By Sean Moeller

There are thousands of them – the jiggly, the bouncy, the unclad – placed exclusively where they are, bending so unrealistically over Fat Joe or Trick Daddy, feeding their bloated carnal appetites, shriving all sense of pride for a couple hundred bucks, a prime spot in a hip-hop video and maybe a couple dried out carrot sticks from a warm, stale relish tray that sits on a card table, just left of the rolling cameras. And never before have they had part of their story told until Eef Barzelay of Clem Snide wrote “The Ballad of Bitter Honey,” the first track on his solo debut for SpinArt.

“That was my ass you saw bouncing, next to Ludacris/It was only on screen for a second but it was kind of hard to miss/And all those other hoochie skanks/They ain’t got shit on me/And one of Nelly’s body parts/It totally agreed,” begins the song, drooping and surging over a musty acoustic picking and strumming that could have been found in a Nashville back alley, nuzzling up to Willie or Hank. Barzelay, nothing even reminiscent to a video vixen – no dumps like a truck, no pillows, no sweet fleshy twitch, takes a first-person attempt at the mind of a booty dancer in one of the 10 intimate sketches of personality that make up the contents of “Bitter Honey.”

What he didn’t do a lot of, to nail the thoughts of said dancer, was research. It struck him at a moment’s notice.

“It is thrilling to kind of teleport yourself into another person’s life and body. It feels good to do. I was actually in a hotel room in Berlin when I was on tour with Ben Folds last year. I was just had MTV Germany on, with the volume down, and this song came out,” Barzelay said. “It came pretty easily. It might have been all the Gummi Bears I was eating at the time. I don’t really watch a lot of videos, but I do like to watch them when I’m in Europe – especially German hip-hop, if there is such a thing.

“I knew that song would be an attention-grabber. It gets a little more serious later. I like to kind of trick people. I like catching them off-guard, but it’s hard for me to say that what I’m doing is something that’s valid. I tend to put more people off that I put on. I don’t really sell any records and in our society, if you’re not a profitable venture, then there’s always this sense that you’re not entirely validated. I’m not trying to make music for the indie rock elite.”

Barzelay sells records to families, not just to college-aged sons and daughters with Radiohead fixations and Magnet subscriptions. He sees the young and the old, spanning numerous decades, coming to his live shows, having found him through Snide’s song “Moment in the Sun” being the theme song for the now-dead NBC series “Ed” or from wherever. But they don’t buy as many records as they should or they don’t tell enough friends to buy records.

“It’s strange to see…” Barzelay muses.

“Bitter Honey” resonates days after the first listen, sneaking its temperate feelers into the basement of you, where it’s echoey and hollow, so that it bangs faintly all the way up to your head and ears, surrounding you like a sheriff’s posse, warning you that your time is up and it’s best if you just come out with your hands up. Press play again, you sonnovabitch, the voice from your basement sternly whispers, and you can almost feel something cold and barrel-like pressing into your back. It’s not that “Bitter Honey” – not to be confused with The Fiery Furnaces latest, “Bitter Tea,” though the two could combine and make a nice cup since it sounds like they need one another – is a forceful creature, but it does force you to listen and listen and listen, pulling you to it the same way you were pulled unmercifully back to that Penthouse of your dad’s that you found hidden in the house when you were young enough to fall in love with any breast. Its draw is the shape-shifting quality of Barzelay’s lyrics, which stay ponderously close to the fine line.

“I like to keep things ambiguous,” he said. “If you’re doing it any other way, then you’re just lecturing people. It’s like the if a tree falls in the forest and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound? It’s that kind of thing. The song only exists in the hearts and minds of those listening to it. Whatever may have sparked the song in me isn’t important. If anything, it’s the least important thing.”

He hints that Clem Snide has been on shaky ground over the last few years. It prompted him setting out to make this record on his own, but he also said that a new Clem Snide album – tentatively titled “Bluebird” – is nearing completion and will likely see an early 2007 release date.

“I like to do whatever I want. That’s the reason I do this, so I can be free, or at least have the illusion of being free. I like to be a boat untethered,” he said. “I wanted to keep this record just me and a guitar. If I would have added little bits and bops, it would have just been like, ‘Goddamn it!’ Things are a bit of a mess for me and Clem Snide in the last year or two. It’s just the usual indie rock trials and tribulations. I fired our manager and then he was going to sue me…It’s just hard to keep this going when there are a lot of people involved and there’s no money. I haven’t given up on the band though.”