On Wednesday, October 1, 2014 at a quarter after seven, the
Greenville College Blackroom was filled with fog, loud music, and excited
college students, just waiting for the show to begin. When the first band, LED, took the stage, the
audience crowded close to the stage, not wanting to miss a single word, despite
the speakers blasting throughout the room.
As they began playing through their set, I casually noted that each of
the four songs they played seemed to be a sort of love song. Being a self-proclaimed hopeless romantic,
however, I thought nothing of it at first, simply enjoying their sound and
getting lost in the music. Once the
second band, Nick Bifano and the Innocents, started playing, I noticed that
while their style was very different from LED, the topic was much the
same. Again, we heard a set consisting
of songs mostly about love.
In a society so focused on being in a relationship, I
suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that so many songs being written and sold are
of the romantic variety. They tend to be
some of the easier ones to write as many people have experience with relationships,
both good and bad, and they are easy to sell because everyone can relate to
what they are talking about. Even those
like myself who have never had a “significant other” can find connections
between the lyrics and other types of relationships, or, if nothing else, the
longing for a relationship like the song speaks of.
Perhaps it is the vast array of styles these songs can take
on. There are softer melodies, mournful
tunes, angry choruses, and so on. There
is almost no limit to the form a love song can take, so long as it tells the
right kind of story. In a way, these
songs have become the “lullaby” for our generation. Those who listen to music when going to bed
listen to these crooning melodies to fall asleep. Also, the lyrics of many of these songs are
known by thousands of young people all around the world, much like lullabies
were to our parents. (This is not to say
that the only music our parents listened to were lullabies, nor that the only
music any of us listen to are love songs.)
Even so, there are a multitude of other topics that songs
could be written about, so why is it that love songs tend to be so popular
among our society?
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