https://www.commentarymagazine.com/artic...songs-rip/
EXCERPT: Most pop songs are about love. So are most classical art songs. So are most folk songs. [...] Since the range of possibilities for human action extends far beyond the compass of love, sex, and marriage, why should the representation of these three activities have preoccupied songwriters of all kinds? Ted Gioia, a music historian and sometime jazz pianist, addresses this question and others related to it in his latest book, Love Songs: The Hidden History. [...] Gioia shows that song lyrics about love, sex, marriage, and fertility can be traced all the way back to the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians, and that once Jewish and Christian religious leaders came to terms with the iron determination of their own people to write and sing about romantic love, it quickly emerged as the dominant subject matter of Western popular music. This tendency became overwhelming in 20th-century America.
[...] To the extent that any one form of music can lay a meaningful claim to primacy in America’s fissiparous popular culture, that position is now held by rap, whose creators, most of whom are black, take an even more jaundiced view of romantic love than did the blues singers of the pre-rock era. Rap and rap-flavored pop songs are typically about sex, not love, and most of them are written and sung by men who portray the women whom they covet not in an idealized way but as objects of lust and violence.
[...] It is no coincidence that today’s songs should appeal so strongly not merely to black listeners but to the younger public at large. The millennial generation, after all, has grown up in the aftermath of the sexual revolution of the ’60s and ’70s. In 1935, the U.S. divorce rate was 17 percent. In 1985, it was 50 percent. Today it is declining—but so, too, is the marriage rate, for whites as well as blacks. Millennials of all races live in an increasingly post-marital world in which it is taken for granted that men and women will “hook up” without any pretense of intimacy. [...] they [...] appear to view marriage not as a sacrament into which one enters with the reasonable expectation of permanency but as an arrangement subject to dissolution at the whim of either party. And while college-educated millennials who marry take a relatively conventional view of how best to rear the children of their union, this view is no longer widely shared further down the socioeconomic ladder, where single parenting is the new norm.
[...] in such a culture, it is highly unlikely that the romantic love songs of which Ted Gioia writes will ever again attain anything remotely approaching the cultural primacy that they long occupied. One cannot make art about that which one cannot imagine, and now that nearly 70 percent of all children born to high school–only graduates grow up in single-parent families, it is improbable that the children of those families would feel inspired to sing songs that take an idealistic view of love. In much of America, love and marriage are a dream, not a reality, and our popular music will surely reflect that fateful transformation for a long time to come....
EXCERPT: Most pop songs are about love. So are most classical art songs. So are most folk songs. [...] Since the range of possibilities for human action extends far beyond the compass of love, sex, and marriage, why should the representation of these three activities have preoccupied songwriters of all kinds? Ted Gioia, a music historian and sometime jazz pianist, addresses this question and others related to it in his latest book, Love Songs: The Hidden History. [...] Gioia shows that song lyrics about love, sex, marriage, and fertility can be traced all the way back to the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians, and that once Jewish and Christian religious leaders came to terms with the iron determination of their own people to write and sing about romantic love, it quickly emerged as the dominant subject matter of Western popular music. This tendency became overwhelming in 20th-century America.
[...] To the extent that any one form of music can lay a meaningful claim to primacy in America’s fissiparous popular culture, that position is now held by rap, whose creators, most of whom are black, take an even more jaundiced view of romantic love than did the blues singers of the pre-rock era. Rap and rap-flavored pop songs are typically about sex, not love, and most of them are written and sung by men who portray the women whom they covet not in an idealized way but as objects of lust and violence.
[...] It is no coincidence that today’s songs should appeal so strongly not merely to black listeners but to the younger public at large. The millennial generation, after all, has grown up in the aftermath of the sexual revolution of the ’60s and ’70s. In 1935, the U.S. divorce rate was 17 percent. In 1985, it was 50 percent. Today it is declining—but so, too, is the marriage rate, for whites as well as blacks. Millennials of all races live in an increasingly post-marital world in which it is taken for granted that men and women will “hook up” without any pretense of intimacy. [...] they [...] appear to view marriage not as a sacrament into which one enters with the reasonable expectation of permanency but as an arrangement subject to dissolution at the whim of either party. And while college-educated millennials who marry take a relatively conventional view of how best to rear the children of their union, this view is no longer widely shared further down the socioeconomic ladder, where single parenting is the new norm.
[...] in such a culture, it is highly unlikely that the romantic love songs of which Ted Gioia writes will ever again attain anything remotely approaching the cultural primacy that they long occupied. One cannot make art about that which one cannot imagine, and now that nearly 70 percent of all children born to high school–only graduates grow up in single-parent families, it is improbable that the children of those families would feel inspired to sing songs that take an idealistic view of love. In much of America, love and marriage are a dream, not a reality, and our popular music will surely reflect that fateful transformation for a long time to come....