Modern Love, with Lyrics

A Full Commitment’s What I’m Thinking Of

Since the Rickroll rose from the shallows of 4chan to the wider internet, much has been written about it as a cultural phenomenon.  I have little to add to the narration: even my 1988 copy, on audio cassette, of Astley’s debut album Whenever You Need Somebody is no unique possession, but merely marks me out as a child, with hoarding tendencies, of the baby boomers.  I requested it as my birthday present that year because I liked Top 40 hits, and was vaguely looking for a pop idol to replace in my affections George Michael, who had broken my heart first by growing a swarthy beard and then by releasing the grimly lewd “I Want Your Sex” the previous year.

The Stock Aitken & Waterman studio sound didn’t do much for me, and I was far enough into my music studies at the time to recognise that Astley tended to sing flat, on the consonants and through the nose, in the Great American Songbook number that was clearly his preferred track on the album.  Auto-tune in those days was not as it is now, and although it was rumoured that the voice of Kylie Minogue, contracted to the same producers, had been run through a computer so as to give it pitch, tone and phrasing, none of us who spread that rumour had much idea as to how that might be done.

Even at twelve or thirteen, I was sceptical of the lyrical position of Astley’s hit single.  It seemed unlikely to me that any suitor, or at least any boy, would make the kind of declaration the lyrics make, and thus leave themselves open to mockery, rejection or even, more scarily, enthusiastic acceptance.  The singer’s nonchalant, “I just want to tell you what I’m feeling” seemed at odds with the weight of what was being offered, and I wondered what might be expected in return.  I had no experience but some of my classmates did: declarations of love from boys were often followed by expectations of some form of sex.

You know the rules, and so do I
A full commitment’s what I’m thinking of
You wouldn’t get this from any other guy.

Romance was alluring but brutal, and relationships were carried out largely in public, for the entertainment of others.  I wanted the recognition and the social status that came from having a boyfriend (same-sex relationships, like mental patients, existed to us as a concept for mean-spirited sport) but I did not want to shoulder the risk.  It helped in this regard that I was tall and geeky.  It gave me something like space to make my own way.

Bring Rusty Pliers to Pull this Tooth

In the introductory course I teach to my international students, we usually spend some time exploring Orientalism as an example of ideas about how discourses, or perhaps just modes of thinking, can be constituted.  In this we’re less interested in the arguments about how Orientalism is transmitted than the way in which it is a mode of thinking that has interactive constituent parts.  Edward Said had it thus: that Orientalism dichotomises, essentialises and creates hierarchies.

In the past I have asked the students to think about the first two features in particular as a prelude to understanding.  What are some of the ways in our everyday lives  in which we essentialise groups of people, and place them in a dichotomous relationship with others?  On one occasion I started this process by throwing out a phrase for the students to consider: “All Men are Liars”.  How does this essentialise?  How does it dichotomise?

The female students, mostly in their early twenties, were adamant: this was a truthful statement.  This was representative not only of the behaviour of all men they knew — particularly those with whom they’d had relationships — but also all men they had yet to meet.  It was the nature of romantic relationships, they said, to be sullied by lies, which came principally from men.

The young men objected: it was women, they said, who were the liars, or who at least suffered from what the readings called “want of accuracy” (the original citation by Said from Cromer in 1908, talking about Egyptians).  Any lying on the part of men was only in response to the fickleness of women.

No-one would allow that these were generalisations; they were too close to their own disappointments to let them be made into abstractions.  The truth of their romantic disappointment and what I assumed to be painful experiences demanded extrapolating; the consistency of their experience gave the essentialising, dichotomising statement all the weight it needed.  Somewhere they had assumed they would not be given up, nor let down, nor run around, nor deserted, and these things had happened.

All this was sewn up in a different way, of course, when I was still a teenager and my students no more than toddlers.  Just two or three years after Astley’s stagey song about complete fidelity, Nick Lowe took at it a cheap shot by way of opening salvo, in a lyric of sliding irony about how we react when it all goes wrong.

Do you remember Rick Astley?
He had a big fat hit; it was ghastly.
He said, “I’m never gonna give you up or let you down”.
Well, I’m here to tell you that dick’s a clown.
Though he was just a boy when he made that vow
I’d bet it all that he knows by now

All men; all men are liars …

This is the older man’s mockery not only of the earnest earlier sentiment but the inevitable reaction to its disappointment.  Promises are made in ignorance or bad faith, and not kept, and from this my students win, hard, their essentialist, dichotomising knowledge.  The heterosexual discourse of romance flings insults as monkeys fling poo.

Hey girls, bring rusty pliers to pull this tooth:
All men are liars and that’s the truth.

… All the ones not choking on the words they ate are
Sweating on getting their stories straight.

I played them the track, but it didn’t do much for them, my international students: the milieu too retrograde, the lyrics not easily heard for anyone whose first language is not English.  I sang along with it to give a laugh, and was indulged; the privilege of a teacher in a warm-enough-hearted seminar class.

These Promises … / That I Made and Could Not Keep

From the first age, then, at which we learn the conventions of romance, we seem doomed to shuttle back and forth between extremes of hopeful elation and bitter disappointment.  Lowe’s song speaks, with the assurance of experience, of Astley regretting his vows, even while poking fun at the attempt (which we all knew was a simulacrum, the song that got Astley’s voice into the consciousness of the public, in preparation for a more serious career that never came).  And even the music that we listen to as grown-ups beguiles us with something like the same possibilities, the voice of the lover whose pledge of absolute devotion is erotic in itself:

If you want a driver, climb inside
Or if you want to take me for a ride
You know you can: I’m your man.

One blogger, earlier this year, cited another journalist’s description of the reaction of concertgoers in Australia to Leonard Cohen’s performance of the above-quoted song: “When he growled his sleazy 1988 classic I’m Your Man, women leapt from their picnic blankets to yell: “Yes, you are!”

Cohen’s song is mostly a string of promises offered in the conditional like the ones above, but has also within it (not unlike “Hallelujah”) an acknowledgement that this is all largely futile.  The thing that makes the promises possible is the fact they are undeliverable, and indeed, the lover has already gone.  This is a song in which the singer is reconstituting himself not as a failed lover but as a wooer par excellence, but he’s speaking to the empty air.

I’ve been running through these promises to you
That I made and I could not keep.
Ah, but a man never got a woman back, not by begging on his knees
Or I’d crawl to you baby, and I’d fall at your feet
And I’d howl at your beauty like a dog in heat
And I’d claw at your heart and I’d tear at your sheet
I’d say please, please; I’m your man.

At the point of the dog in season, the gender boundaries collapse, since it’s not in real life the dog in heat that does the howling, but instead gets howled at by the other dogs.  But this is a small point in a song that drowns out disappointment with something like erotic bravado.  The women at the gig know, more or less, that it’s working.

Shifting the Furniture Around

I have in the past made promises of compliance and devotion which I have then not kept, and have put others in the position of making such promises to me when I guessed they would be proved liars eventually.  The fact that I’m about to marry would suggest that I believe some kind of exit from this loop, if not some kind of accommodation within it, is possible.  What form might either of these things take?

One answer is stepping outside of the narratives of romance as much as possible in everyday life.  That doesn’t mean I don’t treat the señor with loving regard, that we don’t have a laugh, that we don’t speak the private language of true companions; far from it.  But it does mean that, as much as possible, I don’t hold him to a vision of our relationship constituted by society and popular culture alone, and it means that I don’t expect him to fix the disappointments I’ve endured and caused in previous relationships. Knowing my penchant for gloomy balladeers, he does not himself have to be a balladeer for me to be happy.  

Many people take Dan Savage‘s assertion that “to settle down is to settle for” as a hard truth, but for me it’s a liberation from the ever-shuttling alternative of Romance with which, as a single person, I had already learned from experience not to truck.  The señor does me an honour to settle for me, and I am grateful indeed to have the opportunity to settle for him.  I don’t think settling down and for could be done any better.

Another answer is the answer of modernists: the exit from unrealistic expectations comes by stopping those expectations not so much at the root as at the point of flowering, the better to mulch them under again.  You know where I’m going with this metaphor: it’s the one that produces art, which is not life.  Mistakes minor or major become Gothic scenarios of all-encompassing regret, separate from the slight that gave rise to the emotion that produced the art.  What have such lyrics to do with the minutiae of the household, the dispute over who last emptied the dishwasher?  Yet it’s the breaking of just such stalemates that fuels the fight that mixes pathos and bathos here:

The water is high on the beckoning river
And I made her a promise I could not deliver
And the cry of the birds sends a terrible shiver
Through me and my sorrowful wife
Who is shifting the furniture around

In another song in which the singer appears about to throw himself into the water, the lyric pulls up short, breaking the fourth wall to address that invisible other: “Don’t be afraid; come on down / I’m just sitting here thinking aloud”.

We learn some of our emotional conventions from popular culture, but must modify those conventions in our lives if we’re to be happy.  We can’t strive for the Platonic ideal and clean the shower at the same time.  The best of the songs about romance are, in my opinion, those that reveal the gap between the world and their making, and do it in a way that allows for difference, that doesn’t identify failure and disappointment as the only concluding options.  A version of this is in some regard done by the Rickroll.

Synthesised, low-budget and historically distant, the Rickroll reveals (in our unexpected happening on it beneath an innocuous link) the gap between these competing versions of love.  The context in which we uncover the song shows it to be a piece of culture, a product of its time.  And yet, the headspace therein is enough for me to say that I’m happy in a fortnight to be making public promises to someone whom I intend with sincerity to try neither to give up, let down, run around or desert.  Partial failures of these vows will inevitably accrue to us over time, but our faith is good, our awareness of structural irony high and our ability to compromise active.  That, I think, is about as well as any reasonable person can do.