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

[radargrrl.livejournal.com]

Same with the Turtles' 'Happy Together'.

[penguin2.livejournal.com]

Come again? I grew up with that song; I know the full lyrics; and no, there's nothing in Happy Together apart from a (fictional, but typical) young man's harmlessly infatuated daydreams. To tar it with the brush of stalkerishness is to trivialise the real act of stalking IMO.

For generations beyond counting, young women have similarly obsessed about the male objects of their fancies - writing imagined marriage-changed surnames over and over in copybooks, sharing what-if fantasies with their friends - is this lame but totally normal behaviour any different, mmm?

Most or at least very many pop lyrics are about courtship rituals. More than that, they're about hope. People dream about wishes and desires. It's no more sinister than that.

[radargrrl.livejournal.com]

I don't remember exactly where I heard it...most likely the CBC's old show Prime Time, I think...but it was an interview with the guy who wrote it, not my own interpretation.

[penguin2.livejournal.com]

Ah. Well, the original inspiration for a song doesn't necessarily come through in the finished lyric (trust me, I was a career songwriter), and certainly didn't there.

Besides, everyone knows that creative artists are toto loco. Can't trust them buggers to tell the truth :P

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

Right. Sting himself said the song is from the viewpoint of a stalker. Don't forget that this is the guy who starred in the remake 'Brimstone and Treacle', played Feyd-Rautha, etc.

[daev.livejournal.com]

Sting didn't write "Happy Together."

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

That's my reaction too, about the inclusion here of "Happy Together," which the Turtles released when I was 20. However, as I say the lyrics to myself, I can imagine them being said by an obsessed stalker. But the way the song was sung, it never would have occurred to me.

[nexstarman.livejournal.com]

Same as 'You Are My Sunshine'.

[radargrrl.livejournal.com]

See...there you go. I wasn't aware of that one.

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

I don't find that one stalkerish... maybe a little codependent, as '90s psychobabble would have it, but then most love songs are.

Or are you being sarcastic? ^^

[dhole.livejournal.com]

The chorus is a little codependent; the lyrics are a bit more problematic.

Mainly these lines:

But if you leave me
To love another
You'll regret it all some day,

and

You told me once, dear
You really loved me
And no one else could come between
But now you've left me
And love another
You have shattered all my dreams.

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

Aaah, I didn't know the later verses.

[nexstarman.livejournal.com]

It's on the 'O Brother Where Art Thou' album, and listening to the later verses I started to think, 'Uh...'

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

I forgot about that.

[jamesenge.livejournal.com]

You don't get to be sad that someone left you anymore? Seems a tad judgemental.

[errolwi.livejournal.com]

Those are things that a stalker might say. They are also things that a non-stalker might say, as honest belief/statement of feelings, not intended as a threat.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I can see stalker possibilities in the first quotation, but the second one sounds to me like plain ol' heartbreak.