What's Love Got to Do with It?

Emotions and Relationships in Pop Songs

Thomas J. Scheff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781594518164
• eBook ISBN: 9781317249238
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

What do pop songs have to say about love? Surprisingly, this book shows that most popular love songs express much more about alienation, infatuation, estrangement, jealousy, and heartbreak than about love. Scheff takes the reader on a tour of popular lyrics from 80 years of American song to reveal the emotional and relational meaning of lyrics. He shows that popular love songs typically steer listeners away from a healthy connection to the emotions surrounding love. Readers will gain a deeper understanding of love songs while appreciating the author's suggestions for how listeners and artists could enrich the art of the love song.

Chapter 1
Introduction

What's in a Love Song?

There is a large scholarly literature on popular songs, but most of the writers only discuss very general and abstract ideas. Many essays have made the point that popular love songs are not like real love. But they don't go on to point out clearly how they differ. Similarly, the idea that popular songs matter because they evoke emotions is also not new. Most observers of popular music agree.

For example, Simon Frith, perhaps the leading scholar of popular music, makes this point repeatedly in "Why Do Songs Have Words?" (2007, 209—239) in his book Taking Popular Music Seriously, However, neither Frith nor any other scholars consider specific emotions. They are discussed only in the abstract, making the comments almost meaningless. This book explores specific emotions, such as love, genuine pride, grief, anger, and others, in the hope of clarifying the meaning that popular songs have for their audience.

Three questions about emotions in popular songs require exploration: 1. How do these lyrics define the emotion of love? 2. How are other emotions represented or distorted in the lyrics?

3. What kinds of lyrics would help, rather than hinder, the listener's development as a person in the real world?

The '50s song "That's Amore" provides an extreme example of one way of defining love: "When the moon hits your eye / Like a big-a pizza pie / That's amore," This lyric is probably the champion of goofiness, but it appears that most other popular lyrics seldom provide realistic definitions either.

The meaning of love has been hotly debated for thousands of years, and continues to be. One of the many divisive issues is whether love is ineffable, a mystery, the less talked about, the better. The "big-a pizza" lyric and many others contribute to maintaining the mystery, since they reveal next to nothing about the look and feel of actual love.

On another side of the debate there has been a call for realistic descriptions. This book proposes that since most popular songs help preserve the mystery, we also need realistic approaches if we are to understand the meaning of these songs, much less real love itself. As already indicated, this first chapter introduces the debate on the meaning of love, and the sixth chapter describes and defines both romantic and non-erotic (family) love.

What are the pleasures and pains of love? A French folk song is eloquent on this topic:

The joys of love

Are bur a moment long

The pain of love endures

A whole life long.

("Plaisir d'Amour")

This lyric is blunt to the point of despair: the pleasures of love are brief, the pains are forever. Although overstating the case, the implication that love is a mixture of pleasure and pain counters the tendency in popular songs toward idealization and fantasy. This lyric doesn't quite involve another aspect of the question, however: the intensity of the pleasures and pains. Popular songs speak to both aspects in loud voices. Most lyrics about the earliest stages of love suggest that the pleasures are virtually infinite. Songs about the later stages, especially those about heartbreak, the loss of love, usually imply that the pain is not only of long duration, but also intense to the point of being unbearable.

Understanding how popular songs portray the meaning of love and its pain/pleasure turns out to be more complex than one would first think. What we understand depends on how we define love and other emotions, not a simple task. In some ways, the questions asked here are just different sides of the same coin. The pains and pleasures of love that we identify depend largely on how we define love and the emotions that usually accompany it.

Popular songs overwhelmingly define the emotion of love broadly and loosely. The "big-a pizza" lyric is only one of many instances. For one thing, most include "falling in love," even with a person that one has only seen at a distance. This kind of "love" brings up the question of whether one can love a person one doesn't know. In the English language, at least, one can even love an inanimate object—red wine, old farmhouses—so why not a person who is entirely a mystery? In English, love is frequent and cheap, at least more than in all other languages.

Popular love songs also take other liberties. For example, they take the intensity of the pain of heartbreak as a measure of love: the more intense and longer lasting the pain of loss, the greater the love. Alternative possibilities will be discussed later. Love in popular song lyrics can also mean many different kinds of feeling, not only affection and sexual desire, but also infatuation and sexual desire without affection. It can also mean loving someone that you don't even like. In order to get a better understanding of romance as described in popular songs, and even as it is lived in real life, a clearer understanding of the meaning of genuine love might be helpful.

It appears that the English language defines love much more loosely than other languages. There are two different Top 40s in Spanish, one in Spain and one in Latin America. The same patterns of meanings are found in both, but the number of lyrics that can be classified as requited love is somewhat larger than in the English language lyrics. There also seem to be fewer liberties taken with the meaning of love, although there are many popular lyrics that toy with different terms for love. Still it would seem that the Spanish language is less loose with the meaning of love than English.

The second question that drives this book: what other emotions besides love can be identified in popular lyrics? This book considers the language of emotion used in popular love songs in the United States over a period of seventy-eight years (1930—2008). In some ways the language of emotion is fairly transparent, but in other ways it is shockingly ambiguous and confusing. We've already discussed the extremely broad meaning of love as it is described in lyrics. Another problem might be called the enigma of the missing emotions. The emotions frequently represented in Top 40 love lyrics are fairly obvious, but some are only hinted at. This issue is especially relevant to popular songs about heartbreak.

Love songs by far dominate the Top 40, and heartbreak lyrics have long been the single largest category. At least for the period 1930—2000, 25 percent of the U.S. Top 40 concern the pain of losing one's beloved. Songs about requited love, on the one hand, and infatuation, on the other, also appear repeatedly, but much less frequently than heartbreak; each of these other topics involves less than ten percent of the Top 40. Finally, there is always a miscellaneous group that includes many kinds of issues, such as explicit sexuality and comedy. Although the content of the miscellaneous category of Top 40 love lyrics has changed somewhat over the last 80 years, the proportion has remained the same, at about 17 percent.

However, one substantial change has occurred in the miscellaneous category, especially over the last ten years: the appearance of many sexually explicit lyrics. Largely due to the influence of rap and hip hop, most of the sexual lyrics eliminate any thought of commitment to a relationship. Indeed, some don't even award respect to the other person. The masculine lyrics, particularly, are degrading to women. Since these songs take the love out of romance, they might be fairly considered to be anti-love songs.

Emotions That Accompany the Emotion of Love

Here are some representative heartbreak lyrics in which the representation of emotions other than love is fairly transparent. They all involve an extreme situation, loss of the loved one, usually because of rejection. Less extreme situations, such as those that don't involve complete loss and/or rejection, are seldom considered. Popular love songs aim for the highly dramatic, rather than the long haul. Emotional pain within requited love, for example, is virtually unknown.

Many heartbreak songs are straightforwardly about the kind of complete and dramatic loss that gives rise to intense grief.

So I drown myself with tears,

Sittin' here, singin' another sad love song

("Lately" 1998)

As is the case with most heartbreak lyrics, this one doesn't actually mention grief, the emotion of loss. Yet the reference is clear because of the prominence of tears and sadness, as in this song also:

Girl, each time I try I just break down and cry. . .

Oh, I'd rather be dead . . .

("End of the Road" 1992)

The last line, particularly, is of interest, because like many heartbreak lyrics, it implies that the pain of loss is so great as to be unbearable. As already mentioned, this unending battle with pain is usually assumed to register the depth of love. An alternative interpretation is that it might only imply the inability to work through the pain of loss in order to get on with one's life. Often portrayals of love and loss seem closer to obsessional neurosis than to real love. This could be a serious matter, since the lyrics seem to confirm the impossibility of resolving grief.

The continuing, overwhelming presence of the pain of loss and rejection is emphasized in the following lyric. The ironic and somewhat playful tone is unusual. The first few lines of this song convey a feeling of sadness yet acceptance. However, the two lines below are from the chorus and they represent sadness only.

And it only hurts when I'm breathing
My hearr only breaks when it's beating

("It Only Hurts When I'm Breathing" 2004)

This lyric also refers, playfully and therefore indirectly, to another prominent theme in heartbreak lyrics, what might be called the curtailment of feeling (Chapter 5). In this particular lyric, curtailment is only hinted at through irony. As will be noted in Chapter 5, the curtailment of feeling in Top 40 lyrics was generalized and abstract between 1930 and 1958. After 1958, it became dominant, detailed, and intense.

This is an excerpt from another lyric that focuses on continuous pain by a detailed review of the events of a whole day, from awaking in the morning to sleep at night (abbreviated):

I'm half alive but I feel mostly dead

I try and tell myself it'll be all right

("You Were Meant for Me" 1996)

The last lyric is unusually concrete in describing the details of constant pain. The overall theme of the songs is mourning the loss of a lover. As indicated by the line "I'm half alive but I feel mostly dead," the pain of loss is represented as infinite.

A second type of heartbreak lyric also implies grief, but includes anger as well, even though the anger is represented somewhat indirectly:

Could you cry a little. . .

Pretend that you're feeling a little more pain

("Cry" 2002)

The desire for revenge, wanting the lost lover to feel pain also, is a manifestation of anger. The implication that the lover lies and only pretends to care is another indication of blame and anger.

Anger and revenge are also implied in this lyric:

Someday I'm gonna run across your mind

I'll be over you and on with my life

("You'll Think of Me" 2002)

The hint of revenge is muffled:"Someday I'm gonna run across your mind ... While you're sleeping with your pride." Hie implication seems to be that the lost lover may someday feel the pain of loss, no matter how faintly, that the singer is feeling.

Many heartbreak songs imply anger through sarcasm. An obvious example is the Bob Dylan classic "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right":

You just kinda wasted my precious time

But don't think twice, it's all right.

The sarcasm of this lyric implies not only anger, but also, like "It Only Hurts When I'm Breathing," mentioned above, curtailment of feeling, since the anger is expressed indirectly through sarcasm. Although the majority of Top 40 heartbreak lyrics refer to grief alone, many also include anger, if only indirectly.

Hidden Emotions

There are still other kinds of emotion implied in addition to grief and anger.

The following lyric implies the emotion of grief ("crying inside"), but also refers to a highly abstract and generalized feeling ("pain"). It is quite explicit and raw, however, about curtailment:

The pain is real even if nobody knows

Now I'm cryin' inside

("Nobody Knows" 1996).

The following lyric also refers to grief (sad, tears), but it also introduces another highly abstract emotion word, "hurt:"

Cos really I'm sad, Oh I'm sadder than sad

Well I'm hurt and I want you so bad

("Tears of a Clown" 1968)

The only direct indications of emotion are grief (crying inside, sad and sadness). They are used, however, to imply not only grief but the pain of rejection. What is the emotion of rejection? It is pictured as doubly painful, since, like many heartbreak lyrics, it implies that rejection is exquisitely painful in itself and also requires hiding it from others, introducing a second kind of pain.

Although this kind of emotional pain tied to rejection is quite common in heartbreak lyrics, most students I have asked are unable to provide a specific name for it. It is clearly distinct from the four emotions that have been mentioned so far, love, grief, anger, and pride. It is obviously not joy or pride. Could it be fear or shame? No fair using the term "hurt" because it includes many kinds of emotional pain. What would you call it? Don't worry if you can't identify it; the problem of the emotion that is the shadow of love will be discussed in Chapter 7.

Some new issues arise from the problems discussed above. The first is, why is it that there is so little agreement about defining love? The second, how should we name the emotion of rejection? To prepare to discuss these questions, the second chapter considers the problem of naming emotions, not just in song lyrics, but in the English language in general. Because of this link, the conclusions drawn from identifying emotions in popular song lyrics may have implications for the world of real emotions in which we live.

Emotions Provide Value in the Universe of Thought and Beliefs

Our society teaches us that it is the outside world, behavior, and thought that are important, not the inner life of emotions. Yet this orientation can be misleading. Since this issue is so fundamental, some space must be given to it.

Experts agree that emotion and feeling are important for many reasons. However, there may be a reason so far little mentioned that is concerned with cognition: emotions can serve to distinguish what is important to the individual from myriads of cognitions that are not (see Nussbaum 2001 for an ar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface: A Note to the Reader
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: What's in a Love Song?
• 2 Conceptions of Love: The Eternal Debate
• 3 Emotion Languages: Love, Pride, Anger, Grief, Fear, and Other Emotions
• 4 Alienation in Top 40 Songs 1930-2000
• 5 Nobody Knows but Me: Curtailment of Feeling
• 6 Genuine Love and Connectedness
• 7 What Emotion Is the Shadow of Love?
• 8 The Beat Goes On: Alienation and Curtailment of Emotions
• Afterword: Two Projects for Better Lyrics
• References
• Index
• About the Author