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

[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.