I found an error in Ted Gioia’s new history of love songs. It’s late in this 336-page book, when he mentions that Simon and Garfunkel gave their 1968 hit “Mrs. Robinson” to the movie soundtrack for The Graduate. As it happens, the adulterous Mrs. Robinson was first a character in the 1967 movie, and the little koo-koo-ka-choo filler they composed for her they developed into a full song only after the movie’s success.
It’s telling that one has to go this deep into the text, and descend to this level of trivia, to find much wrong with Gioia’s assessment. Love Songs is the definitive work on the topic—and like all comprehensive and topic-establishing texts, the fun comes in taking the author’s work as the new “given,” the added premise, from which we have to proceed in all our thinking about art and culture—about music, in this case, and sex. Ted Gioia has reached behind Freud and Darwin, behind psychology and evolutionary biology, to suggest that the inherent structures of art are what shape experience.
The love song invents love, in other words. The seduction song guides the encounter it describes. The sex song forms the expectations we have of sex. Before music, there was certainly brute rutting; but after song, there was tenderness, awkwardness, unrequited longing, fulfilled dreams, broken hearts, and the Beatles singing, “I want to hold your hand.” Karen Carpenter bubbling, “I’m on the top of the world, looking down on creation.” Rascal Flatts moaning their way through “What Hurts the Most.” Bing Crosby charming his way through “Love Is Just Around the Corner.” And Ted Gioia working his way systematically through it all.
Not that Gioia is loud about such things. As a Roman Catholic and (mostly apolitical) conservative working in an art world that has resolutely turned against both Catholicism and conservatism, he has nonetheless carved out a niche for himself as a popular scholar of music, particularly with his acclaimed standard, The History of Jazz (1997). In Love Songs, he genuflects toward current scientific preferences with an opening discussion of how even birds do it, this evolutionary mating-call thing, and he saves himself a world of hurt by nodding toward current academics in ascribing the general origin of love songs to the marginalized, outcast, and oppressed.
Still, he captures the essential, almost Straussian, political point in it all, for history shows love songs consistently occupying a curious middle ground in culture. On the one hand, they are instruments for rebellious impulse: They push against manners, social control, and political power in the name of an emotion so strong, they claim, that it cannot be constrained. On the other hand, the songs themselves are constrained—and constraining. Love songs domesticate sex. They bring it under control and reform it into love by putting it in an intelligible and useful frame.
The result is that, to any one culture, love songs will seem radical and dangerous, taking exciting risks in edging up to the edge of taboo. To the sum of culture, however, love songs have proved profoundly conservative: They make civilization itself possible, and they reshape some of the worst of human impulses into some of the best. “The history of the love song is also the history of the repression of the love song,” Gioia writes. And yet, the love song has also successfully provided “the legitimization of romantic longing.”
The artists of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance—the troubadours, Provençal poets, madrigal writers, and, especially, Petrarch—are usually given credit for inventing what we think of as the modern love song of Western culture. Gioia points out, however, the oddity of that kind of romance, in which men sing of themselves as slaves, chained in bondage by their passion. The refreshing of Europe through the return of classical learning certainly helped the genre develop: The Renaissance love song doesn’t happen without the examples of Catullus, Propertius, and Ovid returning to cultural awareness.
And yet, Gioia notes, an even greater influence came from actual slaves. The qiyan, enslaved women performers in the Arab and Muslim worlds, converted their bondage into tales of love, the heart enslaved in sexual thrall. And, thereby, they taught even their masters to sing of love as slavery. The music spread through the Muslim presence in Spain and, from there, into Provence and eventually the rest of Europe.
The influence of slaves on the American love song shows the same pattern. The European musical traditions were enriched with repeated borrowings from the marginalized culture. The mixing of Methodist hymns, British regional songs, and slave spirituals would produce what we think of as American folk music. (“Greensleeves,” Gioia suggests, may have begun as a ditty about prostitutes.) It appeared again in the birth of jazz. And yet a third time in the creation of rock ’n’ roll. Each has its songs about love—and each has its love songs expressed in terms of bondage and the enthralled heart.
Sex is both necessary and dangerous to civilization, and the role of sex in art has always been the simultaneous taming and enflaming of the dangerous elements. With the high risks of sex decreased by the Pill and the dissolution of the old chastities of the marriage system, the play with danger has had to reach far out into the exotic. But the love song was always there, at least metaphorically. When the Allman Brothers sang about being “tied to the whipping post” in 1969, they were just crossing the “t”s and dotting the “i”s.
As it happens, in that same song, the Allmans add, “Good Lord, I feel like I’m dying.” I would have liked to have seen more from Ted Gioia on love in the love song as expressing the extra-bodily, equating fulfillment with the petite mort, and intermingling agape, eros, and philia.
To mock biblical commentators for failing to read “Song of Songs” as sexually driven love lyrics is easy—and wrong. For something in that text genuinely does drive toward the supernatural, and the metaphors of song, even love songs, derive from unexpected roots and issue unexpected fruit. Actual slavery lurks just outside the frame on one side, and God lurks just outside the frame on the other side.
With Love Songs, Ted Gioia has completed the trilogy that began with the publication in 2006 of both Work Songs and Healing Songs. In each case, what he has provided is the standard account of a genre and grist for any contemplation of art and its cultural roles. In the inner rooms of a Sumerian temple, the priestesses were singing sex songs and the king would leave the temple with their song on his lips. It’s not much of a step from there to understanding that love songs are deep down at the root of culture, and any account of the birth of civilization has to include their pervasive, seductive, dangerous, and pacifying effect.
“I feel it in my fingers,” as the Troggs once put it, “I feel it in my toes.”
Joseph Bottum is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
