Saturday, December 8, 2007

Culture is a funhouse mirror

Well you can lie to me, and I imagine you do.
If nothing's right, what's wrong?
That's what I like about you.
-David Byrne


This interview (audio) with Diane Warren on Weekend Edition is amazing. She writes a ton of popular love songs that make the rest of us think love is something where you can't sleep because you just want to watch your lover breathe in their sleep. (If lovers everywhere are watching each other sleep, who are these cads who are just sleeping while they're being watched?) She admits to having never been in love like that and is just on the cusp of admitting that she does not know whether love is like that. But the rest of us love her music because it expresses the kind of love we wish we had, too, that she never had and that few of us have ever had beyond a brief period of infatuation with someone we might or might not have later actually fallen in love with. Her real love is for music. She's found great passion in her life, which is absolutely wonderful, but wouldn't it be nice if she wrote about the feelings of inadequacy and uncertainty surrounding her love life and her running away from home at age 14? Lying to us will always be more profitable.

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