[Ted Gioia’s "Love Songs: The Hidden History"] touches in passing upon the love song’s evolutionary brief—that is, to encourage men and women down the ages to have sex with each other.... [O]ne of his arguments is that the basic elements have been there from the beginning. It’s hard not to agree with him, really, when Egyptologists are finding amid the pottery shards and crumbling papyri lines like If only I were the laundryman … / Then I’d rub my body with her cast-off garments. Gioia credits women with the greatest breakthroughs in love-song self-expression: “Women were the innovators and men the disseminators”— which sounds anatomically correct, at least. Love shook my senses, / Like wind crashing on the mountain oaks. That’s Sappho, or the composite forensic entity known as Sappho, sounding like Kelly Clarkson.
February 28, 2015
"The genesis of the love song would seem to lie somewhere in the fertility rites of the ancient world..."
"... the Sumerians, for example, had a number of hymns/love songs to celebrate the sacred marriage of the king (human) to the goddess (immortal), these nuptials being conducive to a rich harvest, cultural plenitude, satellite dishes for everyone, and so on..."
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A peer of the gods he seems to me, the man who sits over against you face to face, listening to the sweet tones of your voice and the loveliness of your laughing; it is this that sets my heart fluttering in my breast. For if I gaze on you but for a little while, I am no longer master of my voice, and my tongue lies useless, and a delicate flame runs over my skin. No more do I see with my eyes, and my ears are filled with uproar. The sweat pours down me, I am all seized with trembling, and I grow paler than the grass. My strength fails me, and I seem little short of dying.
"You plus me, it equal better math/Your boy a good look, but she my better half/I'm already bossin, already flossin/But why have the cake if it ain't got that sweet frosting?"
Keepin' it real,AA girl.
I don't think Sappho was into procreation.
When A Man Loves A Woman is one of the better love songs.
Lusty Egyptians rocked the cradle of civilization.
Fascinating that love songs and relationship songs dominate music themes and have been doing so since essentially forever. Even the Beach Boys "409" and "Little Deuce Coupe" honored deep and affectionate relationships.
" If only I were the laundryman … / Then I’d rub my body with her cast-off garments. "
So guys stole women's panties from the laundromat dryers even then.
I wonder if the Egyptians coveted women's bicycle seats.
I am Laslo.
Because of this Egyptian connection all love song lyrics should be displayed in the font "Papyrus."
Classy that way.
I am Laslo.
The early medieval Christians were nearly phobic: the very presence of love songs in their culture has to be inferred from the amount of denunciations such songs received from the pulpit. But as the priests volleyed and thundered, the love song was approaching one of its great flowerings, in the upward-flying utterances of those strolling love-loonies, the troubadours. Lean out the window, golden hair; my heart is in bondage and my lute is on fire.
I hope that the words above are the article's author & not from Goia's book, because, I'd expect better from Oxford U. Press.
If the early medievals often had to denounce such "libertine" songs from the pulpit (any authors cited?), then it hardly seems that they were "phobic". It seems more likely that they thought that popular ballads were not worth the effort for the rare literate individuals to transcribe onto very expensive parchment, which was the only "paper" they had. Considering that these same early medievals did transcribe "pagan tales" such Beowulf & the Norse myths, they didn't strike me as all that "phobic" of much of anything.
YoungHegelian:
During the Middle Ages and afterward, the Church had a huge collection of erotic art from many foreign cultures.
All of which they kept under lock and key. The ordinary citizens were not allowed to see it or even know of its existence.
@sinz52,
You got a source for that assertion? Are you talking about the Vatican, with its holdings of many thousands of artifacts, or some sort of Europe-wide "corporate" church?
The prohibition of the public display of e.g. Roman pornographic images holds even now. But, from what you know of Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque art, does it strike you that Roman Catholicism had some problem with the display of naked bodies?
The earliest known love poem was penned by Sappho, and it sure didn't have anything to do with procreation.
Btw, examples like this belie the common claim that romantic love is a modern convention.
Fertility rites are not about "make love, not war"; but rather "make life, not abortion". The meaning changed as more women came to believe that men followed the secular profits of wealth, pleasure, leisure, and narcissism.
The democratic revolution which gave rise to the abortion industry (part of the social complex, including the abortion industry) composed the songs of sacrificial, not fertility rites. Just do what feels good, I suppose.
"A new book suggests that the love song has always been among the most revolutionary of musical forms."
And what's wrong with that?
I'd like to know.
The genesis has to start in Genesis, when the Creator liked the Harmonic Music of the Spheres made into phonal songs of the loving voice of His Son and Spirit. They loved hearing each others' voices so much that They decided to make man in our image with a voice that can use all of the tongues known to The Spirit of Holiness.
Selah.
Drago said...
And what's wrong with that?
I'd like to know.
Well, there you go. Again.
"The genesis of the love song..."
Is that with Peter Gabriel, or Phil Collins?
I am Laslo.
This is all about the young women.
Best love lyric ever, courtesy of David lee Roth:
"Goddamn it lady, you know I ain't lyin' too ya, I'm gonna tell you one time."
Damn straight.
I am Laslo.
What the fuck genesis doesn't lie in the ancient world?
Subtract to generalize and you complicate.
New ain't true.
New not true.
Yeah dummy a butterfly in New Zealand, on a warm summer's day with affluent bees buzzs' heard through the happy gurgling down the hatches of miserys boozings bottles more-than-:intimate.
"New" in a just world would be taken to mean 'forget everything just and properly decent and submit to a god called "New.'"
Tormenting Father Martin Fox must have had a purpose?
Was it to destroy me?
I celebrated Father Martin Fox's contributions to this forum.
If I am shitting in your home by all means destroy me. I am unworthy of existence amongst and I understand, I stand under if I stand at all.
The solution to suicide is empathy.
" Fuck the world would be way bestest without.... Oh, but then I could not stop bad. Stopping bad is good. I may stop bad stupid, but it's still stopping bad."
Well okay then.
It's all about rape culture.
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