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

[tangaroa.livejournal.com]

I was going to mention the The Reel Big Fish's Skatanic and The Offspring's Special Delivery as two such songs mocking the first-person stalker, and hey, I just did. Both songs present the stalker as a dangerous nutcase.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, STP's Sex Type Thing goes past "stalker" and seems to be "yay for rape". I don't sense irony in that song when I listen to it. It's more like a slice of a rapist's mind presented as art without the kind of social commentary that the Fish and the Offspring like to do.

[paraleipsis.livejournal.com]

Death Cab's "I Will Possess Your Heart" is another deliberate takeoff on the first-person stalker song--which I mistook for just another actual stalker song the first time I heard some part of it. I imagine that pop songs with unreliable narrators must be sort of tricky to write, since a lot of people will half-hear them in the car or what-have-you and not necessarily follow carefully enough to see what you did thar.

[montrealais.livejournal.com]

This is true, and Wayne Studer of "Pet Shop Boys Song-by-Song Commentary" sees this as one of the things the Boys did to commit career suicide in the US: people heard songs like "Opportunities" and "Shopping," assumed the songs were serious rather than sardonic, saw the Boys as cynical, heartless triviality incarnate, and rejected them.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

I got irony from "Sex Type Thing" only because it was so completely cliche. The lyric "you shouldn't have worn that dress" is a line straight out of decades-old movies. On the other hand, STP always seemed to be either ambiguous or on the side of the disturbed protagonist, not just in "Sex Type Thing" but "Creep" and "Plush".

Grunge seemed to have a whole subgenre of songs dedicated to sexual violence, which was a disturbing trend.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

They Might Be Giants have done a bunch of these, about men who range from simple shy geeks with fantasy crushes to full-on crazy stalkers, with some ambiguity in the middle. Now that I think about it, when John Linnell writes these the protagonist is generally crazier and the implied authorial position is more obviously contemptuous ("I'm Your Boyfriend Now", "I'm All You Can Think About"), but John Flansburgh is more sympathetic, while still perhaps implying that the dude is not quite right in the head ("Sleeping In The Flowers", "If I Wasn't Shy"). ...Or maybe it's just that those Flansburgh songs are older and he was younger when he wrote them. But they're always from the guy's POV.