When it comes to matters of romance, I get virtually all of my advice from popular song lyrics. Now you may say that this is not in fact a good source for romantic advice, and that self-help books, friends and family, or a therapist might be better choices. You would be wrong, because popular songs offer great advice for almost every romantic situation.
Pop songs are notoriously obsessed with love, often to the point of absurdly repetitious tedium. However the advantage of this obsession is that every stage of the romantic process is carefully considered from every angle and distilled into short, easy to remember, rhymed phrases, with catchy tunes attached.
Our first reading for today’s sermon will come from The Book of Diana, wherein it is written:
You can’t hurry love
No, you just have to wait
Love don’t come easy
It’s a game of give and take
Surely there is no better advice than these words spoken by Diana Ross’s fictional mother! In fact, you can make a setlist of Supremes songs that lays out the entire romantic cycle. Something like: Come See About Me, Baby Love, Stop in The Name of Love, My World is Empty Without You, Back in My Arms Again, Where Did Our Love Go, You Just Keep Me Hanging On. From initial interest, to falling in love, fear of losing love, the devastating breakup, getting back together, breaking up again, and just wanting to be done with the whole damn thing, it’s all there.
You may also say that pop song lyrics are mostly aimed at teenagers, and are therefore not a good source of advice for more experienced folks. To this I would say that love has a tendency to turn us all into teenagers. It brings out our insecurities, our awkwardness, our hormonal urges, in ways that can be very uncomfortable even when we are older. To fall in love at any age requires confrontation with one’s teenage self, and song lyrics can help us do that.
This leads to another obvious problem, that pop songs idealize love, that they are not realistic. This one is harder to argue with. Certainly the great songs of the jazz age offer a ridiculously idealized view of love, mirroring the unrealistic expectations of society at the time. Even then however there were many songs about heartache and loss, love with the wrong partner, and other explorations of the dark side of love. Later, songwriters were more free to describe other aspects of love, to write more directly about sex, and to take a more mature perspective. This ideal vision of eternal love still persists in music however, just as it does in society.
But don’t we still need this idealized view of love? When we love another person, don’t we try to see some of this ideal within them, however imperfect they are in reality? Perhaps we need to cling to this ideal in order to really love at all, even though love often turns out to be messy and difficult in ways that are difficult to describe in popular songs. Maybe that’s what we need most from pop song romantic advice: that reminder that romantic splendor is still possible, that love can still be beautiful. Also, for god’s sake, be patient and wait for the right person.
Cross posted to The Joshua Gilbert Quartet blog.