Songs of Love 24: Love in the Future
As we’ve seen already many times, the love song is often profoundly interested in individual moments. Moments of change, or moments that seem to contain an entire relationship in miniature; some even find themselves trapped in a particular moment. Last time, we looked at a couple of the many love songs that are in some way concerned with ideas of disaster of apocalypse, which is by definition a decisive moment. This time, though, we have a couple of songs that do something broadly similar, but with a significant difference. These songs aren’t looking back on a moment, or experiencing it – they’re anticipating it. The decisive moment has yet to occur, although both songs seem to treat it as an inevitability. Both songs express a real confidence that this moment will occur, and that it will be earth-shattering in its importance, yet we might just as easily see this as a kind of deferment or procrastination, pushing the change out into the future so as not to deal with it.
A-Side
Performed by Sammy Davis Jr.
Written by Johnny Mercer
Released 1955
Sometimes the randomiser throws up some real coincidences. Like ‘Love Me as Though There Were No Tomorrow,’ from the last entry, this song is also featured in Fallout New Vegas, albeit in a different version, by Bing Crosby[1]. In this case, I actually knew the song (specifically this version) before playing the game, so for me at least it was a case of recognition rather than discovery. But it does throw up the question of why it was included in the game. ‘Love Me as Though There Were No Tomorrow’ plays into a mini trend of black humour in the games, putting songs vaguely referring to the idea of nuclear apocalypse into a post-apocalyptic world (see also the use of the Ink Spots’ ‘I Don’t Want to Set the World On Fire’ in Fallout 3). That sense of an anticipated disaster is far less present here, though. Rather, ‘Something’s Gotta Give’ looks forward to a future catalyst, a moment of irrevocable change.
And moreover, it doesn’t just conjure that catalyst as a possibility, but as an inevitability. There’s a sense of pleased expectation running throughout the song, an assumption that romantic entanglement is inevitable. “Somewhere, somehow, someone’s gonna be kissed,” the singer announces, and while the “somewhere” and the “somehow” are indeterminate, there’s a coyness to the “someone.” After all, it’s going to be one of two people.
But then those elements of indeterminacy and coyness get at something curious about the song: there’s a real passivity to it (not unlike ‘Kiss,’ though to different ends). The singer isn’t announcing their intention to make a move, or even necessarily their confidence that the object of their affection will come to them. Rather, they believe – they know – that something will happen. Which begs the question: what makes them so sure?
It’s the bridge that provides an answer: “Who knows what the Fates have in store/From their vast mysterious sky.” Like other songs that we’ve covered and will cover in the future, there’s a sense that love is ruled over by destiny. And so the singer, believing themself to have recognised the pattern of destiny, resigns themself to a change that they believe now must come to pass – and thus presumably will come to pass without any effort from them. It is, strangely enough, the stuff of Greek tragedy – once something is prophesied and thus fated, any action will only bring it closer. So why do anything at all?
Which seems distinctly pleasant: all the singer has to do is sit around and wait to be drawn together with the one they love. And yet there are repeated references to the idea that their mutual attraction is being resisted in some way. Even after referring to the idea of destiny, the singer affirms their intention to “try hard ignoring those lips I adore,” while a couple of lines later it seems that both individuals are going to “fight, fight, fight, fight, fight it with all of our might.” So perhaps we really aren’t all that far from Oedipus or Antigone. Which raises a further question: what’s the issue? Why fight and resist in this way?
A few possibilities suggest themselves. Perhaps this is another ‘The Dark End of the Street’ situation of forbidden attraction, with the two would-be lovers kept apart by some taboo or societal mandate[2]. Perhaps one or both of them are married or otherwise attached, and so there’s an element of temptation, which would certainly explain both the urge to resist and the seemingly inexorable draw between them. Or perhaps it’s simply a classic rom-com Much Ado About Nothing-style scenario involving two people who feel a deep dislike for each other, but are drawn together by some indescribable magnetism [3]. Whatever the case, we’ve seen this story before. Media is full of depictions of two people overcoming obstacles, some of them self-imposed, to be together: it accounts for at least one whole genre of fiction. And rarely has it been more economically summed up than in this song. No wonder it quickly found a life outside its original source material.
[1] And, like that song, it’s originally from a musical, though a far better-known one in this instance: Daddy Long Legs, from 1955. Incidentally, I’ve chosen the Sammy Davis Jr. version here not only because I like it better, but because I think the urgency of his delivery fits what I’m saying here better than Crosby’s gentler version.
[2] In the aforementioned original musical, there’s a significant age gap between the prospective lovers – Fred Astaire was 56 at the time of the film’s release and Leslie Caron 24 (though playing an 18-year-old). Combined with the pseudo-parental relationship between the pair, it’s enough to make a contemporary “your fave is problematic” Tiktokker’s head explode.
[3] There is in fact a 2003 rom-com directed by Nancy Myers and starring Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton called ‘Something’s Gotta Give’ with pretty much this premise.
B-Side
Performed by the Bangles
Written by Susanna Hoffs and Vicki Peterson
Released 1984
A lot of the B-sides we’ve seen in the course of these projects are, by necessity, about isolated individuals. Whatever their relationship to their former lover, whether they miss them or despise them, the fact that they’re alone is really the point. How gratifying, then, to come to a song that is almost the opposite: a song that is, in part, about togetherness and solidarity. Moreover, it centres on a uniquely powerful force, and one which is something of a darling for a certain flavour of popular culture: the power of a group of women teaming up against a scummy man who has, by inference, done them wrong.
I like to think of this as a sort of sequel to ‘He’s Got a Secret,’ from the same album. That song addresses someone whose lover seems inherently untrustworthy, darkly hinting (not especially subtly) that he has other lovers. When paired with this one, there’s a pleasing plot arc. The secret is unveiled, and the hero, a word here imbued with as much irony as humanly possible, consequently falls from grace. In fact, that’s the theme of the All Over the Place album – bad boyfriends commented upon from a place of knowledge, and hence of disdain. It could easily be dispiriting in its apparent jadedness, but there’s a sense of optimism to a song like this that cuts against that. Justice will prevail, it seems to suggest, and bad behaviour (“crimes”) will find its comeuppance (“judgement day” – the apocalyptic rhetoric calling us back faintly to the last entry).
But there’s a catch. The title of the song seems to suggest that the “fall” is ongoing, happening in the present of the song, but the actual text of the refrain is in a different tense: “I won’t feel bad at all/When the hero takes a fall.” There’s a confidence here that the man’s downfall is inevitable, to the point that the singer is planning her reaction. But there’s nothing in the song to suggest that it’s necessarily imminent. Are the “sycophants [1] […] chanting slogans at your door” at this exact moment, or is this a projected future event? “Here it comes, here it comes” the singer assures us (or rather, assures the man), but while the confidence is certainly infectious, it’s hard to know exactly how warranted it is. Just because something is deeply felt doesn’t make it true, even in a love song.
As B-sides go, then, this is an odd one. There’s a sense of triumph to it, even of optimism, which is a very far cry from the kind of dejection and isolation that we’ve seen in many songs that we’ve looked at. But it’s also suffused in another mode that we’ve seen many times: bitterness. A justified bitterness, we might say, but then it’s not hard to cloak personal venom in a righteous cause. There’s a schadenfreude to the way the song views the man’s downfall, which means this is far from being an A-side despite all that lovely solidarity and sense of justice. And so it ends up being another liminal song, like the ‘Days’/‘Make it Easy on Yourself’ entry. Yet another reminder, if it were needed, that love has a tendency to collapse our categories and even, at times, our ethics.
[1] Pronounced “psycho-phants” by Susanna Hoffs – it’s hard to know if this is a clever pun or a genuine slip-up resulting from her not knowing how to pronounce the word (though one would imagine someone present would have been able to correct the latter, and Hoffs did co-write the song, so presumably knew what she was doing).
