Parting Playlist

"Speak the truth - but leave immediately afterwards."
- Slovene proverb

On Spotify Here

An inverted reply to a musical reply to the thing I wrote on love.

Most songs are about love, sex, or loving sex. Better: most are about the glory of it, wanting it, or heartbreak. There's little space for resenting its incursion into your business, or how it fucks up your social circle; being glad of the back of someone; pining because you're trapped in a shit relationship; or simply suddenly losing interest, all commonplace in life and missing in culture. (I suppose this is where grime comes in.)

 

The dumped is always focalised; we don't have a decent cultural vocabulary in which to treat leavers or rejectors. They're enigmatic dicks, or nothing. But it sucks to leave too - to happen to fall out of love first and have to do something about it - and it's just inadequate to have one mechanical trope for justifying the action (being abused or cheated on). You can be heartbroken to leave.

 

It's actually strange that there aren't many sympathetic treatments of leavers, since logically around half of us are. Right? Anyway: songs why love stops.

1. No reason.
Just stopped. Terrifying - "Nihil est sine ratione? Falsa; amor est."

(Freebird comes closest to this, but I'm damned if it's getting linked.)

2. Psychobabble blame. 
Subconscious resentment; transference; projection; low first-state psychosocial development, etc.

3. Sudden cowardice.



4. Sudden bravery.
The need of self-determination, or riding without stabilizers.

5. Because there are no more chemicals left in you (see 1?)

Endlessly appropriate that the sound of reductionism is dubstep.


6. Moment of clarity

(Lamia - Keats)

"...Poor Lamia answer'd not.
He gaz'd into her eyes, and not a jot
Own'd they the lovelorn piteous appeal:
More, more he gaz'd: his human senses reel:
Some hungry spell that loveliness absorbs;
There was no recognition in those orbs.
"Lamia!" he cried - and no soft-toned reply.
The many heard, and the loud revelry
Grew hush; the stately music no more breathes;
The myrtle sicken'd in a thousand wreaths.
By faint degrees, voice, lute, and pleasure ceased;
A deadly silence step by step increased,
Until it seem'd a horrid presence there,
And not a man but felt the terror in his hair.
"Lamia!" he shriek'd; and nothing but the shriek
With its sad echo did the silence break.
"Begone, foul dream!" he cried, gazing again
In the bride's face, where now no azure vein
Wander'd on fair-spaced temples; no soft bloom
Misted the cheek; no passion to illume
The deep-recessed vision - all was blight;
Lamia, no longer fair, there sat a deadly white..."

7. Grown apart. / Things just aren't going anywhere.
Also, maybe excess intimacy breeds resentment, somehow?

8. Utilitarianism.

 

9. Because they cannot dance.

(Astounding comment attached in that link: "Genesis found a way to convert sex into sound.")

IRL, none of these are reason enough for the spurned. So once you find yourself with one of them, the search for a pretext to leave begins. (The most common being the orifices of another person.)