Here is a question for lovers everywhere… would you rather
1. Be insanely in love with someone who didn’t love you back
Or
2. Be moderately in love with someone who did love you back.
Sure balance would be nice but who is ever balanced and it seems to me that unless you are insanely in love with someone it is hard to maintain the intensity necessary to survive the long haul and if you’re not insanely in love with some one but kinda love them, well, how do you deal with the fact that whoever you are in love with is clinically insane.
Because they most certainly are, you know. I wonder if insanity is built into us, like original sin or something: it is like there is this great big secret and we can’t get our brains around it. One day we wake up and we realize we may not be immortal. That whatever ever is, it might not be us.
So this seed of doubt is planted very early and it infects us, it makes us paranoid, everything becomes a lie and needless to say love is the big lie. How can we know how people feel about us?
Anyway, we are completely insane and romantic love is the greatest insanity of all and the only thing I can say about love is it makes for great songs for time to time. The reason is that there are as many types of love as there are people and each persons has as many types of loves as people that they know.
I like my emotions, and my favorite type of music, to be very very intense and with that in mind I am including two Valentine’s Day songs in celebration of VD in 2014. Do I have a Valentine? Yes, I do, but like so many other things in love it is complicated. Anyway, I buy concert tickets for those I love; not so romantic but if it is a good set the memories can outlive the love. The two songs I chose have nothing to do with her, the first is the physical action of sex mixed with love: the spurts are a self-evident reaction to romantic love but also, if you get past the ejaculation imagery, also the way the intensity of love can hit you and reside.
The second song is, if anything, a better use of imagery. Byrne uses a cool, stuttered, nervous vocal and small two word phrase to build to the sense of impending immolation which comes to life when the horns kick in on the break.
Happy Valentine’s Day.