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Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Of Lullabies and Love Songs


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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