Songs of Love 22: Love as Mirror
Love changes people – or, if you prefer, it reveals them. Some people, when they fall in love, become more open and generous, while others turn inwards and become selfish and narcissistic. It can reveal the world to you, or it can narrow your world to just your lover. Which it ends up being depends, perhaps, on the people involved – their respective outlooks, personalities, principles et al. The B-Side here is very much a bitter narrowing of the world (though, as we’ll see, it needn’t be), while the A-Side is based around empathy and devotion (though that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s no narrowing of the world going on here). These songs make for a good reminder that this sort of thing is never entirely simple, that people contain multitudes and so do relationships. And songs, for that matter.
A-Side
Performed by the Velvet Underground
Written by Lou Reed
Released 1967
To be in love with someone is often, at least initially, to idealise them. The longer you spend in love, the more this idealised vision will blend with the reality of who they are, but still, we tend to associate infatuation with smoothing out your beloved’s flaws, making a perfect angel of them. Of course, that results in an inaccurate picture of who they are, objectively speaking. But then again, how many people have a really accurate picture of themselves? Many people undervalue themselves, or think of their flaws as magnified, for all sorts of reasons. So in fact the idealised vision that love brings can be quite helpful to balance that out. To let someone see the best of themselves, rather than just the worst.
It’s an idea that’s simultaneously romantic and practical, and one with great appeal. So it’s not a shock that it would be at the heart of a song that, to my mind, is one of the most beautiful sentiments of love of any kind out there [1]. I honestly think there are few more romantic statements in all of popular music than “please put down your hands/’Cause I see you,” with its sense of tenderness and empathy. That idea of reaching out to someone who believes themselves repellent resonates through a lot of popular culture, bringing to mind outsiders like the Beast (the fairy tale one, not the guy from The Chase) or the Phantom of the Opera (who, in the stage musical, is first seen through a mirror, funnily enough).
In those two examples, we have a beautiful young woman reaching out to the man who lives on the outskirts of society in one sense or another, just as this song is sung by a woman. And that idea of extending kindness and understanding does tend, popularly, to be gendered, where women are the ones offering the empathy – doing the emotional labour, we might say. But it’s complicated in this case by the fact that the song was written by a man [2]. We can associate the sentiment here with both Nico and Lou Reed simultaneously, rendering it ungendered and more of an abstract ideal. After all, a healthy romantic relationship is based on reciprocal roles.
The song is based around the idea of the lover as a mirror, a way to reflect back one’s true self, devoid of self-deprecating illusions. But alongside this, it is also full of images of darkness and light. The former stands in for the lover’s self-image, but also for a kind of interior darkness with which they associate themselves – “when you think the night has seen your mind.” Meanwhile, the singer’s idea of them is associated with light, a homely light – “the light on your door.” Darkness is not an entity in itself, of course; it obscures what’s there, while light reveals it, and while they’re often figured, in true Kingdom Hearts style, as metaphysical opposites (and there is a touch of that here), darkness is no more than the absence of light. So while the song is playing with that idea of the singer as a sort of angelic presence, it’s also telling us that the lover’s self-image is simply wrong, shrouded as it is in an obscuring darkness.
There are also, on a similar note, recurring images of seeing and of blindness scattered throughout the song. Again, the sense is that the singer is alive to what is really there, whereas the lover isn’t. But perhaps the most revealing of these is the one I quoted earlier: “please put down your hands.” The lover’s hands here are another obscuring force, but for whom? Their hands may form a protective barrier between them and the world so that they can’t be seen, but they may also just be covering their own eyes. Either way, they can’t see what’s around them. So there’s a strong suggestion here that the singer is not only correcting the lover’s self-image, but also awakening them to the world around them. It’s easy to see yourself in this if you’ve ever had a loved one with mental health problems, who seems unable to see what’s around them. All you want to do is take them by the hand and show them around. Starting with a mirror.
And there’s more to this idea of revealing the whole world. As well as the mirror and the light, the singer also wants to be “the wind, the rain and the sunset.” In other words, the whole of the natural world, which in true Romantic fashion, can stand in for love itself – untameable and glorious. But then there’s also a suggestion that the singer wants to become the lover’s whole world. Perhaps there’s a contradiction here – do they want to reveal the world as it truly is, or wrap the lover up in comforting solipsistic illusion? If it’s the latter, the song certainly takes on a darker aspect, albeit one that I don’t particularly see in it – I tend to see this as the one true shaft of light on the otherwise bleak The Velvet Underground and Nico [3]. Either way, though, this is fundamentally a song about devotion and selflessness, whether or not we think that extends to obsession. It’s about giving of oneself to help another person out. And I don’t feel inclined to be particularly hard or cynical about that.
[1] And I’m not alone. Judging from his letters, the teenage Morrissey was a big fan of this song, which I think you can see in a lot of his writing – as we’ve covered here before, he’s fond of the achingly romantic and idealised himself. The difference being, of course, that he really is “twisted and unkind” these days.
[2] A man with a complex relationship to gender and sexuality, no less, bisexual and with both an artistic and a romantic fascination with trans women – way beyond the scope of this post to unpack, but a further complication.
[3] ‘Sunday Morning’ sounds peaceful, but its lyrics suggest a deep sense of dissatisfaction, a sentiment carried throughout most of the album in various ways – the masochism of ‘Venus in Furs,’ the addiction of ‘Heroin’ and (implicitly) ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’ and the general sense of dislocation at the heart of ‘Run Run Run’ and ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties.’
B-Side
Performed by Red Hot Chili Peppers
Written by Anthony Kiedis, Flea, John Frusciante and Chad Smith
Released 1991
It’s very easy to malign the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
In a 2006 interview, Nick Cave famously said “I’m forever near a stereo saying ‘What the fuck is this garbage?’ And the answer is always the Red Hot Chili Peppers.” While Cave has since expressed his regret for the comment, it seems almost certain that the devastating putdown is going to far outlive the more recent statement of appreciation for Flea in the cultural record. More recently, there’s emerged a trend of memes making fun of Anthony Kiedis’s lyrics – many of which are, it must be said, extremely stupid, though at least sometimes gloriously so. To be fair to Kiedis, it’s not as if he’s generally aiming for heartrending cri de coeur. And yet sometimes, especially in the earlier part of their career, you get a song of surprisingly emotional intensity. Like this one, trapped between the sexually aggressive ‘Suck My Kiss’ and the delightful funk nonsense of ‘Mellowship Slinky in B Major,’ which is about as good a symbol of the Chili Peppers’ career as there is.
‘I Could Have Lied’ allegedly charts Kiedis’s attraction to Sinéad O’Connor, here figured as a kind of unattainable femme fatale. Kiedis, in his (perhaps surprisingly) reflective autobiography, talks about them as having had a brief relationship which she suddenly broke off (which O’Connor flatly denied when asked in interviews), causing him to record this song and post the cassette through her door. I’m inclined to believe that last part at least, for one simple reason: if ever there was a song that sounds like it was recorded in the depths of heartbreak to be shoved through someone’s letterbox, it’s this one.
Last time, we talked about first lines setting the tone for the song to come. “There must be something in the way I feel/That she don’t want me to feel” certainly does that, with its tone of obscure blame and self-pity. There’s an implication that the singer’s feelings are inconvenient or otherwise undesirable to their beloved. There’s a stubbornness to this, the singer proudly standing by those feelings: “I could never change just what I feel/My face could never show what is not real.” A self-conscious sincerity, then, is the order of the day – “the things I said to you were true”[1]. Moreover, there’s an accusation that the beloved can’t say this, that she’s running from the truth of her own feelings: “You see she hides ’cause she is scared.” The chorus then goes on to lament that the singer was unable to keep their feelings to themself It’s all vaguely adolescent in its wounded self-righteousness.
And there’s undeniably a power to that. From a clinical distance, we might be tempted to see a song like this as cringeworthy in its sincerity, or even to raise valid concerns about misogyny – there is a touch of the incel to this idea of the distant woman turning down the man’s precious feelings, after all. But we don’t experience songs from a clinical distance. There’s a deep sense of unfairness to unrequited love, and as ugly as that feeling might become, it’s a powerful one that’s difficult to deny. And this song speaks to that feeling in its own language.
That’s not to say there aren’t other possible approaches, though. In fact, we have one on the very same album, albeit dealing with a different kind of situation. ‘Breaking the Girl’ is a song of self-criticism based around a seemingly inevitable breakup – “the twilight of love.” And what’s notable here is the kind of empathy that’s largely lacking in ‘I Could Have Lied,’ which is a song of projection; here, there’s a definite sense of how the “girl” is being harmed, complete with attempts to psychoanalyse her “She was the girl, left alone/Feeling the need to make me her home.” More pointedly, the song even comments on inherited ideas of toxic masculinity in its second verse, drawn from Kiedis’s bizarre adolescence with his drug-dealing father: “Raised by my dad, girl of the day/He was my man, that was the way.” So there’s a clear implication here that the singer has internalised harmful ideas that prevent him from forming a meaningful bond with a woman. It’s still far from the most cerebral or philosophical of songs, but there’s a genuine thoughtfulness on display here. It’s also less visceral than the indulgence of ‘I Could Have Lied,’ though. And really, we need both in art – the clear-headed self-criticism, but also the indulgent complaints about someone who won’t return your feelings. Because both contain an emotional truth.
[1] Most of the song refers to a third-person “she,” but this verse slips into the second-person. It’s tempting to think that this betrays the song’s origins in Sinéad O’Connor’s letterbox, but we might also think of the kind of slippage between the abstract and the direct that we saw in something like ‘Last Goodbye.’
