You Scared the Lovin’ Outta Me
Apparently there’s a place in france where the ladies wear no pants. This seems a delightful thought, though no doubt if true sensitive souls would feel at least a little nervous as the plane touched down in Nice. Love may be a wonderful thing – and a route of personal survival for sure – but surely only the naïve or the most dead-brained conformist doesn’t find it a little scary. The emptiness, obsession, feelings of being used, abandonment, physical insecurity, fear of contact and intimacy are all the general currency of personal relations in our alienated age. So while artists, especially in rock or soul, will address the sorrow of love not so many will address the fear.
As we grow up we are sent a million signals of how to act in matters of the heart and body, you only need to open a magazine to see the fearmongering, moralising and double standards: The objectification of women’s bodies combined with accusatory prurience. Sexual health issues treated as excuse for censorious panic. A focus on performance and physical perfection that comes close to the abuse of the young and insecure. It’s no wonder people get screwed up. The gap between the sold ideal and the social reality is a major incubator of psychological difficulties.
Of course this blackmail, in service of power and profit, affects us all differently – we all stand in slightly different positions and this ideology (for that is what the sum of parts amounts to) is mediated in different ways and forms to us. Our different experiences and histories give us a specific reading, though it is a testament to the power and malignancy of the message, and the ubiquity of social life, that our stories are so similar. This song isn’t about that of course, but music should salve your wounds whilst being approximate and non-specific. You can have the love scared out of you, even if you thought you were above such neurosis, and I’d like to thank George, Gary and Glen for saying it.
The vocal arrangement of this song is particularly wonderful with the gang putting on some squeaky greenhorn voices and goofing around with some lustful longing moans. While the main riff (from ‘Streets of Cairo’) hits just the right anxious pathos.
