A preface to lunch "What is love?" lyrics speak the truth

Author: James O'Brien

Most people I know at Middlebury are far more intelligent than me. In order to prove their intelligence, many of them listen to songs with lyrics that I can't even begin to comprehend - lyrics like, "Society is a maggot! You are Bob Saget!/Life is ephemeral! You are a chemical!" Perhaps not those lyrics exactly, but they listen to Wilco and Radiohead, whose lyrics are somewhere along those lines. There isn't anything wrong these bands' lyrics - except that they don't mean anything at all. Yes, they sound deep. Sure, we can parse these lyrics for shades of meaning. We can listen to what the words suggest, and we can do all the things that they train us to do in English class. But the amount of time spent thinking about a song does not decide its worth. If a song has a personal meaning, great, but it isn't important. A much more significant song goes like this: "What is love? Baby don't hurt me. Don't hurt me. No more." (As a side note, there is actually a Web site that provides the lyrics to this song - just in case we can't remember them. That Web site = unnecessary. Also, E=mc².)

For intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals alike, Haddaway's lyrics seem less interesting than Radiohead's. This is mainly because anyone can instantly understand them. The "What is Love" lyrics insult our intelligence. They are cliché. But they also tend to bring us together as human beings because, at our core, most of us are cliché. Trite sentiments have been beaten to death for a reason - because they are the most universally applicable human feelings. More power to you if you have a closet-shrine to Crispin Glover and eat nothing but super-organic granola, but you still have the same feelings as the rest of us. Sure, you may respond to these feelings in a different way, but I have a hunch that they are the same feelings. I can't prove this hypothesis, of course - I am not you. But I believe I can sympathize. Then again, R. Kelly believes he can fly, which is ludicrous. Aside from the one time I got trapped in a closet, I cannot relate to R. Kelly.

We tend think to our feelings are complicated because we put layer upon layer of our own thoughts and experience on top of them. "Why do we feel this way?" we ask ourselves before we then assign our feelings to complicated personal reasons regarding parental absence, relationship troubles and the subliminal evils of Hanson. But we shouldn't have to search for explanations. We feel this way because we are human. That's the only explanation that matters.

In this life, we are biologically secluded within our own separate minds, each watching shadows of an objective world that we can never inhabit, or something like that. Simple song lyrics make us feel that elusive sense of togetherness. It is the beauty of feeling overthought. With pop music, instead of discussing our own interpretations of brooding lyrics, we can listen to a Kelly Clarkson song and more or less know exactly what she is talking about. Then we can all feel like idealistic romantics spurned by a morally reprehensible lover, the premise of just about every Clarkson song. Does this have it downsides? Sure. Young women may gain an unjustified feeling of hatred towards males. This opinion, however, will fade as these young women get older and develop justified feelings of hatred towards males. Songs like Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone" may provide an illusion, but it is one we can all share (despite the irritatingly common substitution of "U" for "You" - a trend we can all hate). Most of us recognize that these songs are a mirage, some of us don't, but either way we can all see the mirage.

No, we do not know exactly what others are thinking when they listen to Haddaway. They could be remembering a lost love, listening to the beat or imagining Bob Saget and the entire cast of "Full House" naked. But whatever we do when we listen to "What Is Love?" together, we feel that we understand it. It does not depend upon being an idealist or a cynic. It's techno! It's cliché! It's us! What's not to understand?

James O'Brien '10 is an English major from Medfield, Mass.