I try not to link every post there, really
Yeah, yeah, I know, shut up; whatever you think of k-punk and my extreme admiration for the man's work, you have to admit this paragraph is a stunner:
The form of the love song is often that of a letter which is not sent, or should not be sent. (The psychosis of David Kelsey in Highsmith's This Sweet Sickness is that he has no concept that could be such a thing as a letter that should not be sent, a feeling that should not be symbolically transmitted.) The most powerful love songs always turn on the discrepancy between the act of declaring love and the knowledge that the ostensible addressee is no longer there, was never there, and could never be there. Everyone knows that people continue to write letters or to talk to lovers long after the loved one is dead. But, very far from being unusual, this is the reality of erotic love laid bare. To give up the fantasy that there is someone there listening is far harder than giving up the object itself. The converse of this is the horror of receiving love letters or declarations of love: we know is that they are never really addressed to us.
That it comes in the middle of a very good post on Rihanna just makes it more amazing - not, crucially, because Rihanna's music is somehow lacking or unable to sustain the weight of this analysis, but because most people just wouldn't bother. Mark's genius lies very much in how willing he is to treat Rihanna and Marx, Kate Moss and Schopenhauer, Dr. Who and Deleuze as equally real, equally valuable, equally capable of telling us something about ourselves.
The form of the love song is often that of a letter which is not sent, or should not be sent. (The psychosis of David Kelsey in Highsmith's This Sweet Sickness is that he has no concept that could be such a thing as a letter that should not be sent, a feeling that should not be symbolically transmitted.) The most powerful love songs always turn on the discrepancy between the act of declaring love and the knowledge that the ostensible addressee is no longer there, was never there, and could never be there. Everyone knows that people continue to write letters or to talk to lovers long after the loved one is dead. But, very far from being unusual, this is the reality of erotic love laid bare. To give up the fantasy that there is someone there listening is far harder than giving up the object itself. The converse of this is the horror of receiving love letters or declarations of love: we know is that they are never really addressed to us.
That it comes in the middle of a very good post on Rihanna just makes it more amazing - not, crucially, because Rihanna's music is somehow lacking or unable to sustain the weight of this analysis, but because most people just wouldn't bother. Mark's genius lies very much in how willing he is to treat Rihanna and Marx, Kate Moss and Schopenhauer, Dr. Who and Deleuze as equally real, equally valuable, equally capable of telling us something about ourselves.
