Here lies love.

Gavin writes on the struggle to understand love, and I respond with a history of attitudes to love, and types of love, in pop.

LOVE PART I: LOVE AS A SURVIVAL TACTIC.

Sammi Smith expresses this best. Soft, desperate, failing, falling. "Just, please...please."



LOVE PART II: LOVE AS A MERGENCE OF MINDS.

Late night silence and knowing glances. Heaven is a place where nothing, nothing, nothing ever gets said.

Hot Chip do this well on 'in the privacy of our love', which they used to segue into after a cover of nothing compares 2 u, so I'll put that version on here

'there is nothing outside our love'



and 'nothing compares 2 u' takes us nicely into...

LOVE PART III: LOVE AS ALL-ENCOMPASSING OBSESSION.

Easily the best motown song.

'My love reaches so high I can't get over it,
So wide, I can't get around it.'



LOVE PART IV: LOVE AS SELF-DELLUSION/SELF-AGGRANDISEMENT.


Chiffons express this masterfully. 'The narrative voice is unreliable' is a sentence I read about literature on a weekly basis and this, this, this, this is pop's most supremely brilliant use of a clearly delluded narrative voice on a record.

'Though I know you're the kind of boy who only wants to run around,
I'll keep waiting and,
someday, darling...'



LOVE PART V: LOVE AS AN ENHANCEMENT OF THE PHYISCAL WORLD

Ah, this classic. The only good thing to ever come out of Dundee.



LOVE PART VI: LOVE AS A SERVICE.




LOVE PART VII: LOVE AS COMING HOME TO SOMEWHERE YOU'VE NEVER BEEN.

The resumption of normality. Everything you've ever wanted and everything that actually is, combining for the first time.

'I like to write songs about small things. Paper, animals, a house. Love is kinda big. I did once write a love song, though. In this film I sing it to a lamp'



LOVE PART VIII: LOVE AS SHAKY, CONSTANTLY CHANGING, CONSTANTLY REVISIONIST, INSECURE BLISS.


Properly perfect song, this.




LOVE PART IX: LOVE AS A BATTLEGROUND



LOVE PART X: LOVE AS A SLATE-WIPING COMPROMISE.



LOVE PART XI: LOVE AS A QUEST FOR HARD-OBTAINED GOODS.

I originally thought this lyric was 'we're one collective item', taking us nicely back to Love part II.



LOVE PART XII: LOVE AS AN UNSTOPPABLE FORCE.

i cant explain this feeling,
can't you see that salvation is freedom?



LOVE PART XIII: LOVE AS A UTILITARIAN CALCULATION.

'i'm checking it out, i'm checking it, there's
good points, bad points, but it all works out,
you know i'm a little freak out.'

-talking heads, cities.



LOVE PART XIV: LOVE AS THE ACQUISITION OF AESTHETIC PERFECTION.



LOVE PART XV: LOVE AS A FAST-DISAPPEARING SPARK, HELD BACK BY CIRCUMSTANCE AND YOU BEING A SHY TIT.



LOVE PART XVI: LOVE AS A BOSSY, UNWELCOME, PRECIOUS-TIME-CONSUMING MESS INFRINGING ON AN OTHERWISE FINE LIFE.

one of the last lyrics is 'i have to catch a cab and my bags are at the carousel'. that's key.

'There is only lawlessness'

'give love a little shove and it becomes terror'



LOVE PART XVII: LOVE AS FIZZY BLISS.

This is wonderful. Just a few thoughts, repeated over and over.