Here’s another question I don’t know how to answer: Why is so much modern-day popular music dominated by love and romance songs? I was originally going to just say “love songs,” but “love song” implies only a part of the story, the part where someone’s declaring or reaffirming love or singing a Valentine’s Day card. Whereas popular music feeds off the whole romance cycle, which can take you anywhere from infatuation to breakup or commitment (or breakup and reconciliation, or breakup and murder). Someday, for the hell of it, I’m going to survey the various romance songs on the charts, to see how many different kinds there are and whether it’s happy love or failed love that predominates. I’d actually sat down to list the stock romance situations and was already up to 20 and had barely gotten started, so I’m not going to give you a long list here, but there’s first sight (“She was just 17, you know what I mean, and the way she looked was way beyond compare”), infatuation, pursuit, flirting, wooing, negotiation of terms (Fat Joe telling Ashanti at the start that he won’t go down on her; what a creep!)—and all that’s before the relationship even gets going.
So romance is a very rich subject, and even though what you hear are mostly songwriting conventions, they correspond to what a lot of us experience at some point or another; e.g., a man and a woman fall for each other, but she turns out not to be the person he’d seen her as, or he turns out not to be the person she’d thought, so she breaks off, he feels betrayed, she wants to get back together, he wants to get even. And of course romance is important to life, has a lot to do with how babies get made, and families get made, and the species gets perpetuated.
But still, romance isn’t the whole deal. In comparison, you get relatively few songs about working or parenting or eating, not to mention getting the lawnmower running or watching sports on TV.
I have this theory and I may change my mind about it in three days but here goes: What people want in entertainment isn’t an accurate depiction of life but rather something they can use. For example, a dance song isn’t a depiction of dancing, it’s something you can dance to. Even when there’s no dance floor, pop music always gives you a beat. But you want the sound of a human voice, too, a timbre and a breath, a cry and a laugh, something speaking to you and inviting you. And so these songs have words, and these words are often addressed to a “you,” even if it isn’t you in particular. And when the song tells a story, you’re still hearing a voice, as if it’s singing to you. In olden days songs did cover a somewhat different range. British ballads could be anything from comic tales to descriptions of battles. A lot of that function—narrative, legend, news—has been taken over by TV and movies and novels and the Web. Which isn’t to say that there isn’t a lot of diverse subject matter in popular forms like hip-hop and semipopular forms like metal, for instance.
But anyway, if I like to watch movies in which a lot of buildings blow up, that doesn’t mean that there are a lot of buildings exploding in my life. And if I want to hear love songs and breakup songs, this doesn’t mean I’m constantly falling in love and then getting divorced.
I was listening to JoJo the other day and I had a revelation. JoJo is a 15-year-old who had her first hit several years ago at 13. She’s a wonderful singer, but I don’t get the sense she’s particularly trying to put her personality into her singing. She’s expressing the songs themselves. She’s R&B-based pop, and her songs hit on Top 40 and only then do some of them cross over to Radio Disney. She’d have a career even if there were no Disney. She’s the youngest performer to regularly hit the Top 40.
Unlike older teens like Rihanna and Cassie, she’s young enough that you can identify her as a teen, but her sound and lyrics—like Rihanna’s and Cassie’s—aren’t fundamentally different from that of adult pop singers. She might as well be 25. In her first single, “Leave (Get Out),” she kicks a guy out when she finds out he’s been cheating on her. Her big hit last year, “Too Little Too Late,” was something of a reprise but at a higher pitch of emotion, her not accepting any explanations and affirmations. Her single earlier this year, “Anything,” may be the best of the lot (if you listen to Top 40, it’s the one that samples Toto’s “Africa”); in the lyrics she’s really wanting a guy, says she’ll do anything, which in pop means just one thing; so you could say it takes a different tack from the other songs, though that’s not a change of direction (that is, if on Track 2 you’re liberated by a breakup and on track three you’re heartbroken, the difference indicates no more than which part of the romance cycle the songwriter happened to be mining on a particular day; on the different tracks on her album JoJo’s situated all over the cycle). “Baby, you can have your way, just as long as I can have you.”
A few people I know were a little weirded out by “Leave (Get Out)” for coming out of the mouth of a 13-year-old, though it didn’t seem strange to me: Lots of 13-year-olds date, even if they’re not shacking up together. I haven’t heard much commentary about “Anything” one way or another. But I had this thought. The fact that JoJo at 15 is singing this song is something of a coincidence (it’s just a pop-R&B lyric, and she sings pop-R&B songs); but in fact 15-year-old girls are exactly the ones who would have the feelings expressed in the song, who would feel they have to do anything—not all 15-year-olds, obviously, but the ones who are way uncertain of their inner worth and are trying to get self-esteem through the attention of boys.
So instead of going “Oh my god, a 15-year-old is saying that she’d do anything to get some guy,” I had the opposite thought: “Hmmm, so adult pop derives from the feelings of 15-year-olds. That’s interesting.” (By adult pop I mean Top 40 and R&B as well as adult contemporary. But I’m even thinking of pop going back to the 1930s and 1940s). Or 16-year-olds, anyway. As I said, I may change my mind in three days. It isn’t that adult pop matches up with the actual life of a 16-year-old—some adult pop features adult situations, as they say, and when I was 16 I wasn’t dating anyone—but that it recalls a teen mindset. And I don’t mean that this necessarily makes pop immature. Or maybe I do, but my feeling is that all of pop’s breakups and infatuations and crushes and reconciliations involve issues that still remain in adult life but aren’t so high-pitched.
Teens don’t know who they are—they can’t know who they are—not just because they’re young and doing the adolescent thing but also because there’s no room in the economy for them. And the way things are set up, they’re supposed to keep their options open, and they most likely want to. But this affects everything about romance—impermanence is built-in, and people are going to change on each other. This isn’t untrue of adulthood either, and life is full of unsettling shocks, romantic and otherwise; but in general adults have found routines, ways to live their lives. So it isn’t as if issues of who one is or what one wants out of life and love have vanished, but they’re more ignorable for adults. Adults can often choose not to deal with them. But then in their entertainment, adults can go back and enjoy love and romance in its full vividness and uncertainty.
That said, there’s been some teenpop in the last decade with lyrics more mature than most of the adult pop.
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I assume by this time that if you’re someone who remotely cares about Britney Spears you’ve seen every possible analysis of her VMA appearance that you’re going to want to, from every possible angle and viewpoint. So I’ll just say, as someone who really wants this woman to prevail, and who insists that there’s integrity and even smarts in a lot of her acting out, insists that she’s doing something valuable: Her VMA performance was awful, and watching it was traumatic. Some friends of mine have been saying, “Oh, she wasn’t that bad, just tentative and nervous, or maybe she just didn’t care.” Well, she was that bad, but it wasn’t just that the performance was awful, it was that she looked blasted-out and emptied from the inside. In a word, f--ked-up. Maybe the cause was a virus, or exhaustion, or terror. I wouldn’t know. But I saw what I saw, and there’s a difference between mere indifference and that kind of listlessness and blank eye.
Jimmy Draper: “ ‘Train wreck’ makes it sound like there was actual momentum at some point. More like a train puttering to a stop.”
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