Sons of Loki

What came first, the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?
People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands – literally thousands – of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don’t know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they’ve been listening to the sad songs longer than they’ve been living the unhappy lives.

–Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

Bah! Who needs love? Here’s the top five anti-love songs (that I could find on YouTube. Depressingly, the fantastic “I’m Not In Love” by Talking Heads (entirely different to the 10cc song of the same name) couldn’t be found.)

Richard Ashcroft – A Song for the Lovers
I love Ashcroft’s counterpoint baritone mumble in the video as he sings along to his own song. Diegetic cleverness, there. This song beat out “Love is Noise” in the running, but both depict love as a kind of unpleasant anxiety, which is far more preferable to sentimental pap.

Pulp – F.E.E.L.I.N.G. C.A.L.L.E.D. L.O.V.E.
Different Class is just all over a great album, and this is a fantastic love song that basically sums up the incomprehensible gut-punch of love.

Belle and Sebastian – Funny Little Frog
This is probably my all-time most listened song, but I just can’t get over it. I think I first heard of it as the only B&S song at OK Karaoke in Leeds, but back then I hadn’t heard their album The Life Pursuit, so I just thought it was a song about, uh, a funny little frog, so I never sang it.
At first listen, it’s just about loving someone. Then you realise it’s about loving someone you can’t have. Then you begin to suspect it’s all about loving some ideal girl, some soulmate you have yet to meet and who may not even exist. (I read an interesting theory that it’s actually about the Virgin Mary, which puts a new spin on the lyrics, but I prefer the secular interpretation.)

Absentee – We Should Never Have Children
A title like that says it all, right? “Some people never should have met,” intones the gravelly-voiced Dan Michaelson.

Buzzcocks – Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t've?)
To which we can all answer, “Yes.”

Depressing!