I did hear the song. And it did piss me off.
My name is Nicole, and the 1992 Spin Doctors hit “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong” is about me. Only now, decades after its release, am I ready to discuss my reaction. That’s how much it hurt, offended, and angered me. But now, I’m ready, no longer embarrassed or ashamed, because nearly everything Chris, the band’s lead singer and chief songwriter, said about me is a lie.
Despite (or perhaps because of) an air of misogyny, “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong” became a cathartic kiss-off anthem for the recently single, glad to have shed an ill-suited partner. The inspiration for the song was not a romantic relationship, however. I’m Chris’s stepmother.
It Makes No Sense
I don’t know what I did wrong. I didn’t do anything to hurt him, but he decided right away that he didn’t like me. I imagine he resented me, this woman he didn’t know, suddenly sleeping in a bed with his father, living in his house. While I tried to be motherly, I never tried to be Chris’s mother. He didn’t need a mother. He had a mother. Plus, when I married his dad in 1991, Chris was 24 years old.
That hostility shows itself in the first line of the song. Chris calls me a “bitch” and says that he’s so much happier since I “left town.” The reason I left town was to attend his grandmother’s funeral, with his father. Chris didn’t attend the funeral because he had a gig he didn’t want to cancel. Yeah.
Chris then lyrically rolls his eyes at how I “cook so well all nice and French.” He’s actually complaining that I prepared elaborate French dishes for his family, a family that included an ungrateful, 24-year-old rock musician who still lived at home and didn’t pay a dime for the groceries. When he went through that vegan phase, guess who adapted all their recipes to suit him? What a little turd.
Just Disrespectful
The ultimate takedown in “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong” is the claim that forevermore, nobody will bow when I sound my gong. This is a sly and inexplicable dig at my career as lead percussionist in the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. My profession requires me to play the gong, and I am among the world’s best at doing so, as nightly standing ovations prove. When was the last time somebody did that for the Spin Doctors, Chris?
The reason I’m writing this piece now is because I need closure. I’m dying. Hey, Chris, you know how you said you hoped those cigarettes were going to make me cough? Well, they did. I have emphysema and about six months to live. I hope you’re happy, and I hope it made you feel good to pick on a woman battling a lifelong addiction. A woman who only ever tried to love and care for you.
I don’t wish to be in another one of these here rock and roll songs, and I didn’t ask to be in that one.
Images: YouTube/Pixabay, Pixabay, Pixabay
View Comments (3)
Good. I hope she fucking burns. "“Chris Barron's stepmother had a huge impact on his life: He had to drop out of Bennington College in Vermont, where he was studying ceramics, when she spent his tuition money on (according to Chris) "a Ferrari Dino and a lynx and a mink and a couple dozen Saks Fifth Avenue suits.""
Remember when you told him that he would be a janitor and play guitar for the rats? Or when you spent his tuition money on a Ferrari?
Little Miss Can't Be Wrong, that's exactly why he wrote about you in a song. Choke on those cigarettes.
This is totally false. Here is an interview in 2019 with Chris Barron:
CHRIS BARRON Yeah, I lived with her from age nine to 18 until my parents split up. She had a lot of problems and did a lot of screaming. She had a borderline personality disorder with malignant narcissistic tendencies. She was a tough cookie. CHRIS BARRON Yeah, she actually passed away a couple of years ago, I heard. I haven’t been in touch with her since my parents split up.