“Sukiyaki” (Kyu Sakamoto)

Originally entitled “I Look Up When I Walk,” singer answers loneliness by preventing the spilling of tears. Walking (in winter) “beyond” the clouds and sky and avoiding the “shadow” of night, the problem of feeling “alone” is that it must have its origins in the familial/familiar; by having the eyes serve as bowls, truly, the prismatic effect of looking through tears possibly allows access to “happiness,” but this can only come about through willful delusion. As the biggest hit by a Japanese act in America (number one in between Leslie Gore’s “It’s My Party” and The Essex’s “Easier Said than Done”), this is the sweet stew(ing) produced by the tether of (ascetic) love.

“Exit Does Not Exist” (Modest Mouse)

The whole problem with love is that it must have a sustained temporality and be dated simultaneously (located, engaged with, bound). Lover’s exhaustion in the face of singer’s insistence on documentation and verification contends that lovers never “do” anything really. Hence, loving the other has no otherwise.

“I Cover the Waterfront” (Connee Boswell)

Max Miller’s wonderful insider memoir of San Diego newspaper reporting is turned to song in 1933, but utterly repurposed. At first, it seems a conventional love trax: waiting at the docks for the beloved to sail into port. But something isn’t right: why doesn’t he write, and let her know which boat he’ll be on, and what day and time? Why the need to watch the whole of the sea and its shore continuously? There’s a certain misanthropy at work here (“away from the city that hurts and mocks”) as well as a lurking, water elementalism. Indeed, we’re in close temporal promixity to H. P. Lovecraft’s “Shadow Over Innsmouth,” written in 1931: “Some frightful influence, I felt, was seeking gradually to drag me out of the sane world of wholesome life into unnamable abysses of blackness and alienage” among “great watery spaces.” “I’m covered by a starless sky above,” the singer laments, and “I see the horizon, the great unknown.” The last chorus is sung the most forcefully, however, as she begins to assert her rightful place at the edge of posthumanist cosmology.

“Chances Are” (Johnny Mathis)

With(holding). Ominous, wide vibrato reinforces singer’s ability to control the appearance/timing of chance. The doubled governance (and omission)—”chances are your chances are awfully good”—holds the lover at bay. Suggestive hypnosis and (tepid) confirmation lyrical structure re-routes desire across smoothed out, gendered landscape: laying down some serious pavement.

“The Book of Love” (The Monotones)

Our collective love life appears to be determined and bracketed–bound between the covers of a book. It’s just the same old story, really, and we’re all a terrible, sad cliché. Who wrote us, and is the author “someone from above” us? Where is the missing or hidden ur-text, so that we might read it? And finally, “why” is it this book “true” (why am I subject to it)? Seeking answers, by song’s end the sextet peruse the book and forecast that their romances will end happily, as all things must, for lovers, in the genre of the romance. (Breakups are merely plot points in Chapter Four—difficulties to be overcome for purposes of readerly pleasure.) This conventionally happy news, however, cannot cover over the fact that the “who” and “why” questions remain fundamentally unanswered, and that our fate is to remain embedded as type. Let’s assume, then, that no one wrote “The Book of Love,” and for no good reason. And let’s register the dead-stop/single-drumbeat signature in the chorus as a sign of reading interrupted, a break in the question, a Zen-like whack to the skull with a massive tome. C’thunk.

“Refrain” (Lys Assia)

Is the “refrain” in the repetition, the singularity of the melody, or the repression of impatience? A bit of all, to tell the truth. As the first Eurovision Song Contest winner (1956), it’s a way to understand Europe’s sense of being at a particular moment. But it’s not a European song inasmuch as a Swiss song in French, which beat out the German Swiss song. This descent down the location ladder is challenged by the inversely proportional desire to sing particularly (here, of an experience), setting up the trax’s loop: the proper way of being and comportment writ large must be miniaturized in order to be magnified. The chanteuse sings in the present to the love of her youth, noting a sense of mutual maturity while lamenting what’s been lost. Instead of melancholy in which what has been lost must eventually disappear into a generalized longing, this could be taken as a desire to differ from one’s self—a need to retain previous identities to register one’s difference from them. What matters is a promise to decide, continually, on the promise of such difference.

“Unlimited Capacity for Love” (Grace Jones)

After the loving community—an insomnia-induced incarnation desiring a prenuptial agreement for inclusion—hits the “floor,” singer wonders how one can “add another to love” without inheriting “classic” community’s exclusions. Lacerating kick drum and staccato descending bass figure point the way, repeatedly; it’s the rest/pause which can admit the rest of us (without worrying about dividends). In the reverse: apart from “hope” and “without pressured expense,” one should only fret about how to expend love without short-changing.

“Nature Boy” (Nat King Cole)

Written in the 1940s by legendary proto-hippy Eden Ahbez (“ahbe,” to friends), who, according to Joe Romersa, much later disputed his own final, key lines (“The greatest thing you’ll ever learn/Is Just to love/And be loved in return”), arguing, “To be loved in return is too much of a deal, and that has nothing to do with love.” Doubled/echoing structure of this track, as well as other versions (Jon Hassell’s comes to mind), is therefore too safe and cozy. That is: love, to be love, should not be subjected to economic calculus, exchange, “return,” and must instead approach the (impossible/singular) limit that is the gift. (Again, that is: to be done with “fools and kings,” one needs first to interrogate the final law of Beatledom: “The love you take is equal to the love you make.”)

“Members Only” (Bobby “Blue” Bland)

A ceremony for the love-less desert of relations. Whether you’re “red or yellow, black or white,” you’re already a member of the “party” constituted through loss. Never melancholic, and a dirge that’s only for “tonight.” The swaying and swooning before, via Nancy, letting love’s movement call to thought through its lack (and excess) of completion.

“(You’re My) Soul and Inspiration” (Righteous Brothers)

If, one day, space aliens ponder the history of histrionic, twentieth-century love songs, they will wonder whether the Anglo-American world went completely mad in the postwar period. Boys particularly seem to have been in some form of competition to claim the most complete and greatest love of all, and oftentimes it got pretty squirrelly. Listen to the Righteous Brothers claim: “Without you, baby, what good am I?/You’re my reason for laughing/For crying, for living, and for dying.” Huh? You’re my reason for dying? Is this what a girl wants to hear? Let’s start by doubting this claim: in the first place, no one has a reason for dying. In fact, it’s entirely unreasonable and quite mad that we start dying on the day of our birth. You can’t choose it. No one ever wished to be born. (Or, if you’re in an emo mood, you might cheat and claim your parents as your reason for dying, but, remember: they weren’t acting reasonably when they conceived you.) So perhaps the love-struck Brothers Righteous are saying: you’re the only reason I continue with this suffering called life. Yes, “you’re my reason for living.” Without you, in other words, I’ll kill myself. Again, just what a girl wants to hear. Now she’s been made hyper-responsible for the continued existence of this big lump on the couch. So as soon as you hear a boy break into song, don’t try to be reasonable. Laugh.