second term, hence the line "Mr. President, make a little money sending people you don't know to Iraq. / Mr. President, I don't like you, you don't know how to rock."
    • Averted in the "Radio GaGa" music video, though Dick knew exactly he was doing when he was dressed as Freddie Mercury dancing on his own grave.
    • A lighthearted one at the Electric Six Wiki founder:
    "Somebody in Newcastle has taken the time to research the catalog of Electric Six and provide a compendium of lyrics to our songs. While we are grateful and honoured, we are also very worried about this person."
    • " Except for GBV and Devo / Nothing seems to redeem Ohio / It is the state that killed my love.
    • One of the songs on Absolute Pleasure is introduced with the phrase, "This goes out to some of the ladies". The song? "Infected Girls"
    • "Adam Levine", which is not only an insult at Adam Levine, it's also one at pop idols in general. The chorus literally tells him to rot/burn in Hell (motherfucker).
    • Lenny Kravitz: "And I never understood why anybody likes Lenny Kravitz."
    • "I'm The Devil" has the Devil himself proclaim he put death into a bottle. The result was Mountain Dew.
    • "Daddy's Boy" is one towards Donald Trump and was written during his presidency.
  • Teens Are Monsters: Parodied in "Kids Are Evil", a song where paranoia about the youth gets turned up to eleven and some rather extreme retaliation is proposed as the solution.
  • The '80s: "Jam it in the Hole". STOP! THEY ARE GOOD TIMES!
    • Heartbeats and Brainwaves is a deliberate throwback to '80s synthpop.
  • This Is a Song: "I am a song! And though my words don't often rhyme! I am a song! With a refreshing twist of lime!"
    • "Love Song For Myself", from the same album.
  • Title Drop: Inverted - Fire is named for how often the word appears in the lyrics.
  • Trilling Rs: Rrrrrrip it! Rrrrrrip it!
  • True Art Is Incomprehensible: The artist "Bleed for the Artist" seems to specialise in this — from the lyrics, said artists' projects alternatively involve sixty-nine dudes, ninety-nine rooms in a Pharaoh's tomb, a gaggle of girls dressed as angels dancing on a heart, even more males, and statues of Christ. The song itself asks:
    ''...but begs the question 'Is this art?'"
  • Tyop on the Cover: The Mustang cover art includes a woman wearing a jean jacket with the band name and album title spray-painted on it, but the former is rendered as "Eletric Six" (the band name is also printed elsewhere on the cover, spelled correctly this time). Dick Valentine has said this was a genuine mistake that happened when they commissioned the artwork, but they decided to Throw It In!.
  • Visual Pun - In the "Formula 409" video, Dick Valentine's disembodied head. Dick head?
  • Word Salad Lyrics: While the lyrics themselves aren't especially tangled up, the band has admitted that no less than 90% of their songs are about absolutely nothing. The topics of their songs also ping-pong back and forth between the initial subject matter and any number of nonsensical witticisms: exactly how the fire in the Taco Bell is relevant to the fire in the disco need not be over-thought.
    • Of special note is "She's White"'s opening line "I was born a prisoner in your dungeon of flesh", which is this trope embodied.
    • Sometimes the lyrics are nonsensical in a way that dives straight into Mind Screw territory. For example, this pair of lines from "We Were Witchy Witchy Witchy White Women" explaining when the two lovers met constantly contradicts itself: "I met you on a Monday, it was Friday night. You were doing alright 'cause it was Saturday night."
    • "Kukuxumushu" (which means 'flea's kiss' in Basque) appears on the surface to be an Anti-Love Song about a girl with the titular name, but Valentine admitted he just saw the word in a clothing store in Spain and wanted to use it in a song.
  • Whip of Dominance: The cover of Human Zoo has a man using a leather belt in this fashion... on some rug pelts.

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