She Don't Use Jelly

The song is known for its chorus, "She uses Vaseline," but it's better for legal and marketing purposes to keep brand names out of song titles, as some radio stations won't play them. Vaseline is a kind of petroleum jelly often used as a personal lubricant. Lead singer Wayne Coyne explained the line to Rolling Stone: "We used to do these silly experiments: You drink out of a glass of water, then you spit into the water and drink it. There would be this disconnect of, 'Christ, I'm swallowing my own spit!' So I took that a little bit further. A lot of times people will use Vaseline on their lips because they don't have lip balm, but the idea of putting it on food and eating it repels them."

This single was the Lips' only mainstream hit in the US. They had existed for 10 years as a post-punk/psychedelic band out of Oklahoma before releasing it. Since 1993, the Lips' albums The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots have received a great deal of critical acclaim, but have produced no hit singles in the States.

Wayne Coyne told Uncut magazine June 2008 about this track: "When we recorded 'She Don't Use Jelly' we knew we were making something special. Whatever the absurdness of it, you could understand that I'm talking about toast and Vaseline, and it had some kind of innocent little sexual thing that ran through the whole song. That was kind of cool for us because up until then all of our songs were so asexual. I think we felt that there was this sort of the Guns N' Roses mentality to rock 'n' roll, and we were something different. We really had a lot of area to explore that didn't include a bunch of naked women- but here we felt like, 'Oh, what the f--k, let's go for it.'"