Big Star / Third / 1978
Femme Fatale
sardonic, weary, tinged with dread
This is a Big Star cover of the Velvet Underground song, recast on Third amid an album otherwise steeped in fragility and collapse. Sung as a warning to an unnamed young man, it catalogs the tactics of a manipulative woman with a tone that oscillates between mockery and grudging admiration.
seduction and manipulation warning/cautionary tale masculine vulnerability performance and artifice cynicism about romance
Who's speaking
An unnamed narrator addresses a naive young man directly, warning him about a woman's history of emotional cruelty; the narrator speaks with the authority of someone who has either witnessed or suffered the same treatment, making the voice knowing but not fully trustworthy—there's a possibility the warning masks the narrator's own fascination or jealousy.
What happens
The song opens with an alarm-like announcement of the woman's arrival, moves into evidence of her deceptive nature, then repeats a chorus cataloging her seductive tricks. A second verse escalates the warning by numbering the narrator among her past victims, then returns to the chorus, which eventually dissolves into wordless vocalizing, as if language gives up trying to explain her.
How it's built
Simple verse-chorus form typical of a cover song, but the arrangement (in Big Star's hands) leans into a slightly unsettled, deadpan delivery that sits oddly against the almost nursery-rhyme predictability of the lyric's structure. The repeated chorus functions like a refrain of received wisdom, and the final dissolve into oohs suggests exhaustion or resignation rather than resolution.
Section by section
Opening verse
The song begins with an almost theatrical announcement of the woman's entrance, framing her as a recurring danger rather than an individual. The narrator immediately establishes complicity with the listener, as if sharing insider knowledge.a
First chorus
“just a little tease”
The chorus reduces her complexity to a single stock phrase, echoing how gossip flattens people into types. Repetition here mimics the way rumor becomes accepted truth.
Second verse
“you're number 37”
This line turns personal betrayal into statistics, suggesting the addressee is not unique but merely the latest entry in a long pattern—undercutting any illusion of special connection.
Final chorus/outro
The lyric eventually gives way to nonverbal vocal sounds, as though the narrator's explanatory power breaks down; the mystery of her allure resists being fully rationalized even after all the warnings.
Craft
- direct address
- The narrator speaks straight to a 'you,' creating urgency and positioning the listener as the potential victim being warned.
- folk-wisdom refrain
- The repeated appeal to what 'everybody knows' functions like proverb or gossip, lending the warning a communal, almost mythic authority.
- numbering/cataloging
- Assigning the addressee a specific number among her conquests reduces romance to bureaucratic record-keeping, deepening the song's cynicism.
- irony
- The playful, almost bouncy tone contrasts with the bleak content, making the warning feel like knowing gossip rather than genuine alarm.
Reading it
On the surface this is a straightforward morality tale about a manipulative woman and a naive man about to be used. But the near-gleeful tone and the eventual collapse into wordless singing suggest the narrator is not simply protective—there's an undercurrent of fascination, even envy, in cataloging her tricks so precisely. A more skeptical reading might note that the song, inherited rather than written by Big Star, sits within Third's broader portrait of male vulnerability and heartbreak, making the 'warning' function almost autobiographically: the singer may be less concerned with protecting the addressee than replaying his own wound.
Context
'Femme Fatale' was originally written by Lou Reed for the Velvet Underground's 1967 debut, sung there by Nico. Big Star's version appears on Third (1978), a famously fractured, emotionally raw record made as the band was disintegrating, with Alex Chilton largely at the helm. Choosing to cover this particular song fits the album's preoccupation with disillusionment and romantic wreckage, though the interpretive choices (tone, arrangement) are Big Star's rather than Reed's.
Listen for
- the shift in vocal tone between verses and chorus
- how the 'everybody knows' refrain is delivered—as gossip or as resignation
- the numerical detail marking the addressee as one victim among many
- the final wordless vocalizing and what it suggests about the song's limits of explanation
About Big Star
Big Star was an American rock band formed in Memphis, Tennessee in 1971 by Alex Chilton, Chris Bell, Jody Stephens (drums), and Andy Hummel (bass). They have been described as the "quintessential American power pop band", and "one of the most mythic and influential cult acts in all of rock & roll".
1971 - 2010 / Memphis
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