Is Romantic Love A Distraction?

Listen to virtually any song or artist and you will inevitably find that for the most part they’re all about one thing. Love. And this isn’t over generalizing. If we group sex into love, the number grows even more. Practically all songs are about sex, being in love, losing love, or wanting love.

There’s seems to be little to no data on the percentage of songs that are about love, aside from people on Yahoo answers and Quora asking why all songs are about love. This is probably good because statistics have a nice way of sucking the fun out of some things. Especially when those are things like love and art. The question becomes, why is all music about love? But first, why did this even occur to me as a question to ask? It was at some point after listening to hundreds of artists and thousands of songs during my work day that I noticed every song I listened to seemed to be about the same thing. I started to feel as if everyone writing these songs had all drank the same Kool-Aid (perhaps one with soma).

Photo by Varshesh Joshi on Unsplash

Love and sex. I began to wonder why no one could write a song about anything else. This made me think back to Brave New World, where the music in that society sings about love in a “care about love so you can’t care about anything else” kind of way. The book contains a song called “orgy porgy” that’s sung during a (you guessed it) orgy. Suddenly listening to popular music started to feel the same way. Why was everyone talking about love? And why so often that it seemed like they couldn’t care about anything else?

Because there was no data, I attempted to get a rough estimate of how many songs were in fact about love. I used the top ten song lyrics on Genius. Small sample size I know, but the resulting percentage is what I used to get an idea of what percentage of music is about love. But wait? Won’t that only show us what percentage of popular music is about love, and not necessarily all music? Yes, the results are biased towards popular music, but we’re not trying to build Rome here. Just prove a point.

So how many songs out of ten are about love? Seven. The top ten songs on Genius upon writing this article were:

• Psycho by Post Malone*
• God’s Plan by Drake*
• 44 More by Logic*
• Amorfoda by Bad Bunny*
• Hope by XXXTENTACION
• King’s Dead by Jay Rock, Kendrick Lamar, Future, and James Blake
• FRIENDS by Marshmello*
• Rewrite the Stars by Zac Efron*
• Next to Me by Imagine Dragons*
• Look Alive by BlocBoy JB

*Songs with mention of love or sex

So now we know that the vast majority of pop music is about love (and/or sex). Now what? Is that distracting? Likely yes, but for something to distract it has to have something else that it’s distracting us from. I think popular music could be distracting us from listening to “smarter” things. Songs that cause us to think and question the things around us. While I’m not suggesting music is mostly about love in a conspiratorial way, as if “the man doesn’t want music to make us think” [spoken with the drawl of a washed out Vietnam veteran], I’m sure I wouldn’t be the first.

Love triggers creativity.

Popular music is probably about love for the simple reason that it appeals to the lowest common denominator, and therefore, a large enough group of people can easily consume it so that it becomes “popular.” David Foster Wallace makes a similar point about movies and Hollywood in an interview that’s on YouTube somewhere. The most popular forms of media are the “dumbest” for the simple fact that they are the most accessible. The other reason is that writing music about love is surprisingly easy to do. Speaking from experience I can say that love triggers creativity. There’s probably a neurological reason behind this, but it doesn’t really matter. The fact is that most music is about love or sex, and this is distracting.

Now some people may insist that they don’t always feel like thinking, and they enjoy listening to music without having to care about the lyrics, and I can’t blame them. Too much thought can be a bad thing. We all need a break every now and again, but I would argue that as responsible primates we should take an extra bit of effort to seek art that helps us grow as opposed to stagnate. Certainly the emotive rhythmic aspect of music generally wins out over the intellectual. Otherwise, the best “songs” would simply be lectures with no “music” at all, and that wouldn’t be much fun for anyone. However, the best musicians find a way to make music objectively good both emotively and intellectually. Even classical music spurs creative thoughts., maybe even more so than music with lyrics come to think of it.

It’s more about vibrations, “frequency and sound” over words.

Erykah Badu in an interview with Vulture suggested that perhaps lyrics aren’t as important as they were in the past because today’s generation has such a short attention span that if a song or TV show moves too slowly they loose interest. It’s more about vibrations, “frequency and sound” over words. The rhythm and not the lyrics matters more now. Plus, in this age of Bluetooth speakers more often than not we listen to music while doing other things, so if those other things are sufficiently mentally taxing, it becomes a physical impossibility to focus on both the lyrics and the task at hand at the same time. This effectively makes frequency and sound, that emotive part of music, the only quality to judge music off of, but back to the task at hand. Does the fact that nearly all music is about love have some societal consequences? My guess is yes.

While there may be nothing wrong with elevating love to an ideal that must be sought at all costs, when sex is upheld as an ideal there are very obvious consequences. Now members of society seek sex instead of meaningful relationships and lots of people get their feelings hurt and their bodies objectified. Of course the sex topic has been mulled over countless times, but I’d like to suggest that elevating romantic love to an ideal has similar consequences, ones that are perhaps equally consequential.

I literally can’t live without you.

One of the first issues is that in song romantic love is often idealized in such a way that the person loving someone else often elevates that special someone in to an object of worship. Aside from this being blasphemous in religious circles, the real trouble here is that a person’s entire self worth is tied to one individual who may or may not reciprocate that desire for romantic worship. When this love is not reciprocated, people come to the conclusion that they should commit suicide. I literally can’t live without you.

Other people come to the conclusion that they were “meant to be” with their object of desire, and when that love is not reciprocated, rather than let it go and move on, decide to stalk that person. I’m not suggesting music directly causes people to stalk their ex-lovers, but it at least could play a subconscious role.

One artist that consciously rejects the notion of holding romantic love as an ideal is Moses Sumney. As he told The Guardian in an interview,

I don’t reject romantic love. I believe that it exists for some people, but some people will never have it and that can negatively manifest within you.

This idea can negatively affect people when they don’t find the romantic love that practically all popular music insists we should be pursuing and experiencing like everyone else. It implicitly tells people that they aren’t normal if they aren’t in love, which is obviously untrue, but this is conclusion isn’t always intuitive.

They can occupy all their mental and physical energy on romance, forgetting everything else.

Furthermore, the fact that music remains predominantly concerned with romantic love causes people to focus much more on this very exclusive form of love while distracting them from the more all-encompassing, altruistic form of love. If nothing matters more than romantic love, then once someone has found their romantic partner, their “love”, they no longer have to care about anything else. They can occupy all their mental and physical energy on romance, forgetting everything else. Returning to Brave New World once again, love can put us in a spell of sorts. As Lenina sings about her love,

Hug me till you drug me, honey;

Kiss me till I’m in a coma;

Hug me, honey, snuggly bunny;

Love’s as good as soma.

These lyrics, although they were written in the 1930’s, are reminiscent of a lot of pop songs. Here romantic love diverts all energy to itself. I have no issue with romantic love in principle, and it does society a lot of good. We just have to keep our priorities straight and make sure we extend this love to other aspects of our lives. We must let this feeling of being in love radiate out into altruistic as well as romantic love.

So is romantic love a distraction? The answer is that it doesn’t have to be. But it’s at least something we should keep in mind. Don’t let your love be narrow minded and don’t take the lyrics of your songs for granted. After all Stairway to Heaven is really about hell if you play it backwards, right?