This is Not a Love Song
On the way home from errand-running at Target today, I was thinking. Well, of course I was. When have you known me NOT to be thinking? Deep Thoughts, preferably.
Anyway, I was thinking about music. Well, love songs.
Wait - digression:
Actually this morning on the way to work I was also thinking about music, and what I was thinking is that maybe there’s some chemical in our brain when we’re teens that makes the music we listen to imprint there, so we love it forever.
For instance, next year (ulp.) will be the TWENTIETH anniversary of my graduation from high school. That’s right, class of 1989. And I remember that in 1988, the fall of my senior year, the Sugarcube’s “Life’s too Good” hit the alternative music airwaves. And I remember that we were absolutely captivated by the sound of songs like “Birthday”. And that my friend Jen had a “cube” of Sugarcubes flats that Lance @ Sound Revolution had made (get it? A cube?) and it was hanging from her ceiling. We all thought that was the coolest, but pretended we didn’t. Anyway. Now Lance (with confirmed sugar in his pants) hosts the weirdest kids show ever, and I have no idea what happened to Jen, who turned out to be pretty much a bitch anyway. OK, wait, what was my point? Oh. Music. So on the way to work this morning, “Birthday” came on my iPod. I don’t know if it’s the aforementioned teen-musical-brain-imprint thing, or the fact that there’s never been anything before or since quite like the Sugarcubes, but that music sounds as fresh and innovative today as it did then.
OK, end of digression. (Does that make this a regression?)
So on the way home from Target I was listening to music and thinking about love songs. And how there are some love songs that are so beautiful, and so moving - they make you cry and sing along and RELATE in a BIG WAY and OVER IDENTIFY and whatnot*. Some lyrics so powerful, describing a love so epic that it really moves you to believe that someday, somewhere YOU’RE going to have a love like that. Right? And then I was thinking that of all the bands I love, and the great love songs I identify with, I doubt that even one of those people is still with the person about whom they wrote the song.
Think about that, if you will. Yeah, it’s inspiring to hear about epic love, and people meant to be together, and passion and not giving up and blah, blah, blah. And yet all that stuff that gets a person all misty-eyed, it’s all written about relationships which have long-since run their respective courses.
What does that mean?
I think maybe it means that love, no matter how epic-feeling, passionate and seemingly fated, is ephemeral, fleeting and ultimately hopeless. That’s what I think it means. Or maybe it just means that people who feel love that strongly are fated to burn it out too quickly. There’s a Laura Veirs song (not a love song) about that. About famous suicides like Kurt Cobain and Virginia Woolf who (presumably) feel everything too hard and burn up in it. The song is called “Rapture” and it asks:
Love of color, sound and words
Is it a blessing or a curse?
As someone who suspects they feel things much too hard, I sometimes wonder the same thing.
So what do you think? Do love songs give us examples of how it’s all hopeless in the end, for everyone, or are the good ones written primarily by people with a propensity to have intense, but short-lived, love affairs?
*stop asking what songs. It’s none of your business what kind of sappy love lyrics I over-identify with when I am tooling around town.
Filed under: lyrics, music |Leave a Reply
