Dylan and Us: 4. Beyond America: The unchanging (heterosexual) love song – part 1

by Wouter van Oorschot

Translated by Brent Annable

Previously in this series…

The unchanging (heterosexual) love song – part 1

Well, I spied a girl and before she could leave
I said ‘Let’s go and play Adam and Eve.’
I took her by the hand and my heart it was thumpin’
When she said, ‘Hey man, you crazy or sumpin’
You see what happened last time they started.’
(‘Talking World-War-III blues’, The freewheelin’ Bob Dylan – 1963)

Now that we have bid farewell to the sludge of the entertainment industry, we would do well to study the characteristics of the age-old love song itself, which also feature in those of Dylan. Although we are all familiar with them, we in fact rarely take a close look at them. But we will do so now, so as to enable a sharper distinction between Dylan’s work and the aforementioned sludge.

Since time immemorial, love songs have fallen into one of at least three categories. Songs of the I/you variety are the most proliferous. Less commonly we encounter songs in which the singer sings of a loved one to a third person – the she/he songs. Both kinds appear in major and minor variants, and can therefore express joy at a love that is within reach, or sadness at love that is not (or is no longer). The joyful kinds consist merely of happy tidings, making them somewhat uninteresting. Sadness has a far broader palette, however, and can express itself through jealousy, rage, reproach, contempt, self-pity, or any one of the myriad remaining negative emotions. Lastly, there is the kind in which the love between (usually) two people is recounted by a third party. The ballad, which offers a suitable framework for such narratives, is now considerably rarer than it once was, and so can be discounted here. Which is a shame, since while they are only stories, there are some very beautiful ones among them.

For obvious reasons, the discussion of which would be a needless distraction here, love songs are unabashedly heterosexual in nature. The classic image of a yearning love song is that of a man accompanying himself on a plucked string instrument while serenading a woman from beneath her balcony or open window in an attempt to win her love. He sings to her with words such as: you are wonderful, so sweet and so beautiful, I love and long for you, will you be my dearest (there is no talk of marriage, not yet). This I/you construct allows listeners other than the “serenadee” to splice themselves directly into the action. This is more than likely the reason why they appeal to people the most, and consequently are the most common type. The she/he variety creates more distance with the audience.

The biological fact that most love songs are written by heterosexual males is a matter for scientists to address. Nature perhaps suggests that primate females require serenading by their male counterparts in order to increase the probability that they offer themselves ‘willingly’ for mating. Male birds and frogs that sing or croak more beautifully or loudly have the same goal, after all, and therefore a greater likelihood of mating. This may be the reason why songwriting females have been in the historical minority – a dreadful shame, if you ask me. Again, scientists must be the ones to rule on whether they have rapidly closed the gap in recent decades, due to the contraceptive pill. It is clear, however, that odes and serenades dedicated to men are far less numerous than the reverse: now why might that be?

The odes by men are sometimes cloyed by a half-hearted imperative plea, as though the lover in question cannot choose between a primitive ‘Come here!’ and the more civilised ‘Can I come over?’ One very well-known example of this type is The Beatles’ debut single ‘Love me do’, that appeared on 5 October in England in 1962. The song’s sophistication is roughly equivalent to that of a pre-pubescent brain in its final year of primary school, excepting perhaps the possessiveness of the title and the pendulant awkwardness of the song’s two final lines. Lennon and McCartney were aged 22 and 20 at the time, so perhaps the song’s substrate was a little firmer after all… although the words ‘somebody new’ seem to suggest that the girl in question was not their first love interest. They were simply two attractive, musically gifted young adult men whose modest first attempt (142 seconds long, or two minutes and twenty-two seconds) put them on the road to worldwide fame. The song’s undisputed heterosexual nature is evident, since ‘time immemorial’ was not yet over when they wrote and sang it: people knew, without exception, that by ‘you’ they meant a woman. ‘Love me do’ was a run-of-the-mill novelty, but thanks to that ‘somebody new’, every teenage girl could dream that the song was all about her. John and Paul knew what they were doing.

Is all this attention not perhaps more than such an inconsequential text deserves? There can be no doubt that the more mundane the lyrics, the more subordinate they are to the music. The vast majority of people will therefore claim that they never really pay attention to the words. That may be the case, but it is also true that we can all sing along to a song that we like after only a few hearings – in our native language at least – however vacuous the text may be. Many tens, hundreds, and for some even thousands of song lyrics (or fragments thereof) are therefore now lodged firmly in our brains, which means that worldwide there are hundreds of millions of brains walking around with the same song lyrics inside them (albeit fragmented, and mostly in English). Now, dear reader, feel free to convince me that because ‘nobody pays attention to the words’, they have not managed to somehow infiltrate our global morals and conduct. If that is what you truly believe, I would venture that you only deem the lyrics unimportant when they already align with your existing thoughts and behaviour. Words that profess anything different will stand out to you immediately – only then will you notice them, and face the decision to either approve or reject them. In summary: the lyrics might very well be subordinate to the music, but they penetrate and influence our ideas and conduct nonetheless. And that most certainly deserves attention.

The fact that anybody can identify immediately with I/you songs has won this variant universal appeal. Teenage girls, for example, who wanted literally nothing more than to be adored by one of the Fab Four, transplanted themselves into the position of the I-figure in their songs and imagined one (or all four) of the boys, standing on that balcony or in the open window, listening to their serenade, ready to be seduced. For the girls who had the good fortune to see or hear The Beatles from close by, this inner conversion resulted in utter delirium. The already-married Lennon learned quickly: his entreaty of ‘Please please me’ on The Beatles’ second single of the same name (January 1963) was markedly better than McCartney’s plea in ‘Love me do’. After the recording, producer George Martin congratulated the boys on what he thought would be their first number-one hit. And he was right: the girls had understood, and were willing.

continued: Dylan & us: beyond America. 4: The unchanging (heterosexual) love song – part 2

Wouter’s book is only available in Dutch for now:

Dylan en wij zonder Amerika, Wouter van Oorschot | 9789044655179 | Boeken | bol

We will publish more chapters from it in English on Untold Dylan in the coming weeks

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