Rickie Lee Jones / Pirates / 1981
Living It Up
wistful, gritty, defiantly romantic
A street-corner narrative about a loose cast of hustlers, drifters, and broken women orbiting a stoop and an alley, told with a mix of tough-guy slang and sudden lyrical tenderness. Rickie Lee Jones treats petty urban squalor as a kind of mythology, elevating small-time losers into a self-styled elite called 'the only ones.'
urban mythology romanticized self-destruction outsider solidarity gender and violence nostalgia for a vanished scene
Who's speaking
A narrator embedded in the scene she describes, half-observer and half-participant, speaking with insider familiarity about characters like Eddie, Louie, and Zero; she addresses an unnamed 'you' at points, suggesting someone who was once part of this world and has since left or lost touch with it.
What happens
The song opens with character sketches — Eddie idling on a stoop, Louie running with a crew of toughs — establishing a loose, almost cartoonish underworld. A woman named Zero enters, battered and locked out by her boyfriend, and is absorbed into the same indifferent economy of men watching and judging her. The chorus repeats a resigned verdict about trouble before shifting into an incantation addressed to 'the only ones,' a self-mythologizing in-group. A middle section pulls back to describe the intoxication of early solidarity — shared secrets, magnetic pull between people who feel chosen. The song closes with Louie and Eddie carrying the woman off, a surreal, almost tender image, followed by a hazy vision of a hotel room as sanctuary and escape, before returning to the trouble refrain, now tinged with exhaustion and longing.
How it's built
Verse-driven storytelling alternates with a short repeated refrain that functions as both chorus and commentary; the 'living it up' section functions as a vamped bridge of pure repetition, almost chant-like, disrupting the narrative flow before the song returns to the central image of 'the only ones.' The structure mimics a street scene unfolding in real time rather than a tidy verse-chorus pop form.
Section by section
Opening verses
“like there's something he's waiting for”
The introduction of Eddie establishes a mood of aimless waiting and low-level menace; his idle posture on the stoop sets the tone of stalled lives circling without direction.
Louie's crew and Zero's entrance
The arrival of a tougher crew and then a bruised woman widens the frame from one lonely man to a whole ecosystem of petty power and vulnerability, with the men's casual dismissiveness toward her suffering underlining the song's unsentimental eye.
Trouble refrain / 'only ones' chant
The chorus works almost like gossip turned ritual, naming the cost of involvement with these people while simultaneously elevating them into a chosen, almost mythic group — the trouble becomes part of the appeal rather than a warning against it.
Middle reflection on early days
“you've got all these ideas you never tell”
This passage steps outside the immediate story to describe the intoxicating early stage of belonging to an exclusive, secretive world, explaining why characters keep returning to self-destructive bonds — the appeal is intimacy and specialness, not practicality.
Living it up vamp
The sudden collapse into pure repetition suggests a scene (a party, a bar, a high) overtaking language itself; the lyric's descriptive control dissolves into chant, enacting the loss of individuality within collective revelry.
Closing rescue and hotel vision
The final image of being carried away and imagining a hotel room as a place of total freedom offers a fragile, dreamlike resolution — an escape fantasy rather than a real one, since the song immediately slides back into the trouble refrain, undercutting any neat happy ending.
Craft
- vernacular voice
- The lyric leans on slang and crude nicknames to build authenticity and locate the song in a specific working-class, street-level milieu rather than an abstract pop setting.
- repetition as incantation
- The 'living it up' section abandons narrative for pure chant, mimicking the trance of nightlife and collective identity rather than describing it discursively.
- juxtaposition of violence and tenderness
- Scenes of domestic abuse and casual cruelty sit beside images of flight and sanctuary, creating a tonal whiplash that mirrors the instability of the characters' lives.
- metaphor of flight
- The image of being carried like pages and moving through a terminal of dreams reframes a sordid rescue as something approaching transcendence.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a character study of a specific urban demimonde — hustlers, battered women, petty tough guys — rendered with both clear-eyed honesty about their cruelty and romantic attachment to their outsider glamour. The narrator isn't condemning this world so much as mourning its passing or distance, addressing someone who once belonged to it. An alternative reading sees the whole song as more autobiographical allegory, with Eddie, Louie, and Zero standing in for aspects of the singer's own relationships and self-image during a turbulent period, the 'only ones' functioning as a private mythology for a specific real relationship rather than a general urban tableau.
Context
Pirates (1981) followed the breakup of Jones's relationship with Tom Waits and arrived after the commercial pressure of her debut; critics have often read the album's streetwise character sketches as drawing on that relationship and the Los Angeles bar-and-club milieu both musicians moved through. I don't have confirmed biographical detail tying specific lines to real events, so this context should be treated as plausible background rather than established fact.
Listen for
- the shift in vocal tone between the narrated verses and the chanted 'living it up' vamp
- how the refrain's meaning changes from a warning to an almost tender admission by the song's end
- the way minor, offhand details (a cigarette, a dress color) carry emotional weight without editorializing
- the contrast between the clipped, slangy verses and the more lyrical, imagistic language in the bridge about the terminal and hotel
About Rickie Lee Jones
Rickie Lee Jones is an American singer, musician, and songwriter. Over the course of a career that spans five decades and 15 studio albums, she has recorded in various musical styles including rock, R&B, pop, soul, and jazz.
b. 1954 / United States
Full biography and catalogue