Healthy Love Songs

[redbird]

My friend serenejournal has started a blog for pointing to, and maybe discussing, healthy love songs. This was prompted by a discussion of how many popular songs show really unhealthy relationships—ranging from the subtext of trading sex for financial support in "Eight Days a Week""A Hard Day's Night" (thank you, Avram) to the weirdness of people using the blatant stalker song "Every Breath You Take" as a wedding song. I'm also blogging there, as is Rob (who may be on LJ but I don't remember his handle), and I have skimmed the song list in my iTunes library (just because it's handy) and been disconcerted by how few of the songs in there definitely qualify. A lot are about other things, of course—for example, the only love song in Sondheim's Assassins is "Unworthy of Your Love," the duet for Squeaky Fromme and John Hinkley, but that's not primarily a musical about relationships. (Company is, but I'm not convinced there's anything there either, much as I like the show.) But I was still hoping for more, and will be posting some of these, probably only one or two a day, and seeing what else I find. There's a lot I don't remember well enough to be sure of: it may be an afternoon for listening to VNV Nation and/or They Might Be Giants and seeing which lyrics fit. This definitely calls for attention, as a lot of music has disturbing subtext but is far less blatant than "Every Breath You Take."

Obviously, people may disagree on what counts as healthy here; this thread started on alt.polyamory, though quite a bit of what we come up with is more or less explicitly monogamous, which is fine as long as it's "I love you" and not "s/he's mine, keep your hands off" or "I'm watching to make sure you don't look at another man."

ETA: I think I shall spend some time tracking down some of the songs people have pointed to here (though it may take a while). If anyone would rather not be credited elsenet, or wants to be credited under a name other than your LJ handle for songs you've pointed to, please let me know.

Comments

[avram]

the subtext of trading sex for financial support in "Eight Days a Week"

The what?

[redbird]

I think the lyric that someone pointed to was "work all day to get the money/to buy you things."

[serenejournal.livejournal.com]

Rob is autographedcat.

I am probably gonna spend a lot of time listening to music for the next few days/weeks. :-)

[avram]

So, nothing by Richard Thompson, is my guess.

[avram]

That's from "A Hard Day's Night".

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

"My Funny Valentine" (Rodgers & Hart; my recording is Ella Fitzgerald singing) springs to mind; not sure if all the lyrics quite fit, but:

Is your figure less than Greek?
Is your mouth a little weak?
When you open it to speak, are you smart?
But don't change a hair for me,
not if you care for me,
stay, little Valentine, stay...

[redbird]

Fixed, thank you.

[redbird]

I don't think I can call "When you open it to speak, are you smart?" with the clear meaning that this is a flaw "healthy."

[liv]

What a lovely idea! I will have a look through my music collection. In the meantime, you might enjoy this essay by eye_of_a_cat.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Just off the top of my head: there's nothing striking me as creepy about Louis Armstrong singing "A Kiss to Build a Dream On" or "I Get Ideas" or "La Vie en Rose," or about Nat King Cole doing "Orange-Colored Sky" and "Paper Moon."

You know, one of the things I'm noticing about my BNL songs is that I think they're pretty healthy about teen relationships not having to be eternal to be real. Which is not really what you asked for here, but I'm appreciating it anyway.

Buddy Holly, "(You're So Square) Baby I Don't Care" is in some ways a really sweet song: the object of his affection is not the cool/wild girl he might have imagined himself, but he likes her for who she is.

Josh Ritter, "Good Man." "Babe, we've both had dry spells, hard times, and bad lands" -- again, there is no pedestal here, and "there's so much where we ain't been yet" does not get followed with any line about jealousy or nastiness. "Bright Smile."

I don't know. There's a lot of room for interpretation on things like "I'm yours" -- when we sing it around here, we don't assume it means "and never anybody else's," any more than being my mother's daughter makes me not my father's daughter.

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

Fair enough.

I'm not sure at what point accepting someone unconditionally with all their perceived flaws is healthy or unhealthy, but for me that's very much what that song is about.

[liv]

Metallica's Nothing else matters has nothing stalkery or misogynist, and is really pretty:

Trust I seek and I find in you
Every day for us, something new
Open mind for a different view
and nothing else matters

So close, no matter how far
Couldn't be much more from the heart
Forever trusting who we are
No, nothing else matters

[liv]

I've always been fond of Scarlet's Independent love song, partly because it has independent in the title, and partly because it's at least slightly poly-friendly:

You could say this was an independent love song
It's nothing like to us what love meant to them
But that's not to say the love we have isn't big or that strong
I'm doing it a different way

Also features the singer asking for what she wants sexually (I'm gonna show you how to turn me (right on)) and enjoying occasional liaisons with other men while remaining loyal: (And sure I'll like a few / but I'll leave the rest to play)

[liv]

What do you think of Hey there Delilah? To me it's telling a cute story about a young couple who think their love will change the world, and finding ways to keep a LDR alive, and it doesn't seem possessive or stalkery to me. But perhaps it could seem sinister if you are jaded and think he's promising her the moon on a stick and will never follow through.

[liv]

Dar Williams' When I was a boy is about a woman who's unhappy being forced into feminine roles meeting a man who's unhappy about being forced into masculine roles. The love song element is relatively small, it's mainly about restrictive gender roles, but I am touched by the image of them skipping off queerly into the sunset.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

The closest of anything he *wrote* would probably be "Dimming of the Day." (Which isn't all that close, but it is lovely. The narrative voice is deeply depressed, but doesn't seem to be describing a destructive relationship. Hard to tell, though, because it's so roughly sketched.) Some of the covers on _1000 Years of Popular Music_ sound healthier. I was impressed by his take on "Kiss," (which I thought was orders of magnitude hotter than the Prince arrangement that hit big).

Adding anger and intensity to "Whoops, I did it again," is brilliant, but it doesn't bring the song anywhere near talking about a healthy relationship. It might bring it somewhere near talking about people who seem real enough to have been hurt, real enough to heal later. I'm not sure.

[redbird]

I like that one; I need to think about whether it fits here.

[shweta-narayan.livejournal.com]

Oingo Boingo's Not My Slave is an explicit rejection of unhealthy love models. Don't know if that counts, since it seems that one person in the relationship does have unhealthy models...

You're missing the whole point
You're not my little pet
Don't throw away your life
The game's not over yet
I do not want your soul
Don't want you in a cage
I only want your heart
To find that special place...

Beyond that, uh, I'm into indie music most other people haven't heard of, but Brother (http://www.brothermusic.com) has some healthy love-song lyrics. I'm probably going to wander off and listen to them for the rest of the day to find out which ones are even love songs....

[abostick59.livejournal.com]

What about his crypto-religious songs ("Dimming of the Day," "A Heart Needs a Home," "Night Comes In," etc.?)

[timprov.livejournal.com]

Which goes a long way toward explaining why I dislike him, I think. In fact this seems to be a pretty good rule for my musical taste, which I hadn't enumerated before.

(The Mountain Goats' "No Children" aside, anyway. But that's fabulous because it's such an over-the-top bad relationship song.)

[liv]

Oh, one more and then I will stop spamming you: the most romantic song in the (my) world is If I could save time in a bottle, and I've read over the lyrics just now and I think it's pretty ideologically sound.

[liv]

Similarly Alanis Morissette: I am not the doctor. But that's definitely more along the lines of anti-unhealthy than actually describing a good relationship. Ooh, just as I was typing this my music player came up with All out of tea (April McLean) which is very much along similar lines, but almost more a dumping song than a love song.

[redbird]

How do you feel about bands/musicians who do stuff that isn't mostly in the love/relationship spectrum at all? (I'm listening to Moxy Fruvous at the instant, and while "Michigan Militia" is addressed to a woman and even has the phrase "my sweet betrothed" it isn't in any sense about the relationship: "I hope you like the double barrel/I think it goes with your apparel."

[daharyn.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if XTC's "My Bird Performs" qualifies for you; it definitely does for me, but I suppose the idea of referring to one's lover as a bird might be somehow seen as limiting?

I was going to list a couple of others but realized upon thinking on it that they are healthy songs about sex; not sure that's the same thing. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

TMBG has the most quantity of songs on my playlist, and there's plenty of similar things. I'm thinking about making a large post, since I can easily scroll through my playlist and come up with several hundred positive romantic love songs, and lots of non-romantic love songs.