Love Songs and Politics

Here I go again. While trying to compose an essay on the public sphere, media, and political life, you'd think my playlist would be a little different. But this is what I have spinning on my computerized jukebox this morning:

"Cotton Alley" by 10,000 Maniacs
"Evangeline" by Bad Religion
"Must I Paint You a Picture" by Billy Bragg
"A Home" by the Dixie Chicks
"Sweet Avenue" by Jets to Brazil
"Forget Me" by the Promise Ring
"I am Stretched on Your Grave" by Sinead O'Connor
"Love Serenade" by the Waifs
"Only in Dreams" by Weezer

Except...except...this is so hard to explain sometimes...because it makes me seem so unscientific and undisciplined...but songs about politics and social criticism merely give me intellectual inspiration. Love songs help me remember why I care enough to give a damn in the first place, you know? So a good love song, for me, isn't necessarily "political," but it is what is behind those politics...at least some of them.

It's that ineffable, unphrasable longing for another's well-being. It's the feeling I get when I look at my child and the person with whom I co-created him. It's the idea that somewhere, in Iraq or South Dakota or Mexico, someone is languishing and longing, wants a nice place to live with someone he or she loves. That somewhere, anywhere, everywhere, there are people afraid of losing jobs, certainly, but really, when you get underneath it, they are afraid of losing the ability to love, losing the object of their desire, not in some abstract sense, but in the concrete material sensuality of love. Bombs falling from the sky, means I cannot touch you. Union losing its pension fight, means I cannot feed you. Oh God, let me take care of those I love. Let me have dignity and security. Let me stretch myself across this great, beautiful earth and get some of the plenty, some of the promise. Not just for me. Not just for me.

Here's Weezer:

"You can’t resist her.
She’s in your bones.
She is your marrow, and your ride home.
You can’t avoid her.
She’s in the air.
And in between molecules of oxygen and carbon dioxide."