I mean, not to diminish that part of life. But ISTM that if you compare that as an aspect of life to the position that it occupies as the subject of pop music, there’s an enormous disparity. Two possibilities suggest themselves:
[ul]
[li]The emotional aspects of romantic love lend themselves to expression in song much more than a lot of other aspects of live, e.g. mowing your lawn or eating lunch.[/li][li]The demographic that is most into music - teens and young people generally - is more obsessed with romantic love than other demographics, and they are the drivers of what gets produced.[/li][/ul]
That’s likely a big part of it. Plus, people in their teens and twenties are more likely to be dating – and, thus, regularly experiencing the “pursuing someone” and “twitterpated just-fallling-in-love” aspects of romantic love – more often than people in their thirties and beyond (who are more likely to have found their partner, and have been with that partner for a while).
Thus, those sorts of topics might be more immediately relevant to teens and twenty-somethings.
I’m not an expert on modern pop music, but my (somewhat) educated guess is that part of the reason so many modern pop songs are about love is that many pop songs today are written according to formulas that have already proven successful. Many of the pop songs of today are written by the same fewpeople, who know how to work the formula.
So I’m guessing that love is a topic that works well in songs that become very popular, so it’s a topic that gets used often when writing pop songs.
This. Romantic love keeps the human race going. We could reproduce without it, but life wouldn’t be very interesting. Wanting love, keeping love, losing love - these are all fairly universal things, no matter what age you are.
Yeah, I think this is one of those threads where the OP answered its own question. If you want to write a song about something that most people can relate to and that will produce an emotional reaction of some sort, romantic love is your best bet for a subject.
Pop songs were designed to be inoffensive. Pap songs, if you will. Radio stations wouldn’t play songs that were overtly political or social or religious. They mostly excluded folk songs because those were often about issues, until the watered-down ones became popular in the 1960s. (The blacklisting in the 1950s often included protest singers.) That also meant that music companies wouldn’t sign people who wrote these songs or allow them to be recorded if someone tried to slip one in.
If the entire economic system you depended on banned just about anything other than love and romance, you’d find as many ways as possible to write songs about love and romance.
That’s part of what the 60s rock revolution was about. The earliest songs by most of the groups were firmly in the old tradition. It wasn’t until they realized their power to change that that change happened.
This kind of begs the question a bit though doesn’t it? New pop songs are about love because old songs about love were popular. Why were original songs about love popular?
Your second point neatly sidesteps the answer IMO. It’s not that the audience demographic is teens and young twenty-somethings, it’s that the songs are written by teens and young twenty-somethings (notwithstanding Emily’s point about formulaic writing) and love is a topic that rules their lives somewhat more than us middle-aged folk.
Hit the decks a runnin’ boys, and turn them guns around, Oh, we’ve gotta sink the Bismark boys, we’ve got to cut her down. Dudah da dah dah dah dah, dudah da da da dah. You can correct me on the specifics.
This. I gotta give rap and metal credit, they’ll address anything and love makes up a tiny minority of songs in those genres. Even country, there’s a lot of love songs, but at least half the songs on any given album are about something else. Country is also the only genre I know of that will sing happy songs about marriage and families, the kind of love that stands the test of time, whereas pop and R&B tend to concentrate on new love and breakups.
If you listen to pop and R&B and make assumptions about the lives of the singers, you quickly get the impression that aside from very short relationships that end very badly, they aren’t doing too well on the love front. Which is one reason many people find pop to be throwaway music: even when the subject is love, it’s usually so shallow. IMO, pop is strongest when the subject is dancing and partying.
