Why are there so many pro-stalker pop songs, anyway?

[james_davis_nicoll]

I'll give old-timey folk music a pass because people were stupider and more brutal in the past and if a man went from sunrise to sundown without slaughtering the neighbors to steal their cattle, partaking in a mob attack on the local minorities, burning down the local distillery while stealing a barrel of hard liquor and murdering his entire family while recovering from a hangover, he [1] was probably due to be nominated as a saint.

Modern people don't have the same excuse for backing the wrong side in their songs, so why is it there are so many songs about obsessive stalkers that make the stalker out to be the protagonist? As someone on rasfw pointed out, even when songs are written by people who have been stalked, like McLachlan's Possession, the song is told from the stalker's point of view. Why?




1: Almost all old timey song murderers are guys.

Comments

[snippy]

The stalker is empowered, the victim is powerless: who wants to sing (or hear) a song about being powerless?

[montrealais.livejournal.com]

Tori Amos (numerous, of which the harshest is "Me and a Gun"), Pet Shop Boys ("Can You Forgive Her," "The Theatre"), Pulp ("Common People"), New Order ("1963"), Bronski Beat ("Small Town Boy"), Oysterband ("Our Lady of the Bottles"), are a few examples off the top of my head.

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

Meh, plenty of people get off on the powerless victim perspective. There's an awful lot of porn out there that's all about displaying the woman's reactions without showing the man's face, and often her reactions are of pain rather than pleasure.

I think the question was more about why the stalker is a protagonist opposed to an antagonist (not why is the song about the stalker rather than the victim).

[daedala.livejournal.com]

Um, that _is_ the perpetrator's perspective.

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

Huh. Okay, point taken. In a filmed or photographed context it's the perpetrator's point-of-view.

At the same time, the subject matter is the feelings and reactions of the victim, which is what a song is about when it's from the victim's perspective.

In either case you aren't seeing inside the perpetrator's head, you're just getting to see the reactions (fear, pain, etc.) that he causes in the victim.

[vito-excalibur.livejournal.com]

Yeah - they're trying to put you in the perpetrator's head. Works, too.

That's the difference between textual art like song lyrics and visual art like porn and movies.