Love is difficult: some songs

I don’t like Valentines Day. I know I’m far from alone in this and that if you want to you can quite easily ignore the whole thing. I dislike Valentines far more now i’m in ‘a couple’ than i ever did when I was single, I think because it makes me think about the unhelpful and dishonest ways that love is often represented and talked about in our culture. It makes me think about the way that having a relationship, ‘finding the right person’ can be represented as some kind of holy grail; the weird false binaries of ‘singles’ and couples that often get set up in, for example, awful adverts like those Match.com tube ones (‘Imagine if everyone in this carriage was single’ etc etc).  I’m happy in this relationship but I don’t think there’s anything inherently worthy about being in a relationship per se or indeed about monogamy in general. Love, relationships, sharing your life with another person – this can be wondrous, joyous, fun, but it can also be difficult, confusing, deeply challenging.

Most pop songs are about love in some form or another. But if you actually stop and listen to them, even some of the best ones are either talking over-idealised bollocks or have some weird, slightly scary element of compulsion and/ or coercion in them (variations on please don’t leave me/ I’m gonna make you love me etc). So I’ve been thinking about songs that give a more honest version of love and acknowledge some of the struggle that’s involved. Here are five.

1.My Girl – Madness

This is one of my favourite songs about being in a relationship, partly I think because of its almost complete absence of ego. I love its vulnerability, the way he’s so open about being completely confused by his girlfriend’s reactions, but also sort of tender and loving:“Why can’t she see she’s lovely to me?” It’s such a plain, descriptive lyric – there’s no attempt to generalise or make it about some bigger rejection. Just some bloke, trying his best, getting a bit wrong and feeling sad about it.

2. If We Were Words (We Would Rhyme) – Gruff Rhys

On the surface, this just seems like a sweet simple almost nursery rhymish love song. But the full chorus is “I’d never claim you were mine/ Just if we were words we would rhyme” . The whole idea of possession/ wanting to possess somebody is one of the most problematic things about the way love is talked about and it’s nice to see Gruff sort of acknowledge that. At one point, he also sings: ‘And I will always wonder/ How it would be if we never had met/ Life would be easier, But dull, I suspect.’ YES, Gruff, love is hard!

3. Jealousy – Pet Shop Boys

Nobody could ever accuse the Pet Shop Boys of having an oversimplified take on love and nobody has a perspective on relationships quite like them. Sometimes this manifests in their trademark archness, like in 2013’s Love is A Bourgeois Construct , but sometimes it’s about confusion, anxiety, ambivalence, rejection and, in this case, jealousy. Jealousy is doubtless the most painful, agonising emotion involved in love, partly because there is absolutely no reasoning with it, and the Pets capture its all consuming nature here: “I tried to see your point of view/ But could not hear or see for jealousy” It also down to that possession thing and how difficult and painful that can actually turn out to be.

4. Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood – Nina Simone

Nina on life being hard, love being hard and how, you know, if you will insist on being in a relationship with me, sometimes all that is going to show in my behaviour. “Doncha know noone alive can always be an angel?” Obviously this is originally an Animals song, but Nina owns this, she knows what she’s talking about. It’s brilliant on the desire to be a good person, a good partner, but how those pesky demons can sometimes just get in the way. “You know sometimes baby I’m so carefree/ With a joy that’s hard to hide/ And then sometimes it seems again that all I have is worry/ And then you’re bound to see my other side” 

Sometimes I’m a nightmare. This is me. Take me or leave me.

5. Count on Me – Kirsty Maccoll

Leading on from Nina quite neatly is a song expressing similar sentiments, from my spirit guide Kirsty: “And if you weren’t expecting trouble/ And I burst your little bubble/ Well I’m sorry babe/ but you can count on me.”  What I love about this song is that, like in My Girl, there’s love, there’s tenderness, but there’s also honesty about the process. I am an individual, with my own struggles, my own desires, ambitions, not to be subsumed and which will be brought to the relationship: “And I know I should remember/ Never never lose my temper/ But you know it isn’t easy being me”. There’s love here, Kirsty wants to get it right, but wants their love to exist in the world.

So that’s my top five love and struggle songs. Would be interested in people’s suggestions for more, if they have them.

Now let’s leave it on a slightly more upbeat note with Stevie Wonder and one of the greatest love songs ever written, the wonderful, poetic, impressionistic celebration of love, in all its forms,  existing out there in the world.

 

Thanks to Hannah and John for their ideas on this