Non-detailed OP because I was feeling like a rant about a song that I really think gets way too much play. Still, my personal preference for discussion of the Arts:
I love to hear/read someone detail their appreciation for a work that they love,
but, in contrast,
I prefer a fun “It sucks because I do not like it” approach to discussing a work that is disliked.
It’s impossible to prove that a work is bad and I find it tiresome when someone tries to explain that they are right that a particular work is bad. It is also impossible to prove that a work is good, but when someone likes a work, it is interesting to hear that appreciation expounded upon. Often, I’ll see something new in a work upon hearing how someone else connects with it.
“A World Without Love” is a song that I hate, so an enthusiasic “It sucks because I hate it” is- contrary to most other academic discourse- is how I would leave it. But I am happy to discuss- but don’t expect to win me over, I’m not on the fence on this one- I really hate this song.
The melody isn’t bad, but it’s not particularly interesting to me. I do like how neatly the wrap-around is served but the “I don’t care what they say I won’t stay in a world without love” (the melody of that line, not the lyrics).
So, it’s a net “meh” for me based on the melody. It’s the lyrics that I really think are so bad.
Now, there isn’t any noteworthy “wordsmithing” happening, so the lyrics are really only to be judged upon the narrative content.
The song’s narrator is really very trite, whiny, and adolescent- and not in a Catcher in the Rye artistic exploration of a whiny adolescent character kind of a way. There’s nothing self-aware enough about the writing that would convince me that McCartney wanted to explore this frame of mind from a psycological angle.
The narrative is tiresomely hyperbolic. This is not “A World Without Love” as may be explored globally in socially aware songwriting of the later sixties. No, this is only a “World Without Love” because the narrator himself doesn’t have a girlfriend. C’mon, give me a break. Who would really have any patience to listen to a teenager go on like this in realy life? Well, putting it in song form doesn’t help.
If McCartney had gone all the way and really made this an exploration of despair, it may have been interesting (compare the far superior Skeeter Davis hit “End of the World”). But in this song what is actually despair is played up as if it should be thought of as romantic. There is something very noble about the melody, as if the writer’s opinion is that the narrator is correct. The problem has nothing to do with personal failings of the narrator, rather it is the world that is in the wrong.
If the narrator is noble and romantic and right, then it follows that locking one’s self away in loneliness is an admirable thing to do when facing a harsh cruel world. Bad enough leaving it at that, but really the world described in the song is not “a harsh cruel world”- it’s just that this guy can’t get a girlfriend!
I can go on, I actually would like to contrast it to Gershwin’s similarly themed (but, again, far superior) “Somebody Loves Me”, but I am posting from work, so I have to interupt myself.