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eye_of_a_catVia chalepa_ta_kala: Is it love, or a mutual strangulation society? Look! It's why I'm single!
Okay, no, it's not, but it is an interesting piece on the fine line between what's coded as 'romantic' and what's needy and suffocating, and it uses love song cliches as an example, which is the kind of thing that makes me point at the monitor and shout "YES!". I don't want to rid the world of love songs, or anything - I don't even want to rid my iTunes library of love songs - but, well, you don't exactly need to go all the way back to 'Stand By Your Man' to think that as a culture, we are going wrong somewhere with this.
Think about it: do you really want the person who'll tell you that they 'can't live, if living is without you'? They exist. They are out there. They will also screw you over in a lot of different ways, because someone who loves being with you is one thing, but someone who really sees their own psychological survival as dependent on you being with them is quite another. That person is going to suffocate you. Ditto, the person who considers you their 'everything'. Ditto, although arguably to a lesser degree, the person who will love you forever no matter what happens - yes, sweet, but really, the world has enough people in it who refuse to get over their ex because some part of them thinks they'd be breaking a contract.
Which isn't to say that I think the world should contain no songs about obsessive, suffocating, needy love. There are lots of ways to love somebody, and we need songs about all of them. The problem, really, is that we take that one kind of love, write songs about it, and present it as The Kind Of Love You Want. (Yeah, my iTunes library has a fair few songs like that too, including 'Without You'. They're not individually bad, they're just rather disturbing as a monopolising collective.)
So, here are a few of my favourite cliche-avoiding love songs. These, the world needs more of.
1) Ryan Adams - 'Come Pick Me Up'. This isn't a song about the kind of love you want, either. Not by a long way. But it's just so painfully, beautifully honest, from the long litany of wrongs that makes up the chorus - "Come pick me up, take me out, fuck me up, steal my records, screw all my friends, behind my back, with a smile on your face, and then do it again" - to the longing that goes before it the second time round - "You know you could... I wish you would." I adore the way he doesn't even sound angry, just tired. We need songs about all kinds of love.
2) Suzanne Vega - 'Gypsy'. It's a song about a summer fling that isn't going to last forever, and it's got all the intensity and innocence of the fling without any of the 'until the ends of time!' qualifiers. ("With a long and slender body, and the sweetest, softest hands / And we'll blow away forever soon, and go on to separate lands / And please do not ever look for me, but with me you will stay / And you will hear yourself in song blowing by some day.") And how sweet is 'Hold me like a baby that will not go to sleep'? Aww.
3) The Magnetic Fields - 'Papa Was A Rodeo'. Or anything else by the Magnetic Fields, who do all kinds of love songs so, so well, but I'm picking this one because it does such a wonderful job of flipping round your expectations. So much so that if you haven't heard it, or at the least read the lyrics, I strongly advise you to do so now before I wreck that part of it for you. Seriously, just Google it or buy the song off iTunes or download it somewhere. Go on, now. Gone? Back? Good. Anyway, as I was saying: it's sung by a man and addressed to a 'Mike', who turns out to be a woman, which we find out at the same time we find out that the speaker's 'never stuck around long enough for a one-night stand' flightiness, which is coded male about 90% of the time in most music, is shared by the woman he's speaking to, and then it ends 'fifty-five years later' after 'the romance of the century'. There are not enough characters in the LJ post limit to describe how much I love this song.
4) The Weakerthans - 'The Reasons'. "How I don't know how to sing, I can barely play this thing - but you never seem to mind, and you tell me to fuck off when I need somebody to. How you make me laugh so hard... I know you might roll your eyes at this, but I'm so glad that you exist." This is the kind of song I want somebody to sing to me, one day.
5) Dar Williams - 'In Love But Not At Peace'. Not about happy-ever-after, but about the reality of an 'after' once the kind of can't-live-without-you relationship turned out to be suffocating and short-lasted after all. This is the kind of being in love "where you still think of famine, and you still dig up train fare," and where the world of moons and gondolas that came before it is compared to a ship inside a bottle, 'where the moon hangs above like a Valium pill'. This, you get the distinct impression, is the kind of love that's going to last.
So I'll keep you wondering what time I'm arriving
And you'll drive me crazy with your backseat driving
And I'll talk in my sleep and you'll steal all the covers
We'll argue it out and we'll call ourselves lovers
And I'll stay in my body and you'll stay in your own
'Cause we know that we're born and we're dying alone.
So we turn out the light while the sirens are screaming
And we kiss for the waking, and then join the dreaming.
6) The Beautiful South - 'Song For Whoever'. A song about the girl all the cliched love songs were written about - or girls, as the long list of names points out. It's half light-hearted and funny, and half an insightful comment on how detached from real humans those songs can be: "I wrote so many songs about you, I forget your name."
chalepa_ta_kala: Is it love, or a mutual strangulation society? Look! It's why I'm single!Okay, no, it's not, but it is an interesting piece on the fine line between what's coded as 'romantic' and what's needy and suffocating, and it uses love song cliches as an example, which is the kind of thing that makes me point at the monitor and shout "YES!". I don't want to rid the world of love songs, or anything - I don't even want to rid my iTunes library of love songs - but, well, you don't exactly need to go all the way back to 'Stand By Your Man' to think that as a culture, we are going wrong somewhere with this.
Think about it: do you really want the person who'll tell you that they 'can't live, if living is without you'? They exist. They are out there. They will also screw you over in a lot of different ways, because someone who loves being with you is one thing, but someone who really sees their own psychological survival as dependent on you being with them is quite another. That person is going to suffocate you. Ditto, the person who considers you their 'everything'. Ditto, although arguably to a lesser degree, the person who will love you forever no matter what happens - yes, sweet, but really, the world has enough people in it who refuse to get over their ex because some part of them thinks they'd be breaking a contract.
Which isn't to say that I think the world should contain no songs about obsessive, suffocating, needy love. There are lots of ways to love somebody, and we need songs about all of them. The problem, really, is that we take that one kind of love, write songs about it, and present it as The Kind Of Love You Want. (Yeah, my iTunes library has a fair few songs like that too, including 'Without You'. They're not individually bad, they're just rather disturbing as a monopolising collective.)
So, here are a few of my favourite cliche-avoiding love songs. These, the world needs more of.
1) Ryan Adams - 'Come Pick Me Up'. This isn't a song about the kind of love you want, either. Not by a long way. But it's just so painfully, beautifully honest, from the long litany of wrongs that makes up the chorus - "Come pick me up, take me out, fuck me up, steal my records, screw all my friends, behind my back, with a smile on your face, and then do it again" - to the longing that goes before it the second time round - "You know you could... I wish you would." I adore the way he doesn't even sound angry, just tired. We need songs about all kinds of love.
2) Suzanne Vega - 'Gypsy'. It's a song about a summer fling that isn't going to last forever, and it's got all the intensity and innocence of the fling without any of the 'until the ends of time!' qualifiers. ("With a long and slender body, and the sweetest, softest hands / And we'll blow away forever soon, and go on to separate lands / And please do not ever look for me, but with me you will stay / And you will hear yourself in song blowing by some day.") And how sweet is 'Hold me like a baby that will not go to sleep'? Aww.
3) The Magnetic Fields - 'Papa Was A Rodeo'. Or anything else by the Magnetic Fields, who do all kinds of love songs so, so well, but I'm picking this one because it does such a wonderful job of flipping round your expectations. So much so that if you haven't heard it, or at the least read the lyrics, I strongly advise you to do so now before I wreck that part of it for you. Seriously, just Google it or buy the song off iTunes or download it somewhere. Go on, now. Gone? Back? Good. Anyway, as I was saying: it's sung by a man and addressed to a 'Mike', who turns out to be a woman, which we find out at the same time we find out that the speaker's 'never stuck around long enough for a one-night stand' flightiness, which is coded male about 90% of the time in most music, is shared by the woman he's speaking to, and then it ends 'fifty-five years later' after 'the romance of the century'. There are not enough characters in the LJ post limit to describe how much I love this song.
4) The Weakerthans - 'The Reasons'. "How I don't know how to sing, I can barely play this thing - but you never seem to mind, and you tell me to fuck off when I need somebody to. How you make me laugh so hard... I know you might roll your eyes at this, but I'm so glad that you exist." This is the kind of song I want somebody to sing to me, one day.
5) Dar Williams - 'In Love But Not At Peace'. Not about happy-ever-after, but about the reality of an 'after' once the kind of can't-live-without-you relationship turned out to be suffocating and short-lasted after all. This is the kind of being in love "where you still think of famine, and you still dig up train fare," and where the world of moons and gondolas that came before it is compared to a ship inside a bottle, 'where the moon hangs above like a Valium pill'. This, you get the distinct impression, is the kind of love that's going to last.
So I'll keep you wondering what time I'm arriving
And you'll drive me crazy with your backseat driving
And I'll talk in my sleep and you'll steal all the covers
We'll argue it out and we'll call ourselves lovers
And I'll stay in my body and you'll stay in your own
'Cause we know that we're born and we're dying alone.
So we turn out the light while the sirens are screaming
And we kiss for the waking, and then join the dreaming.
6) The Beautiful South - 'Song For Whoever'. A song about the girl all the cliched love songs were written about - or girls, as the long list of names points out. It's half light-hearted and funny, and half an insightful comment on how detached from real humans those songs can be: "I wrote so many songs about you, I forget your name."
