The song “Haven’t Met You Yet” by Michael Buble is my current, obnoxious earworm (be warned before you listen to the wretched thing) and the lyrics of it make it into a theme song for dysfunctional romance (and possibly Nice Guy Syndrome):
I can’t think of anything less romantic than “I’ll give so much more than I get” unless it’s “I’ll do home dentistry on the cat.”
What songs are attempts at love songs that just miss the mark? I don’t mean stalker songs or deliberately creepy songs. I mean things that are meant to be love songs but just… aren’t really about love, or at least healthy love, at all.
Well, there’s a whole load of stalker songs that weren’t meant to be such, including most boyband pop ballads.
However, there’s a difference between ‘I’ll give so much more than I get’ and give ‘I give so much more than I get.’ the former is saying ‘I’m a needy whiney loser’ and the latter is saying ‘my GFs up to now have never been into the relationship as much as I have.’ Or some such. It still sounds a bit whiney, but not as bad as promising to always be the beta in the relationship.
A clearer enunciation of the same sick sentiment was expressed in the American Breed’s 1967 hit “Bend Me, Shape Me,” in which the singer tells his girlfriend to “Bend me, shape me / Any way you want me. / Long as you love me, it’s all right.” If you relinquish your self to that degree, you have no self to give–and if you aren’t giving of yourself, it isn’t love.
“Backfield in Motion” by Mel & Tim is my personal favorite ridiculous “love song”. This is a song about a relationship framed in the context of football. It features heart-wrenching, soulful lyrics such as:
That song is just silly, too silly for me to hate (I feel the same way about “MacArthur Park”). A song that I do hate is “Take a Letter, Maria”. This is a song about a guy who asks his secretary to draft a letter to his wife informing her that he’s leaving. What, he can’t write the breakup letter himself? Why on Earth should Maria have to do it? And after all that he realizes that he has the hots for Maria and asks her out
End Of The Road, which I will sing the crap out of in the shower, is the most pathetic love song ever. It beats out Just My Imagination for the Slap That Guy Award.
At least Just My Imagination is some poor smuck who doesn’t have the balls to talk to the woman he loves. Here is the spoken word part of End Of The Road:
*All those times of night when you just hurt me
And just ran out with that other fella
Baby I knew about it, I just didn’t care
You just don’t understand how much I love you do you?
I’m here for you
I’m not out to go out and cheat on you all night
Just like you did baby but that’s all right
Hey, I love you anyway
And I’m still gonna be here for you ’till my dying day, baby
Right now, I’m just in so much pain baby
Cuz you just won’t come back to me
Will you? Just come back to me
*
She repeatedly cheated on you and then left you. Even when she was with you, she didn’t really want you. Grow a fucking pair, you pathetic schlub!
The Pina Colada song (Escape by Rupert Holmes). Lyrics here. So stuck in a 70s idea of relationship health.
Man, bored in relationship with his wife, sees personal ad for a woman who seems to share his likes and dislikes (pina coladas, getting caught in the rain in column A, health food and yoga in column B). Woman wants to escape. Man publishes his own ad to similar effect in reply. They decide to meet.
And when they do (big reveal here, folks) the woman who turns up is his wife all along. And they both seem to laugh about it and realise that they loved each other all along and had just forgotten about the things they shared in common.
It is hard to get one’s head around the 70s ideology that thought this was credible any more. It’s barking nuts.
I hear that song and wish I was at that O’Malley’s with a video camera because I’m sure after the moment of laughter, drinks were flying all over the place.
How about “Dirty Little Secret” by All-American Rejects?
I’ll keep you my dirty little secret
(dirty little secret)
Don’t tell anyone or you’ll be just another regret
(just another regret, hope that you can keep it)
My dirty little secret
Hey, girls- if a guy wants to see you on the downlow, and doesn’t want you to tell anyone about it, there’s something wrong there!
There are a couple of entries from the '60s pop sub-genre of “songs about men who get involved with less-than-attractive women because that’s the only place where you can find true looooove” that I don’t really care for.
The first is a song called “Beauty’s Only Skin Deep”, by The Temptations. Okay, I get this guy’s point that a good significant other requires more than just a pretty face to make the relationship work, but still. He spends the whole song telling his new girlfriend that she’s not attractive and how he’s “learned to do without” good looks. WTF? If this girl makes you so happy then why do you keep putting her down? “Ugly, but has a great personality” may be an acceptable assessment of a one-time blind date but it isn’t something you would want to say to your established girlfriend. She should just be “beautiful”, no clarification of the location of her “true beauty” needed.
The second song I dislike from this genre…I forget the name of it, but it features the following lyrics:
Like the previous song, this song seems to have its heart in the right place (don’t judge a book by it’s cover), but it has a strong vibe of “get an ugly girl to marry you, because she’ll never leave you for another man, because, you know, she’s ugly. Who’d want her.” Not exactly the best reason to marry someone. God forbid you should get her to want to stay with you because you, like, treat her right and stuff.
*"it’s true you really do abuse me
You get in a crowd of high class people and then you act real rude to me
But oh baby when you love me I can’t get enough
“He Hit Me (And …” was the first one I thought of, but I could take this thread into so many directions at once that I thought I’d better introduce them a little at a time!
Never mind the cacaphonous kazoos–How 'bout the huge number of people who blamed Johnny for the problems in “Johnny Get Angry”? For those unfamiliar, it’s about a girl pretending to break up with a boy just to provoke him into a (possibly violent) reaction. There are ways to encourage a guy to be more assertive, but that isn’t one of them.
Another song that always annoyed me was “Diary.” It’s not the plaintive keen of the singer, that would make even the above-mentioned Johnny remark that the guy sounds like a wuss–it’s that the narrator would read someone’s diary without permission, and think that a marriage can be sustained on that level of trust. All presented as though it’s somehow so tender and touching…
