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

[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.