Opinion - The Love Song vs The Anti-Love Song- Which is superior? - 2024 - Far Out Magazine

Credit: Far Out / Jon Tyson

For and Against: The Love Song

Wed 14 February 2024 14:24, UK

To embrace the love song or to shun it: that is the question. Is it more noble in mind to suffer the slings and arrows of cheesy platitudes and soppy heartbreak or take arms against gushing public affection and oppose these sweet serenades? This quandary has plagued plentiful hipsters wondering which route is cooler, more artful, and dignified: opposition or embracement, Joy Division or The Beach Boys.

Today, on the day of love, two of these hipsters wage war against each other: Tom Taylor will take up Lothario’s defence while Dale Maplethorpe looks to prosecute odes to other halves. As our readers, you serve as the jury, and to aid your decision, we have indicted two playlists resplendent with some of the greatest lesser-known love songs and the anti-love counterparts in the hope of swinging your decision.

Tom: In Defence of Love Songs: Thrashing the love song is the province of the unloved, the unlovable, and those in denial—the dishonourable Dale Maplethorpe is all three of these. Many scorned lovers have found themselves in a similar boot camp of embittered cynicism. ‘Of the myriad bounties of human emotions, why does one receive disproportionate attention?’ they ask themselves while they weep into their ready meals, in their saddened cores well aware of the reasons, yet pleading the false wherefore that love songs merely ’sell well’.

The answer is self-evident: love is the sun of the human condition – there are plenty of other stars in the comedy of our continued existence, but none support life on this planet quite like love. Even platonic love pales in comparison – I’m fond of my mate Toby, but I’ve never thought of saying, ‘We both like Peep Show, enjoy commenting on the effusive hustle of Anthony Gordon’s wing play, curry and Cobra nights, and the odd Test Match, why don’t we spend the rest of our lives together?’ With Shezzy, on the other hand, things are different.

Romantic love is the only thing that can make such a proposition not seem truly ridiculous. Thus, it not only warrants songs, but it is the very reason we write them. For evidence, you needn’t look further than ‘To Feel in Love’ by Lucio Battisti – perhaps the most underrated song of all time – which springs a geyser of exultant emotion. Exultant emotion separates the same four chords a child could learn to play within an hour’s practice from a masterpiece that makes sense of humanity.

If all art is quite useless, as the fellow once said, then why not continually apply it to the pointless enterprise of love—the futile engine of every stupid endeavour in human history? In essence, when a love song is done right, it is the truest form of artistic expression, showcasing why we bother to do anything other than exist.

You can’t divorce the anti-love song from love because it is merely mirrored opposition. Even the most irreverent punk song can be traced back to love because it is somehow written in response to all the soppiness that has gone before. But when that soppiness is sincere, it reaches the pinnacle of art: a heartfelt exposition of truth that transfigures songs from useless noise to the meaning of life—which is, of course, to fart around, a pursuit best enjoyed in unison.

Thus, my opponent can’t win because theirs would be the pyrrhic victory of sadness—they would not be tears of triumph, but rather repudiated cynicism leaking onto previously soiled Kleenex, well aware that a change of circumstance would have him championing ‘Into My Arms’ every day and saying things like, ‘Love is so vast and deep that the only reason we bash it is because there aren’t enough words for it or enough of it in supply’.

The greatest alternative love songs:

‘Into My Arms’ – Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
‘To Feel in Love’ – Lucio Battisti
‘Martha’ – Tom Waits
‘Le Tourbillon’ – Jeanne Moreau
‘You and Me’ – Penny & the Quarters
‘Bless the Telephone’ – Labi Siffre
‘Smouldering Fire’ – Ural Thomas & the Pain
‘The Making of You’ – Curtis Mayfield
‘Maps’ – Yeah Yeah Yeahs
‘Baby’ – Donnie & Joe Emerson
‘We Could Be Looking for the Same Thing’ – Silver Jews
‘Magnolia’ – J.J. Cale
‘I Love You’ – Fontaines D.C.
‘The Man in Me’ – Bob Dylan
‘Spring’ – Angel Olsen
‘Pigeons’ – Bill Callahan
‘The Dreamer’ – The Tallest Man on Earth
‘For You’ – Laura Marling
‘To Love Somebody’ – Nina Simone
’The Wonder of You’ – Elvis Presley
‘Clair de Lune’ – Claude Debussy
‘Everyone’s in Love with You’ – David Byrne
‘Forget About’ – Sibylle Baier
‘God Only Knows – The Beach Boys
‘The Power of Love’ – Frankie Goes to Hollywood

Dale: In Prosecution of the Love Song: Love. An inescapable feeling of ecstasy that is so strong you share it with everyone on the planet, yet Tom Taylor is deluded enough to think that experiencing it somehow makes him special. The love song appeals to this delusion, one that is less about feeling an untold connection with “the one” and more about an inner desire to combat the fear of dying alone.

It’s selfish to fall in love. You become a different version of yourself in the hope that a person you can tolerate and who will sleep with you now and then sticks around. You’re desperate to have someone nearby at all times, not because you’re a deep and profound individual with enough room in your heart for someone else, but because you’re too weak to go at life alone. The reason there is an abundance of love songs is the same reason scammers keep ringing your grandma: because the weak are easier to sell to.

Behind every love song is a marketing team, a PR team and label executives, all of whose job it is to make sure the track is vague and masquerades sincerity well enough so that morons like Tom will buy into it. “This song is about me,” he thinks as he stares at the three dots on his WhatsApp, desperate for the validation of others because he knows deep down he’s not worthy of it.

The love song takes something human and inhumanely monetises it. It has always been enough to be a part of the natural order of things, but the love song will try to tell you otherwise. Don’t be bought. Listen to Joan Jett.

The anti-love song, or songs that are inherently against the idea of love, don’t try to sell you a falsehood. Rather than some bullshit attempt to help you make sense of a complicated emotion, the anti-love song takes anger and confusion and justifies it. It does what music should do and provides a quick release before letting you get on with your day, rather than creating a sonic dependency on an artist that equates to album sales. You are not an individual to the love song; you are a keyword in a marketing strategy and another zero on a profit margin. Fuck ‘em!