I may not always love you, but long as there are stars above you...

[eye_of_a_cat]

Via 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."

Comments

[deborah-judge.livejournal.com]

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.

Says one of the world's great Delenn/Lennier shippers. ;)

But seriously...what's your favorite fictional pairing with a *non*-obsessive/destructive relationship? I'm thinking about it and I don't know if I have one.

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

Fiction's different. Fiction would be buggered if it left out the utterly shite relationships, and opera would have no plots if it weren't for adultery. It seems that the healthier and happier a relationship is, the more boring it is to read about. I mean, I find Coriolanus/Aufidius fascinating and distinctly hot, and it's one of the most screwed-up around (tip: anything which is based on hatred and ends with one partner killing the other is Not Doing Well, but it's fantastic theatre). Not to mention Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

[eye-of-a-cat.livejournal.com]

"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

[eye-of-a-cat.livejournal.com]

what's your favorite fictional pairing with a *non*-obsessive/destructive relationship?

Hm. Wash/Zoe, probably... except I'm sure [Serenity spoiler] would've happened sooner or later if Firefly hadn't been cancelled. But there really aren't that many, are there? Which is strange, given how much drama-avoiding happy-ever-after-ness there is in fandom. (That's probably not expressed very well - I mean 'drama avoiding' not in the sense of cutting down gratuitous angst, but of reducing canonical complexity down to romantic-stereotype simplicity, like a lot of Delenn/Sheridan fic.)

Although, heh, yes, I do like the obsessive and destructive pairings rather a lot. My justification for this, as far as it goes, is that I wouldn't enjoy them if destructive behaviour was presented as not destructive, and so on. Which doesn't mean they have to be somber and moralistic, or that they can't have happy endings or be genuinely about love, and so on... they can go whichever way they want, so long as they're honest.

[deborah-judge.livejournal.com]

Can good relationships make good stories?

(This may be why *I* am still single - I tend to be drawn to relationships that make very good stories...)

I mean 'drama avoiding' not in the sense of cutting down gratuitous angst, but of reducing canonical complexity down to romantic-stereotype simplicity, like a lot of Delenn/Sheridan fic.

How about Delenn/Sheridan canon? I was just thinking about them, as the only Former Enemies Must Boff pairing that I've seen that somehow manages not to be hot. Maybe because they never actually confront the one thing that makes their relationship most interesting? And yet, that is probably the better choice for their relationship.

[eye-of-a-cat.livejournal.com]

Maybe because they never actually confront the one thing that makes their relationship most interesting?

Yeah, I think so. Zany culture-clash shenanigans aren't really a substitute... Presumably the original plan (when Sinclair was meant to stay for the whole run) would have been Delenn/Sinclair, which would've been far, far hotter. Although in that case, there wouldn't have been a way to avoid the issue of the war and surrounding circumstances... I wonder how it would have played out?

I think I like Delenn/Sheridan at the end of S3, when Anna comes back, and at moments in S5, though.

Can good relationships make good stories?

I don't think they can. Is that depressing and cynical? Hm. I do tend to go for the relationships that make good stories myself, too, and maybe because they do, although I couldn't say why. But, I don't know - I define 'good for me' not as 'someone who'll make me happy all the time', but as 'someone I feel like my best self around', and those don't overlap as much as they might. Constant happiness doesn't make for good stories.

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

You should try love songs from around 1600, where you get lashings of screwed-up-ness, who-cares-who-the-object-is-this-is-all-about-my-suffering, and kinky Christ imagery. But beautiful music.

The romantic stereotype is a mess. There's a controversial Almodovar film, Talk to Her, which explores just how close the ideal of romantic closeness is to extremely dangerous obsession. On a lighter note, there's also an excellent Sara Maitland short story called "An Un-Romance" (read it next time you're visiting, or get the collection called Angel Maker) dealing with the subject of unrequited love, and how, if the frustrated lover is appealing, s/he almost always gets all the sympathy.

I'm not sure "I won't always hold you close" was a good choice for their second-last point in that article. Holding someone close =/= vampiric obsession. "I'll never let you go" would have been more accurate (no idea if that's the title or refrain of a song, but it must have been at some point). There's a degree of closeness in relationships which is healthy and which is one of the parts which needs to continue. If the two members of a couple aren't close, the relationship is probably dead. Whether it will last forever is unknown, but if you're committing to a lifelong relationship such as marriage or civil partnership, you should be intending to hang onto the essential elements of that relationship, at least for as long as the relationship lasts. Unless the article was sneakily trying to say that marriage is wrong? I suspect it was more likely poor phrasing.

How's the peacock-sitting going?

[eye-of-a-cat.livejournal.com]

Re: "I won't always hold you close" - I think the 'won't' is meant to be modifying the 'always' there, rather than the 'close', and so it's more "I'll give you your own space sometimes" than "I'll never be close to you at all." People do need different degrees of closeness (and I tend towards the "Get out of my hair! I'm doing stuff!" end of that spectrum), but nobody's going to cope well in the long term with somebody who can't ever take a step back and do their own thing.

The peacocks are doing well! I thought I'd lost one, but it turned up.

[eye-of-a-cat.livejournal.com]

Also, this (http://istherenosininit.wordpress.com/2007/12/16/to-enter-in-these-bonds-is-to-be-free-then-where-my-hand-is-set-my-seal-shall-be/) might interest you: the eternal debate of whether Donne's Elegy XIX ('To His Mistress Going To Bed') is hot, disturbing, or both ;)

[bike4fish.livejournal.com]

There are so many occasions on which I've wanted to tell friends to run for the hills because they were going into one of those "I can't live without you" situations.

A good friend has occasionally performed 'Come Pick Me Up'. I love the song.

You might want to listen to another of my friends, Tracy Shapiro. Check out her song, "Be My Friend".

[eye-of-a-cat.livejournal.com]

Yes, you've recommended her before. She's seriously talented - is she still unsigned? Here's hoping that's fixed soon, if so...

'Come Pick Me Up' is one of my favourite love songs ever, of any kind. And I still melt at the chorus, even though I've heard it about a trillion times by now.

[marymac.livejournal.com]

That's a mostly true article. I find too many of those one true love songs weirdly stalkery.

This is why I like Josh Ritter's 'Baby that's not all' so much, I think. Its a really short but lyrical but realistic image of intimacy and loving. Although, most of his love song songs are pretty true to reality anyway.

And nearly every love song Glenn Hansard's ever written is kind of unromantic in that respect, but oh, have you heard the songs off 'Once'? Some lovely sensible stuff in there.

[eye-of-a-cat.livejournal.com]

I haven't heard any Glenn Hansard; I'll look to that! Love the Josh Ritter, though.

[marymac.livejournal.com]

Guh. Oh dear. He's lead singer/writer for The Frames, and he's been working with a girl called Marketa Irglova recently as well. Has an ability to write about being a born romantic getting his heart broken second to none. Although he's obnoxiously happy at the moment, so we'll see where that goes :)

The Frames site has a stackload of their stuff streaming live. None of the 'Once' soundtrack though.

[kalimeg.livejournal.com]

I always accused out teenage romance music of making the divorce rate climb. The music of the 1950's and 1960's was a mess of one-and-only, of codependency, of jealousy and revenge. It's a shock that any marriages have survived. It's astonishing that anyone has managed to successfully do poly in the face of the brainwashing. That last is something that the teenage-romance music credo would have found alien.

[eye-of-a-cat.livejournal.com]

That's true, isn't it - there's not exactly much room for anything other than monogamy in that kind of philosophy. Or even the idea of loving two people consecutively (except in the 'I thought I'd found love, but then I met you' sense, which doesn't really count).

[dracschick.livejournal.com]

I think there's always room for a middle ground.

[eye-of-a-cat.livejournal.com]

We can hope! I think extremes on both ends are doomed to be short-lived.

[drenilop.livejournal.com]

Have you ever heard the song, "Title of the Song"?? It's an absolutely amazing cliche'd version of a boy band love song. If you haven't, comment in my journal with an email address where I can send you a 5-6 mb mp3 file. :-) You will laugh yourself mildly stupid.

[eye-of-a-cat.livejournal.com]

Yes! Oh, I really should have put that on there - love it to pieces. "Drop to my knees to elicit crowd respooooonse.."

[drenilop.livejournal.com]

I'm rather fond of "Modulation and I hold a hi-igh noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooote" myself. :-)