The Perils of Indeterminateness Part One: James Blunt--"You're Beautiful"

Ok, so as a change of pace after the earnestness of the Fleet Foxes I have decided to pick on some terrible music. Now, while the pace may change the issue at stake will not: just like the first verse of "Helplessness Blues," the songs I will deal with here are all about indeterminacy and vagueness. However, while "Helplessness Blues" deals with indeterminacy, these songs deal in it. But hey, there's nothing like the levity that comes from criticizing the ineptness of others to ease thoughts of the predicament of modernity.

Anyway, first up on the chopping block is a song that oozed steadily from the radio a few years ago, James Blunt's "You're Beautiful." To be blunt (I'm sure that joke's been overused, but he's all about overuse, over-emoting, and overkill so it's fitting), this song is about as beautiful as a Hallmark card. But then again, it is designed to appeal to people for whom bland simplicity and sentimentality are the hallmarks of beauty (clearly a different kind of terrible beauty than Yeats' kind). I've included the version with lyrics so you can gaze at them and tremble, mortal.



Now, just as the bizarre mixture of childishness and adult sexuality in Fergie's "Big Girls Don't Cry" made for a telling if probably unintended example of the unthinking sexualization of young children, the fit between form and content in "Beautiful" is likewise unintentionally apt. The shallowness of this song, musically and lyrically is only matched by the shallowness of its theme: love at first (and only) sight.

Skipping past the less than brilliant opening, the first verse chronicle's the singer's encounter on the subway with a woman:

My love is pure.
I saw an angel.
Of that I'm sure.
She smiled at me on the subway.
She was with another man.
But I won't lose no sleep on that,
'Cause I've got a plan.

This verse perfectly illustrates why I am suspicious of claims of love at first sight. The "purity" of the love involved here is the purity of nothingness (or pure horse shit). After all, what basis is there for this outpouring of song? Nothing but a brief smile, which I am inclined to think was more a social nicety (or an awkward reaction, since "She could see from my face that I was, Flying/Fucking high," and there's nothing sexier than drug-addled creep leering at you on the subway) than a come hither stare. The love on display here is unrelated to everything actually important about this woman (who she is, what she's actually like, or what she thinks and feels, for instance) other than her beauty. But this beauty--and this is where the significance of this post's title kicks in--is itself utterly meaningless and empty. The problem with "beautiful" is that it the way it is used here it is really more of an evaluative rather than a descriptive term, i.e., it tells us less about the object than the speaker's relation to the object. That relation is extremely tenuous (and maybe a little creepy as well) so we are left with a love song that, like most love songs, is mostly about the shallow ego of its singer. The best he can come up with is to describe her as an angel, but that only works since there is really nothing human about her so she might as well be some kind of imaginary/mythological figure.

So, rather than being romantic this song is actually quite misogynistic in the way that it reduces her to an occasion to fantasize. The indeterminacy of "you're beautiful" means that it ends up being an insult instead of a compliment.