INXS / Elegantly Wasted (Remastered) / 1997
Elegantly Wasted
jaded, glossy, weary-euphoric
A late-period INXS track that circles a single mood rather than tells a story: a glossy, exhausted meditation on living well while falling apart. The title phrase becomes a kind of mantra, turning self-destruction into an aesthetic pose rather than a crisis.
glamour and burnout denial and self-soothing excess as lifestyle restlessness disillusionment with 'the good life'
Who's speaking
A narrator addressing a woman (and by extension himself or his audience) who moves through privilege and wreckage with the same cool detachment; the voice is complicit rather than critical, more intoxicated by the scene than appalled by it.
What happens
There isn't a plot so much as a repeated observation: someone shines, owns her own downfall, and the narrator proposes reviving old highs. Each verse restates the same scenario with small variations -- shine becomes crime, spirit running becomes spirit fine -- while the chorus keeps insisting the good life isn't actually good, before the song gives up arguing and just repeats the title as a soothing, affirming chant.
How it's built
Built on near-identical verses that barely develop, a short pre-chorus of clipped phrases, and a chorus that first argues with itself before dissolving into repetition. The final third abandons new lyrical content almost entirely, looping the title and a few agreement phrases, which mirrors the numbing, circular feeling of the subject matter.
Section by section
Opening verse
“Baby's down on the world”
The woman described seems to have both privilege and defeat at once -- she's succeeding by the world's standards yet weighed down by it, which sets up the song's refusal to separate triumph from collapse.
Pre-chorus
The clipped, almost telegraphic lines about running, hiding, waiting, and wanting strip the song down to pure impulse, listing reflexive behaviors instead of explaining motives.
Chorus
“This ain't, the good life”
The chorus sets up a wish and then flatly denies it's being met, but the denial lacks urgency -- it's delivered as a shrug rather than a complaint, which is part of what gives the song its glazed tone.
Second verse
“Look at all the crimes”
Swapping shine for crime reframes the same scene as more overtly transgressive, and the line about owning the world rather than merely being down on it suggests she has claimed agency over her own ruin.
Outro
“you could be right, you could be certain”
The song stops arguing and starts conceding, repeating agreement phrases until they function as a lullaby. This collapse of the chorus's earlier resistance into pure assent suggests the narrator has stopped fighting the lifestyle and simply surrendered to how it feels.
Craft
- repetition/mantra
- The title phrase and short agreement phrases recur with increasing frequency until they crowd out narrative content, enacting the glazed, repetitive state the song describes rather than just naming it.
- oxymoron
- Pairing refinement with ruin in the title phrase fuses glamour and collapse into one image, refusing to let the listener separate the two.
- paradox in the chorus
- The chorus affirms a wish for 'the good life' then immediately negates it, dramatizing the gap between aspiration and lived reality without resolving it.
- second-person address blurring into self-address
- The repeated concessions toward the end sound like the narrator agreeing with an unseen interlocutor, but could equally be him talking himself into acceptance of his own condition.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a portrait of comfortable nihilism -- a character (and narrator) aestheticizing their own dissipation rather than confronting it, with the music's gloss mirroring the glamour they're hiding behind. An alternative reading takes the 'good life' denial more literally, as genuine critique of consumerist excess, with the ending's surrender read as resignation rather than endorsement; the lyric's flatness makes both readings viable, since it never signals irony or sincerity decisively.
Context
Released in 1997, the song comes from a period when INXS were working without the commercial dominance of their mid-80s peak, and lyrically it fits a broader 90s vein of songs treating hedonism and emotional numbness as adjacent states. I don't have reliable biographical detail tying this directly to specific events in the band's or Michael Hutchence's life, so I'm reading the lyric on its own terms rather than as autobiography.
Listen for
- how the chorus's negation is delivered with the same energy as affirmation, flattening the emotional stakes
- the shift from 'shines' to 'crimes' between verses as the song's only real lyrical development
- the way repeated agreement phrases near the end replace argument with surrender
- the contrast between glossy production and the lyric's undertone of exhaustion
About INXS
INXS were an Australian rock band formed in 1977 in Sydney. Originally called the Farriss Brothers, the band's founding members were bassist Garry Gary Beers, main composer and keyboardist Andrew Farriss, drummer Jon Farriss, guitarist Tim Farriss, lead singer and main lyricist Michael Hutchence, and guitarist and saxophonist Kirk Pengilly.
1977 - 2012 / Australia
Full biography and catalogue