seventy-eight (theme: silly love song)

[amethysting.livejournal.com]

Come Into My World
Kylie Minogue
Fever
2001

Confession:
After hearing this song for the first time, I listened to it on non-stop repeat for the rest of the day.

This wasn't all that long ago.

I'm more embarrassed about the book I was reading at the time (*cough* something from the oeuvre of Sophie Kinsella *cough*), than my true and true love for Kylie Minogue.

Kylie is--to quote someone's description of Brandon Walsh--just wonderful. 

For a long time the only Kylie song I could identify was "Can't Get You Out of My Head"--a song I found mildly irritating, but also gravitated towards rather guiltily.  I knew that she covered Little Eva's "The Loco-motion" in the 80s--a song Tina, her little sister and I danced to in her cool, unfinished basement on hot summer afternoons.  When I was on that Contiki bus for a month during the fall of 2005, Kylie was an oft-mentioned topic.  She was undergoing treatment for breast cancer and the Australians on the bus kept up with news about "our Kylie".  Their genuine concern for her well-being and the way they claimed her as "theirs" piqued my curiosity. 

A few years later I happened to see the music video for "2 Hearts" (a contender for my "silly love song") on the kitchen TV that had been left on and abandoned.  A platnium-blonde Kylie sings into a rhinestone-covered skull-shaped microphone draped over a grand piano, her red-soled Christian Louboutins kicked up in the air.  I was stock-still mesmerized.  And--what was surprising to myself at the time--I was impressed. 

Kylie's tenth album, X was my gateway drug.  I loved (and love) that entire album.  I gave myself over to it completely.  I remember listening to "Nu-di-ty" and "The One" (a song that still breaks my heart) on an Underground platform in London when I was there in the spring of 2008.  Not unlike Madonna, I admire Kylie's projection of towering self-confidence and how comfortable she is with being...sexy. 

I don't know what made "Come Into My World" stick with me so intensely the first time I heard it.  I do know that there is something about that infectious dance-disco beat combined with simple sappy love-letter lyrics that I LOVE and will defend to the death.  I know that something like:

Take these lips that were made for kissing
And this heart that will see you through
And these hands that were made to touch and feel you

is pretty cheesy, but I just don't care.  It is a perfect pop confection, but it isn't hollow (like a disappointing bunny-mold Easter chocolate)--it still manages to affect me.  Its as much a part of my musical make-up as any of the other songs I've shared before it.

I need your love
Like night needs morning <3

seventy-eight. [THEME: silly love songs]

[cabaretlights.livejournal.com]

Cold Water Symmetry
Artist: Fiction Plane
Album: Left Side of the Brain
Year: 2007
♥: I'm surprised at how difficult this theme was for me, especially given my tendency to wax about love songs on non-theme weeks. But, as always, the moment in this comm is key. Initially I thought I'd take advantage of "silly" to post one of those ridiculous female pop stars I'm only a little embarrassed of listening to. In the process of listening to all those silly love songs, though, I found myself getting increasingly frustrated. Most days, most weeks, I can stand them -- not only that, I kind of guilty-pleasure-love them. But this week, none of them were right. And I worried I was letting this theme slip away without using it "properly" -- strange how that can still happen after a year and a half, huh?

Fiction Plane is Britrock fronted by Sting's son (Joe Sumner), and I picked up this album based entirely on the cover art, back in July '07. I was working at Babies R Us and would frequently pop by Future Shop on my lunch break. For a couple weeks, I kept being drawn to this album...until I finally shelled out the $10 and, sound unheard, popped it into the car I had before Lexy (my dad's blue BMW 735). And -- in one of those experiences you can only get when buying a physical, hard-copy CD with no idea what you're getting yourself into -- I fell in love; listened to it constantly; danced in the car. Listening to Fiction Plane brings me right back to that time, which -- as I've mentioned in other posts -- is generally an emotional deadzone for me. But somehow, I remembered this album a few weeks ago, and was absolutely shocked at how much emotional memory came back to me.

Love is a rough concept for me, and one which I'll probably be defining for the rest of my life. In the spirit of our 'asparagus love' conversation, I'm not sure there can ever be a common experience of love -- not only between relationship types, but between people, and between moments. Love is transformative, but that doesn't mean it itself is static...probably, it means the opposite. Love shifts, warps, twists, slides, moves, seeps into cracks and creates holes. This week, I can't post a silly love song because right now, I'm eminently aware of how unsilly love actually is (but, as love shifts, so do my thoughts on it: had this theme come earlier or later, who knows what I would be posting). And the love song is a big deal. You come back to your favourites; they shape your concepts of what real-life love can be. And since I've never really believed that love can just be roses and sunshine (well, all the time, anyway), a song about love being roses and sunshine just wouldn't be right.

"Cold Water Symmetry" -- my favourite song on Left Side of the Brain -- is absolutely a love song, but it's not a silly one. It's an honest one, with a little bit of how love can devastate:
Love is an angel that smokes cigarettes
She's trying to kill me / I can only say yes

how love can consume:
I can't leave you behind, you live in my mind
Cast out on the silver sea

how love can be distracting, how it can be everything you need:
All the baby spiders fill my heart with dread
I need no science in your arms

There's no such thing as silly love, I don't think, and I realize it more and more every day. Love eats its victims even as it exalts them. And in Joe Sumner's voice, and in the aching guitar line of "Cold Water Symmetry"'s melody, and in the core of this song: that conflict is captured beautifully. Not a silly love song, but a gorgeous one -- if the listener can take the honesty.