The Rolling Stones / Tattoo You (2021 Remaster) / 1981
Start Me Up
cocky, urgent, sweat-slicked bravado shading into desperation
A relentless riff-driven come-on built almost entirely from a single mechanical metaphor: sex as an engine or vehicle that needs igniting. The song trades in innuendo and repetition rather than narrative, using automotive imagery to suggest both physical desire and a kind of self-destructive compulsion.
sexual desire machinery/car imagery as metaphor loss of control virility and vulnerability repetition as compulsion
Who's speaking
A male narrator addresses a woman (or an implied 'you') directly, framing himself as an engine or vehicle she can operate. The voice is boastful but occasionally cracks into confession of helplessness, making it not entirely reliable as pure swagger.
What happens
There isn't a plot so much as an escalation. The song opens with a plea/threat about being switched on, moves through images of fuel and machinery, admits an inability to keep pace with rivals, then intensifies into more explicit commands, before closing with an image so extreme it flips from hyperbole into dark comedy.
How it's built
Built on a tight verse-chorus loop anchored by the title hook, which functions almost like a mantra rather than a narrative device. Short verses supply the car/machine imagery, while the recurring 'grown man cry' refrain acts as an emotional counterweight, interrupting the bravado. The structure resists development in favor of intensification -- each repetition of the hook adds more force rather than new information, culminating in a final line that reframes the whole song's stakes.
Section by section
Opening hook
The song announces its central conceit immediately: a conditional plea that frames the speaker as inert until acted upon, setting up the engine metaphor before any other imagery arrives..The repetition front-loads the track's obsessive quality.
First verse
“gonna blow my top”
Physical overheating stands in for arousal and imminent loss of control, extending the mechanical metaphor into a warning about volatility.
Grown man cry refrain
This recurring line functions as an emotional pressure valve, admitting vulnerability beneath the machismo. It's ambiguous whether the crying is from pleasure, humiliation, or being overwhelmed, and that ambiguity is part of its effectiveness.
Middle verse
“I can't compete with the riders”
A rare admission of inadequacy or rivalry breaks the boastful tone, suggesting anxiety about performance or comparison that complicates the song's swagger.
Final verse and closer
“make a dead man come”
The escalation reaches absurdist extremity, turning the song's central boast into something almost comic, a wink that the whole performance has been knowingly over the top.
Craft
- extended metaphor
- The entire song sustains a comparison between sexual arousal/performance and a car or engine being started, fueled, and driven, giving mundane mechanical vocabulary an erotic charge.
- anaphora
- The repeated conditional opening on 'if' and the recurring refrain create a chant-like insistence that mirrors the mounting physical urgency the lyric describes.
- hyperbole
- The closing image of a 'dead man' being revived pushes the boast to a comic, almost surreal extreme, undercutting the song's macho posture with self-aware absurdity.
- double entendre
- Nearly every line about engines, fuel, and machinery carries a simultaneous sexual meaning, letting the song say more than its literal vocabulary admits.
Reading it
Read straightforwardly, this is a rock song about sexual eagerness dressed in car and engine language, a genre-typical move for the band. A more interesting reading treats the repeated 'grown man cry' line as puncturing the bravado -- suggesting the speaker is as much at the mercy of desire as in command of it, with the machine metaphor cutting both ways: he's both the engine and the one being driven. The final hyperbolic line supports this ironic self-awareness, treating the whole boast as exaggerated performance rather than literal claim.
Context
The track was built from an outtake recorded years earlier during sessions for the album Some Girls, then revived and reworked for Tattoo You in 1981. Musically it's driven by a simple, insistent guitar riff that mirrors the lyric's mechanical, repetitive obsession. Given the band's long history of sexually charged, innuendo-laden rock songs, this fits a familiar mode for them rather than marking any thematic departure.
Listen for
- the way the guitar riff itself mimics an engine turning over, reinforcing the lyric's central image
- how the vocal delivery shifts from confident to almost strained on the 'cry' refrain
- the contrast between clipped, urgent verses and the more sustained, chant-like choruses
- the final line's shift into absurd hyperbole, which recontextualizes everything preceding it
About The Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones are an English rock band formed in 1962. Active for over six decades, they are one of the most popular, influential, and enduring bands of the rock era.
1962 - present / United Kingdom
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