FLASHBACK! It’s 1984, I am 14 and in the 8th Grade. I am inside the Evergreen Junior High School gymnasium. My adolescent hormones are running wild. I glance to my right and I see the Cute Boy I have a crush on sitting with his friends on the bleachers.
The darkened room, the streamers, the balloons, as well as the the nervous smell of unharnessed adolescent sexuality all point to the epitome of a classic school dance. As Judas Priest’s “You Got Another Thing Coming” ends its hypnotic chant, the DJ drops onto his turntable the one and only power-ballad super group Foreigner, and he brings on a slow dance. Mick Jones croons to me that he really “wants to know what love is" and he wants ME to show him…! WOW, thanks Mick! But I really just want the Cute Boy in the bleachers to let me show him what love is. But alas, I am in an awkward phase of my life. I feel ugly and I hate my body. I am insecure and I feel like no one will ever love me. But I do have Mick Jones' sweetly soaring voice, and he has no qualms about letting me know that someday I, too will be able to show someone what love is. And what a lucky person that will be.
As I have grown older and experienced Love in many of it’s infinite forms, I now think that the word LOVE has a far greater definition than just the romantic aspect of that emotion. When I think of Love Songs nowadays, I seem to encompass the idea that all songs are love songs. Whether it a song of "Lost Love" (Thomas Dolby’s “Europa”); songs of "Unrequited Love" (Muddy Water’s “Got My Mojo Working”), "Breakups" (Duh! Every other love song); "Dysfunctional Love" (Dramarama’s “Anything Anything” and Nine Inch Nails' "I Want To Fuck You Like An Animal") and "Deep, Red, Passionate Love" (Prince’s “When Doves Cry”), are all embracing the same theme as the ubiquitous songs about the I’ll-Love-You-Forever Love. Love can fuck you up and make you higher than a kite.
With that statistical idea in mind, that would mean that about 85% (give or take a few percentages) of all songs in recent musical history, quite possibly ancient history, are LOVE SONGS, (the rest probably being spiritual or political songs, and even then, within those 2 seemingly unrelated themes, there will be songs about your Love Of Your Deity or your Love/Hate Of Your Country).
Dang! That’s a lot of songs about one theme! But, it just goes to show you how strong of an experience Love is, especially when you include all the varying forms of love into your reality. It’s all about the ups and down of the human heart and somehow that inspires us to create profoundly.
Since my ideas of love are quite expansive, I find that I get kind of bored with Love Songs strictly about that whole “True Love Forever & You’re My One & Only” concept. The love songs about lost love, songs about the hard and angry feelings after a breakup and the songs of deep passion & drama are the ones I seem to identify with the most, mainly because I think those style of love songs speak to me truthfully of what Love is all about.
Love is painful; it’s heart opening; it ends and it begins again. We Love many times, we sometimes never get over people we Love. Love & relationships, all relationships, take A LOT of work and Love sometimes ends badly, sometimes really badly. But it always seems to be worth it to endure over and over as there is always a lesson to be learned by the experience of the Love Song and it’s impact on our experience with Love itself.
The creative intent of any given Love Song is solely because the artist needed to express deep feelings about an experience of Love. We take the words and the sentiment of that song and transfer it to our own lives, our own issues and to our own relationship’s joys and dramas, and we begin to understand a little more, with each lyric and harmonic soar of sound, what Love is all about.
Moonmama says, "LOVE! YES!"
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