Love is the strongest and most commercial theme that the popular music can use. You may try to count how may pop songs' titles use words such as 'love', 'lover', or even more artistic vocabulary like 'unintended'. Those songs all centralize on 'love'. But what love? Is it a true love, or, shall I say, just a hormonal phenomenal of a grown-up person (or growing-up like teenagers) that blurs mind to redefine lust as love?
I am not trying to define what love is. Thousands have attempted and none of them can be said as successful. It is a very subjective matter and really concerning of one's deepest and sometimes most hurtful experience. I just want to disscuss about the love that the popular culture has brought. As I read through the history of the world, there is never an era in the world history before the 1950s when love becomes so dominant among the teens. It looks like those kids just grow up too fast. They haven't attained any degree but they have already thought after a serious relationship. What is going on their mind?
I am sure that the popular culture that is wide spread nowadays shapes the mind of the teenagers to think that love is priority. Beautfiul and seemingly sensible sentences such as 'Love Conquers All', 'I Don't Want to Live Without You', and even 'You aer the Only One' intoxicate every mind everyday. It has been so common for us that we unconciously accept it as the truth.
Psychologically, teens are in the era when they are beginning to seperate from their parents but they just are not fully ready to step into the real world. They gradually see the drastic change that in the cruel society, they are not the center of attraction. When the kids are still in the hands of the parents, the parents often cultivate a false image that the kids are the sole emperors. Now, as they grow up and become more tangled with many new communities, they realize they new an identity. Some try to achieve it through academics, but ironically as time goes on, the standard has changed. It's not the character that really matters. Popular culture through the movies, magazines, novels, songs etc. emphasize the importance of relationship.
I am not saying that relationships between young men and women are not to be taken seriously. When you have been into something like that, you have been responsible of other's feeling. However, you must also remember the feelings of the other people who love you the most, who love you even before you are born. They are the family. You just cannot run way from them to seek for liberation with your future bride (or bridegroom).
Also, I think true love never involves sex. Sex is a feature of human's animalistic instinct to reproduce. I know that not everyone will agree, but personally I think that love and sex are seperated though they are not totally complementary. Love is when you care of someone else more than you care of yourself. This is one positive impact of love on the teenagers, who just grow up from the fantasiscal 'emperors' state to be an adult. Love encourages you to tolerate difference and admit that I am not the only one who is special in this world. It affects especially on boys, who are naturally self-centered. However, the romatic love, eros, which has been the popular definition for the word love now, is a mix of love and sex. As teenagers are trying to find identity, their physical aspects also step to maturity. If one has a lover, it is a proof for that person that he/she is also needed in the society, or in other words, the person exists so the other can exist. That is a wonderful paradigm. It motivates your life.
The worst thing of the romatic love is when you cannot differentiate between love and sex. I cannot say sex is wrong because it is needed for the survival of human species. I'm much worried about the wrong assumptions that current teenagers usually have. Through popular culture, love is mixed with sex. It is aggravated by the decline of morality now, which has made the physical maturity grows faster but mentality maturity grows slower. It creates a hedonistic lfiestyle that focuses on nothing but pleasure. If that happens to you, you have forgotten the meaning of love. You are as egoistic as animals thus your intelligence will be defeated by your instincts.
I can give you some examples from the popular love songs. Phrases such as 'holding hand', 'kiss your lips', 'hold you in my arms' and even 'make love' have become so common. It has destroyed the definition of love. Love has lost its purity. Whay can't you say it is lust? Why can't everybody be frank enough to admit whether it is affection or instinct?
It is very tough because there are no clear boundaries. What drives romantic love is usually sexual instinct, especially such love that is called 'love at the first sight'. Try to think it rationally. How can you love a person if you never know the person before? You may never know about the person's name! This involves a lot about chemistry of love, which tries to redefine love as a chemical reaction in order to improve our genetic condition. It is the issue of selfish gene, which is too long to be written here.
However, if you find that person is nice, amiable, amicable, and both of you became a very good friend, that is when love comes in. Love is a state when there is another ego that you worship beside yourself. Love is where you are willing to give without thinking the what you will get. You cannot say it is irrationale. Your logical, reasoning power is an effect of superstition believe. For example, the most basic and rationale logic is mathematic. 1 + 1 = 2 happens when you believe so. The pbjectivity depends on how many will agree the same thing and how it makes senses with the outer world. When you believe, you are worshiping what you are believing in. You are actually admiring the belief as higher than you because the belief is something that is taught and accepted by you, not created by yourself. In love, you worship somebody as the other ego of yourself. You create an imaginary, or say methaphysical picture, that this person is the complementary of your finity state.
That abstract idea of love makes it very vulnerable to be contaminated by other desires, such as sex. And that what exactly happens now. Well, to be realistic, I realize that love si not possible to exist in this physical world without physical desires, which include sex. However, as everything starts from your mindset, it will become your habit and shape your life. I am bored to listen to love songs' lyrics which offer physical instincts that bias the real meaning of love. The concept of love that is taught by Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, and many others become 'out-of-date'. Thanks to the excess of technology and information's connectivity, now everyone live in two worlds. The real world and the virtual world which is simulated by the media. This virtual world becomes your sixth sense of the real world and also affects your life largely. The more you are indulged in it, the more you accept it as the highest authority. Because most of the aspect of the virtual world is entertainment, which worships pleasure of self, you become worshipper of only yourself. To make it softer, the media offers love as an entertainment. This is not right in the real context. Love is not an entertainment or 'just an easy game to play' like it is sung by the Beatles, but a resposibility.
I'm just worried to see that music that should be the positive expression of human feeling has become the commodity of the evil virtual world. And one of the commodity is love which has been redefined and reprocessed. How can they make love into something that produces money? Those love songs say 'hearts' but actually their hearts are in their wallets!
I don't intend to insult those song composers who compose really for artistic desire. I am sorry if I am hurting your feeling. However, I suggest to all musicians in the world to compose songs that are not about eros love. Write something about poverty, inequality, or even the grace of life. Or you can even write songs about the school's subjects. If a 5-year old kid can know the definition of love through artistic products such as songs, then why can't he do the same thing with general knowledges? It is the matter of human's future. I never hope the following generations to be hedonistic and completely lured into the wrong definitions of everything until they find nothing to serve them anymore on the Earth.
Well, I admire the artistic side of love songs. I can say that many love songs that I know are the best songs that I have heard. Maybe because it's about love (and the money that can come from it), the songs are created more meticulously with full desire and maximum creativity. The results? Some of the sweetest tunes that the world has ever heard?
Maybe if a song is not about commercial love, it's not a pop music anymore. Okay, then let's just enjoy what's there to excite our artistic desire. Just don't forget to have your own dignity. Sometimes, the best ways are not the most comfortable ways for us. Don't be lured into the wrong concepts. Always think and confront the popular concepts. You don't have to be a bohemian thus exiled from the outside world. Just don't follow the flow very easy!!