You'd think that people would have had enough of silly love songs. I look around me and I see it isn't so. Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs. What's up with that? I'd like to know. (Non-silly love songs also considered.)
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[Start of transcript]
Hi there. Welcome to The Music's Not A Threat, a podcast about culture, history, and an anarchist pop band called Chumbawamba.
Our topic for today is 'love', and we'll be taking a look a the context and background of the Chumbawamba song "Sing About Love", from their 2008 album, The Boy Bands Have Won.
Actually, The Boy Bands Have Won isn't the full title of the album. It's just the first five words of the 156-word paragraph that is the album's title.
I've seen it claimed that this is the longest album title of all time. Which... I can't find any actual authority that certifies that record, but all the sources I can findThe most comprehensive list of contenders that I've found for the "Longest Album Title" record is "The Ten Longest Album Titles Ever" by Reed Fisher, Broward Palm Beach New Times, 12 September 2011. basically agree that:
The third longest album title is the Fiona Apple album that starts with the words "When The Pawn..."Full title: When The Pawn Hits The Conflicts He Thinks Like A King What He Knows Throws The Blows When He Goes To The Fight And He'll Win The Whole Thing 'fore He Enters The Ring There's No Body To Batter When Your Mind Is Your Might So When You Go Solo, You Hold Your Own Hand And Remember That Depth Is The Greatest Of Heights And If You Know Where You Stand, Then You Know Where To Land And If You Fall It Won't Matter, Cuz You'll Know That You're Right. On the album's cover, the text is in a faux-handwritten, all-caps font, with "When the Pawn" larger and bolder than the rest (to the point that you could probably debate whether the rest is really part of the title at all...). Of the three longest titles, this album does have the distinction of selling more copies than the other two, but who's counting? That one has a total of 90 words in its title, which is already ridiculous.
Then the second-longest title belongs to a compilation album by the group Soulwax, the title of which starts "Most of the remixes...".Full title: "Most of the remixes we've made for other people over the years except for the one for Einstürzende Neubauten because we lost it and a few we didn't think sounded good enough or just didn't fit in length-wise, but including some that are hard to find because either people forgot about them or simply because they haven't been released yet, a few we really love, one we think is just ok, some we did for free, some we did for money, some for ourselves without permission and some for friends as swaps but never on time and always at our studio in Ghent." It's a pretty detailed description of what the compilation is, although it is a bit of a run-on sentence. That one tops Fiona Apple by just 13 words, clocking in at 103.
But at 156, half again as much as its nearest competitor, I can't find an album title longer than Chumbawamba's The Boy Bands Have Won,It's entirely possible that there's a self-released album out there on Bandcamp or Soundcloud with a 157-plus-word title (if there wasn't before, someone's working on it now), but probably not from an artist that most people have heard of. or, to give it it's full title:
The Boy Bands Have Won, and All the Copyists and the Tribute Bands and the TV Talent Show Producers Have Won, If We Allow Our Culture to Be Shaped by Mimicry, Whether from Lack of Ideas or from Exaggerated Respect [...the recording becomes increasingly, inaudibly fast. This goes on for some time...] Yeah, this is still happening. [...it continues, finally slowing back to an audible level...] Because Then It Dies, Then It's Over, Then It's Done, and the Boy Bands Have WonFull title: "The Boy Bands Have Won, and All the Copyists and the Tribute Bands and the TV Talent Show Producers Have Won, If We Allow Our Culture to Be Shaped by Mimicry, Whether from Lack of Ideas or from Exaggerated Respect. You Should Never Try to Freeze Culture. What You Can Do Is Recycle That Culture. Take Your Older Brother's Hand-Me-Down Jacket and Re-Style It, Re-Fashion It to the Point Where It Becomes Your Own. But Don't Just Regurgitate Creative History, or Hold Art and Music and Literature as Fixed, Untouchable and Kept Under Glass. The People Who Try to 'Guard' Any Particular Form of Music Are, Like the Copyists and Manufactured Bands, Doing It the Worst Disservice, Because the Only Thing That You Can Do to Music That Will Damage It Is Not Change It, Not Make It Your Own. Because Then It Dies, Then It's Over, Then It's Done, And the Boy Bands Have Won". The album's cover has the final "The Boy Bands Have Won" written larger and on its own line, and the spine of the CD only includes that phrase. As with the Fiona Apple album, it's clear what shortened version of the title we're intended to use. Soulwax is the only one where it doesn't seem like any particular short version is implied.
[deep breath]
No joke, I genuinely considered reading all three of those album titles in their entirety, but even I didn't have the patience for that.
The album, and it's title, will get their own episodes at some point (or I'll cover it in the episode for the song "Pickle" which has very similar themes).
Anyway! The topic for this episode is not the album, but the song: "Sing About Love".
This song is from 2008, so we're about ten years past their big hit, and Chumbawamba's music is going in a kind of folkier direction. This song in particular is actually all acapella. It doesn't sound like the Chumbawamba you know, but I think they do very well.
Take a listen:
[♫: "I don't want to sing about anger and hate
I don't want to sing about fear and defeat
I don't want to sing about the things I always sing about
I wish I could sing about love
I wish I could sing about love..."]
They wish they could sing about it, so today, we're gonna talk about it.
So let's talk about love.
Che Guevara once said... well, okay, what he said was in Spanish.Original Spanish language text available from Marxists.org But for my listeners who don't speak Spanish—and for me, because I also don't speak Spanish—from here on out we''ll be using translations and living in a pretend world where everyone in all places and all times spoke the same language as I do now.
In that pretend world, what Che Guevara said was:
["Let me say, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary without this quality."]The translations used in this episode are based on the two different versions of "Man And Socialism In Cuba" available from Marxists.org (this one and this one), Frankenstein'd together by myself and Josh (who recorded the voice of Che for me), in consultation with the Spanish original (I used a lot of Google Translate and Wiktionary).
"The true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love." It's a good line for revolutionary romantics (and romantic revolutionaries), and I've definitely seen it quoted in the context of romance.
But that isn't really what he's talking about in the original context.
Then again, being taken out of context is kind of Che Guevara's legacy in modern pop culture.
The fad has kind of faded now, but there was a time not too long ago when mass-produced Che Gueavara t-shirts were so ubiquitous that making jokes about it being cliché have themselves. become cliché.
Or should I say... 'cli-Che'?Even the turn-of-phrase "Cliché Guevara" isn't new. For one thing, it's the title of an Against Me! song from the early 2000s.
[♫: "YEEEEAAAAAAH!"]If you didn't recognize it, this is a reference to CSI: Miami, in which the main character frequently dons his sunglasses, deadpans something clever(?), and the theme song kicks in. See for example this YouTube compilation of such moments (some clips may contain gore). The song is "Won't Get Fooled Again" by The Who, which may deserve its own episode at some point...
Maybe we'll dedicate an episode to that t-shirt thing at some point. At the very least it's a fascinating intersection between mainstream culture and the radical fringe. But for now I wanna stick to just the context of this one quote: ["that the true Revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love."]
This quote was first published in 1965, in a letter describing the then-current state of the Cuban Revolution. It talks about the sacrifices made by the revolutionaries, and the quote is meant to explain why they were willing to make these sacrifices: because of their great feelings of love.
He doesn’t specify what kind of love he means, whether it’s romantic love, family, friends, or the sort of broader 'love of all humanity'—you can imagine how any of those might motivate someone. But whatever kind of love you’re motivated by, he’s building to a larger point about how that love should be expressed, and I’m not sure how many people who’ve used it out of context would agree with the whole thing.
Here’s how it continues:
"[R]evolutionaries... cannot descend to the level where ordinary people put their love into practice with little doses of daily affection. The leaders of the revolution have children just beginning to talk, not learning to say 'daddy'; their wives, too, must be part of the general sacrifice of their lives in order to take the revolution to its destiny. The circle of their friends is limited strictly to the circle of comrades in the revolution. There is no life outside of it."]
No life outside of the revolution. Basically, he's framing this larger work for societal change as being a higher expression of love for the people they that care about, even if it comes at the expense of everyday expressions like actually spending time with them.
And if you think that kind of revolutionary austerity sounds pretty harsh, then... yeah, it does.
It certainly doesn't sound pleasant, but neither does revolution. It sounds messy, and difficult, and dangerous, and a million other reasons why I've never personally considered taking up arms against the system.
So it's hard for someone like me to understand why anyone would want to be part of a revolution. But that's kind of the point. The revolutionaries that he's talking about don't necissarily want to be part of a revolution either.
It’s easy to think that revolutionaries are revolting because they like—because that’s the kind of people that they are. And it’s certainly true that some people who participate in violent uprisings might do so because they love just violence or because they want to set up a new oppressive government with themselves at the top. Those people would not be ‘true’ revolutionaries, according to Che’s definition, but I’ll leave the question of who gets to be a true "revolutionary" another episode.
The point is, if you are a “true” revolutionary, motivated by love, you’re not rebelling just for kicks."Ooo-woo, I'm a rebel just for kicks now..." from the Portugal. The Man song "Feel It Still"; reference is intentional. Someone like that doesn’t find the idea of a revolution any more appealing than I do. And yet, they do it anyway. Because maybe the short-term sacrifice of comfort or convenience is worth it for the long-term happiness and security of the people they love. That’s how I read it, anyway.
And that idea doesn’t just apply to armed revolutions, I think some version of it has to apply to anyone who tries to make a change in the status quo. Because any amount change will require some amount of sacrifice. Sticking to the status quo is easy,High School Musical "Stick To The Status Quo" reference also intentional. I've never actually seen the movie, I've just somehow absorbed this particular song through pop cultural osmosis. I have seen High School Musical 2, but the only part of that anyone needs is the ridiculous choreography of "Bet On It". and in order to break away from it, you're going to have to accept some amount of difficulty.
On the other hand, not every sacrifice is equally helpful, or valuable, or necessary. Do you actually have to disconnect from people as individuals in order to best serve "the people" as a group? Maybe sometimes you do. Maybe in the context he's talking about, they did have to do that. (Like I said, I'm not going to get into the details of Che Guevara or the Cuban Revolution in this episode.)
But as I kind of alluded to earlier, that kind of interpersonal austerity—that cutting yourself off from social relationships in the name of social change—that wouldn't be agreed on as necessary or even necissarily good, even among those true revolutionaries motivated by love.
To quote noted revolutionaries Chumbawamba, from their FAQ page in 1998, "why would anybody want revolution if all it promised was more unhappiness? [...] I'm not fighting for a more austere world but one where [...] joy [is] prized.""FAQ You!", Chumba.com, updated 27 November 1998, archived 2 December 1998 by Archive.org.
Or more succinctly, ten years earlier, in 1987, "what's the point in change if it's no fun?"Alice Nutter. "Chumbawamba" interviewed by (unknown), Still Thinking 2 (1987), 3. Available online from Archive.org.
And I don't think that either side is strictly right or strictly wrong here, it's just a balance that every movement for change needs to strike.
On the one hand, you can't make real change without some sacrifice, or, to quote the great Revolutions podcast, paraphrasing the French revolutionary Robespierre: "You can't have a revolution without having a revolution."This paraphrase of Robespierre is actually mentioned twice by Revolutions: in episode 3.25 - "The National Convention" (at 19 minutes 12 seconds), and referenced again—this is the phrasing I quoted—in episode 8.6 - "The Commune" (at 32 minutes 8 seconds).
On the other hand, making yourself a martyr for the cause—insisting on complete austerity, or total ideological purity—can end up backfiring and alienating the people you're supposed to be revolting for.
We'll come back to this in later episodes.
But there is one more part of Che's letter that I want to share, because while I think that Chumbawamba might disagree with the idea that strict personal austerity is a requirement for social change, I think they would agree with this:
"Every day we must fight so that love for living humanity is transformed into concrete actions..."
So the love is not a threat. Just like the music.
[THEME ♫: "(I know there must be more...) THE MUSIC'S NOT A THREAT! (🎥:Is that a threat?!) ♫: ACTION! THAT MUSIC INSPIRES! (🎥:Is that a threat?) ♫: CAN BE A THREAT! (🎥:Are you threatening me?)"]
But maybe just like music, the action that love inspires can be a threat.
So...
You'd think that people would've had enough of silly love songs, but I look around me and I see that isn't so.You'd better believe the reference to Paul McCartney & Wings' "Silly Love Songs" is intentional here. We'll talk about it again in the episode for the song "Behave", if not an episode of its own... The world's already chock- full of love songs, and yet, love continues to be the most popular topic in popular music.
And why is that?
Well, first maybe we should ask the question whether the topic of a pop song really even matters. It's totally possible for a song to become popular even if nobody knows what it's about. Either because the words are slurred...
[♫: "Come On Eileen" by Dexy's Midnight Runners]
...or too fast...
[♫: "It's The End Of The World As We Know It" by R.E.M.]
...or or too loud...
[♫: "Song 2" by Blur]
...or just in another language...
[♫: "Macarena" by Los del Río]
...or it's literal gibberish...
[♫: "MMMBop" by Hanson]
...or words are clear enough, but they just don't help you to get the meaning...
[♫: "I Am The Walrus" by The Beatles]
All kinds of different choices in songwriting and delivery and mixing can make the meaning of the words more or less likely to get through. But even if it doesn't... the fact is that all of those songs were hits, despite their borderline-incomprehensible lyrics.
But if the words don't really matter at all, then you'd think that songs would be just about any random thing. You'd be as likely to hear a song about former U.S. President James K. Polk as you would a song about the onomastic"Onomastic", referring to the study of names. history of a city in Turkey.
But you don't hear many songs about those things (unless you listen to a lot of They Might Be Giants, then you've definitely heard both of those.Referring to They Might Be Giants' songs "James K. Polk" and "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)", respectively.)
So if we could be singing about anything...
Maybe it's force-of-habit. Maybe we're just writing love songs because love songs are what we write. "Write what you know," as they say. Or maybe "write what you write."
And yeah, that's probably part of it.
But I think the biggest answer is probably this: In musical theatre, there's this idea that characters sing because they have to when their emotions become too big for speech. The stronger those emotions, the more it makes sense to express them through something like poetry or song.
And you can actually get a lot of comedy from breaking this rule.
We expect music to be motivated by big emotions or significant events, so it ends up being surprising and funny when a song is about things that don't usually provoke those big emotions—like a simple trip to the dry cleaners:
[♫: "They got! The mustard! Out! (They got the mustard out!)"]
(That jubilant dry cleaning customer is from the musical episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer.Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 7, "Once More, With Feeling". I'll be honest, I haven't seen this one either, but I've heard it referenced so many times that it seemed like a good, short example of the concept.)
For another example, there's a Weird Al song called "The Biggest Ball of Twine In Minnesota". It's just the story of a relatively uneventful family roadtrip and it's mostly funny because of how mundane it is. Like, why would you bother setting this music?
[♫: "We're gonna see the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota! We're headed for the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota!"]
(But having said that, I saw Weird Al play this live last year, and I genuinely almost cried just listening to the whole crowd singing along to this very intentionally inane song. I don't know, I guess even when the song is silly, there's just something very moving about finding yourself surrounded by a bunch of weirdos who are just as silly as you are.)
Now, apropos of nothing, here's Weird Al playing "Tubthumping":
[♫: "I get knocked down! But I get up again! You're never gonna keep me down! I get knocked down! But I get up again! You're never gonna keep me down!"]Sample from the medley "Polka Power!" from "Weird Al" Yankovic's 1999 album Running With Scissors.
Anyway, back on topic: the point is, if you feel strongly about something, that's probably going to translate well to music.
And based on my experience, people seem to feel pretty strongly about romance. That's why when I say we're going to talk about 'love' or 'love songs', the default assumption is that I mean romantic love, even though the word can have all kinds of other uses— from [🎥: "I love my Prada backpack"]Sample from the movie 10 Things I Hate About You, one of the first movies referenced so far in this episode that I have actually seen (multiple times). It'll come up in another footnote when I quote Macbeth later; this was part of a mini-trend of adapting Shakespeare plays (in this case The Taming of the Shrew) into 90's teen comedies, along with Get Over It. (riffing on A Midsummer Night's Dream) and She's The Man (based on Twelfth Night). to [🎥: "I love the smell of Napalm in the morning."]Sample from the movie Apocalypse Now
But when we talk about love songs, we're not talking about those things—we're talking about romantic love. Or sexual attraction—the gray area between those two things in real life is even grayer in pop music, to the point that one can just become a euphemism for the other. (See for example: Enrique Iglesias' "Tonight (I'm Fuckin' You)" or Akon's "I Wanna Fuck You", both of which released supposedly "clean" versions where the only major change was taking out the word 'fuck' and replacing it with the word 'love'.)Ok, it's not completely true that it's the only change: In the “clean” version, Akon also says “up on the floor” instead of “up on that pole”, so it sounds like he’s singing to a girl dancing at a dance club instead of a stripper stripping at a strip club.
But whether you mean love genuinely or euphemistically, in either case, there's lots of strong emotions there, so it makes that lots of people would end up singing about them.
A lot.
According to one study (published in the journal 'Psychology of Music', March 2019),Peter G. Christenson, et al., "What has America been singing about? Trends in themes in the U.S. top-40 songs: 1960–2010," Psychology of Music 47, no. 2 (March 2019), 194-212. First Published online, January 23, 2018. Currently available online at sagepub.com over two thirds of Top 40 songs in the US are about 'love' (in one way or another). An honestly, two thirds seems kinda low, but let's just go with it for now.
What would you guess is the next most popular topic after love? My guesses were either 'bragging' or 'partying'.
Well, according to the study, after love the next most popular topic for popular music is...
Music. (And dancing.)
"Write what you know," I guess.
Seriously, if we sing about the things we love, people do love talking about themselves. Musicians want to talk about music; writers want to talk about writing; people who make movies make movies about making movies.Not to mention plays about putting on plays, from A Midsummer Night's Dream to Noises Off to Phantom Of The Opera to The Play That Goes Wrong.
The next most popular topic is partying and having a good time, at around 10 percent of songs. Then alcohol and drugs, wealth and status, family—all things that produce strong emotions in people.
Then next is social and political issues, around 7-ish percent of songs. And probably unsurprisingly, I want to talk about this one a little bit more. But in order to do that, I need to tell you about...
(His last name is spelled G-A-U-G-H-A-N, and as I understand it, that middle syllable is supposed to be pronounced somewhere between 'ock' and 'och', like in 'Loch' Ness.See for example how it's pronounced in this YouTube video or this one GAHck-h'n.)
Anyway, Dick Gaughan is a Scotish folk singer, who wrote a different kind of love song.
That's the title of the song: "A Different Kind Of Love Song".
There’s also a Cher song called “A Different Kind Of Love Song”—
[♫: "This is a different kind of love song..."]Sample of Cher's "A Different Kind Of Love Song" from the album "Living Proof" (2001). Dick Gaughan's was released in 1983, no idea if Cher's ever heard it.
—but that's not the same song, that's a different "Different Kind Of Love Song". The Cher one’s doing kind of a New Age-y we-are-all-one, why-can’t-we-be-friends, love-everybody kind of love song... anyway, that's not the song we're talking about.
The Dick Gaughan "Different Kind Of Love Song" was inspired by someone who came up to him after a gig, and started asking questions about the kind of things he chooses to sing about.In the liner notes for The Boy Bands Have Won, Chumbawamba quotes him describing a single specific conversation the prompted the writing of the song. But in the liner notes for the original album (also called A Different Kind Of Love Song), he acknowledges that this was not an isolated incident, but that the song was written "in response to numerous arguments of the kind referred to in the first verse."
For context, the other songs on this same album talk about, among other things: the Cold War, nuclear weapons, religious violence, political prisoners...
Yeah, so that's the kind of thing he's singing, and it's not exactly what this questioning listener wanted to hear.
Here's how he recounts the conversation:
[♫: "You ask me why I sing no love songs
You say the songs that I sing make you angry and sad..."]The lyrics to the song, and the story about the song that Chumbawamba quotes in their liner notes, used to be available from Dick Gaughan's website, but it looks like the website's been shut down since around October 2018. Luckily, a you can see an archived version thanks to Archive.org.
So he isn't singing love songs, but as we'd expect, he is singing about things that are emotionally charged—just for this listener, not the emotions they want out of their music.
Skipping ahead to the next stanza:
[♫: "You say that all that I sing of is trouble
And that doesn't entertain you
You say that I should be trying to make people happy
Well, strange as it seems, that's just what I'm trying to do..."]
So he's singing political music, he's singing about the bad times and the troubles of the world, and that isn't necessarily a fun subject to hear about. Like, if listening to that doesn't make you happy, then, you know, yeah, fair enough.
But it's not the listener's happiness that Gaughan is concerned about. He's concerned about the unhappiness created by the situations he describes; and he knows that those situations won't just go away if he stops talking about them. But maybe by talking about them, by singing about them, he can make others aware of them, maybe even resolve them. And ultimately produce more happy people than a happy song would have.
[♫: "So I'll keep trying to make people happy
I'll keep trying in the best way I know how
And for me to help make the most people happy
I must make you even more sad and angry now..."]
His songs produce anger and sadness because the things that he’s singing about are angering and saddening. But if feeling anger or sadness in his listeners can motivate change, then, for Gaughan, that’s worth it.
Finally coming back to the question of why he sings no love songs, he ends the song like this:
[♫: "If you listen again, then you might even find
All the songs that I sing are love songs
But their love is a different kind..."]
In other words, a song that's not about love as its topic, but a song that's motivated by love as its reason for existing. That’s the reason he won’t, or maybe can’t, stop singing these songs.
"Who could refrain, that had a heart to love
And in that heart courage to make 's love known.'"Macbeth, act 2, scene 3, lines 142-143. Full text available from shakespeare.mit.edu.
—Shakespeare (although I'm definitely taking that line out of context)In Macbeth, the title character has just killed (without trial) the guards who were suspected of murdering his cousin King Duncan. So
So all of this is on my mind when I watch 10 Things I Hate About You and David Krumholtz's character uses it as a Shakespearean pick-up line. He flirtatiously quotes the first half, and the character he's hitting on, an established Shakespeare geek, fills in the second half (she slightly mis-remembers it as "courage to make loves known" rather than "to make 's love known", but that's an understandable mistake for someone quoting off the cuff). Anyway, they both treat the whole thing as very romantic. And I guess it is—he's demonstrating a good working knowledge with her favorite subject, bonding over shared interests and all that—but every time I watch the scene, I just can't help but wonder if either or both of them do remember the original context, and they're still treating it like it's romantic... It's the Che Guevara t-shirt thing all over again.
But, okay, after all of that, we’re finally ready to talk about the Chumbawamba song for this episode:
[♫: "I don't want to sing about war and greed
I don't want to sing about those we can't feed
I don't want to sing about the things I always sing about
I wish I could sing about love
I wish I could sing about love..."]
The band lists "A Different Kind Of Love Song" as partial inspiration for this one, and you can definitely see the similarities.
Like "A Different Kind Of Love Song", "Sing About Love" doesn't have a chorus. It just has these short, four-line verses, all with the same simple structure:
And the repetitiveness kind of drives home the message. Now after 25 years of singing topical songs, they know as well as anyone that this stuff can be exhausting—they don't want to sing about these depressing topics any more than you enjoy being depressed.
So then why do it? If they don't want to be doing this, why do it?
Alice said in an interview:
"You got choices: You do '70s cover versions, like all the boy and girl bands are doing; or you write songs about love. Or you write songs about things that actually upset you. We write about things that we are obsessed with..."Corey Moss. "Chumbawamba distribute free anti-facist single in Austria", MTV.com, 24 Jul 2000. Accessed here.
And I should point out that while the things they were obsessed with were often political issues, they did write and sing a few love songs, maybe even one to two that were silly.Most of the love songs they wrote have some kind of twist on them; probably the most straightforward one is "Love Can Knock You Over", although even that one... not a lot of silly love songs would have used "crucified" in their lyrics.
So the troubles of the world didn't really stop them from singing about love, that's not ultimately the point. It's not that they can't sing their songs about love and happiness. It's that they want their other songs to stop being relevant. And until the situations that those songs describe are actually resolved, to just stop talking about it because it's unpleasant is unthinkable, even immoral.
The German poet Bertolt Brecht wrote:
"Ah, what an age it is
When to speak of trees is almost a crime
For it is a kind of silence about injustice!"Bertolt Brecht, "To Posterity," in Selected Poems, trans. H. R. Hays (New York: Harcourt, 1947), 177.
Why sing about unpleasant topics? Why do anything unpleasant at all? For the same reason as Che Guevara and the Cuban revolutionaries: because some things are worth the it.
Because of their great love.
The last lines of "Sing About Love" finish the thought:
They don't want to sing these songs, but...
[♫: "But I'll sing them and sing them
'Til there's no need to sing them
And then I can sing about love
Then I can sing about love..."]
Sing the songs, until the songs inspire action, until the action changes the world, until the world has changed so much that it no longer needs the action, or the songs.
So, after having all of this explained to them, how did Dick Gaughan's listener respond?
To hear him tell the story: "...she looked at me sadly and said, 'Oh. You're still at the political stage, then," and walked off."Quoted in the Chumbawamba liner notes, and on Dick Gaughan's website, already cited.
And that's an understandable response, to be honest. Political music, protest music, turns a lot of people off, and for a lot of good reasons. But that's a subject for another episode.
As for me... I don't know. I don't know if singing about the troubles of the world plays any part in making those troubles go away.
For what it's worth, I do think both Dick Gaughan and Chumbawamba are sincere, I really do believe they're motivated by great feelings of love. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ll agree with any given thing that they (or Che Guevara) might do in the name of love—good of intentions don’t justify all courses of action.
But I do agree with them on the basic premise that if you or I care about something (or someone) but don't do anything about it, then that caring doesn't amount to much.
"They do not love, who do not show their love."
—ShakesepareTwo Gentlemen of Verona, act 1, scene 2, line 31. Full text available from shakespeare.mit.edu. (again, this one's more true to context)At least it's actually talking about romantic love this time.
So love is not a threat.
But maybe action that love inspires can be a threat.
I sympathize a lot with Dick Gaughan's listener actually.
When you're confronted with the pain and sadness of the world, it's hard to really know how to take it.
It's hard not to respond "well, what am I supposed to do about it"?
And that can be a cop out, if you don't mean it, but a lot of the time, I genuinely don't know what I am supposed to do about it. I don't like the fact that so many people in the world have life so hard, and yeah, I would like for that to change, but how's one person like me really supposed to make a difference?
I don't know.
And not knowing what to do means I often don't do anything.
But doing nothing does nothing, and I want to be done doing nothing.
So in the spirit of doing something:
It may not seem like much, but it’s kind of a big deal to me: I had a collaborator on this episode! Many thanks to my friend Josh Padilla who provided the voice of Che Guevara.
In general, I find it much easier to work alone than work with other people; but I recently read Eitan Hersh’s book Politics Is For Power and my basic takeaway from it was that the future of civilization depends on the interpersonal connections between us and the people around us, so I’m trying to make an effort to be less of a lone wolf and more of a… sociable wolf.
We’ll see how that goes.
Transcripts, notes, and sources for this episode available at MusicThreat.net/ep/002. That's E-P-slash-double-O-two.
And if you've got another theory on why we sing so many love songs, I'd love to hear it. Contact information on the website. Just, please cite your sources.
Thanks for listening.
[End of transcript.]