Cheery Songs About Unintended Pregnancies #2: Heart--All I Wanna Do (Is Make Love to You)

One of the great things about being aware of the discrepancy between form and content in these cheery songs about unintended pregnancies is being able to watch other people listen to them, blissfully unaware of the meaning of the song, and initiate them into the hilarity.* Never is the enjoyment of a cheery song about unintended pregnancies quite as fun as when shared, especially for the first time. Heart's "All I Wanna Do (Is Make Love to You)" can slip under people's radar because so much of the song is devoted to the chorus and the description of the one-night stand that it refers to.


The whole pregnancy angle only comes in at the end, by which time a lot of people figure they already know what they need to know about the song, namely, that all she wants to do is make love to him. But, the story the song actually tells is of a woman whose real partner is (presumably) infertile, so she picks up a sexy hitchhiker and they have (unprotected) sex. Suitably impregnated, she sneaks out without letting him know her identity and (presumably) goes back to her partner to have a baby. The song zips forward to when she accidentally runs into the hitchhiker again as she is walking with his baby. In what is no doubt a confirmation of the Maury Povich brand of genetics where paternity is instantly and indubitably recognizable (or not) by a single feature, the hitchhiker realizes that the baby is his: "You can imagine his surprise, / When he saw his own eyes." The woman pleads for him to keep it a secret, etc., etc.

So here we have an interesting variation on the "unintended pregnancy." The pregnancy from my first example "Wanna Be Startin' Something" by Michael Jackson, is not explicitly unintended, although we can infer that it probably was given the mother's apparent inability to properly care for her child (there was some lack of foresight involved). While Jackson's example was probably unintended by both parents, in Heart's case the pregnancy only the father didn't intended it (although, in this tangled web, the person who thinks he's the father but isn't probably intended it). In a refreshing change, however, at least this isn't a case of entrapment on the part of the woman where she comes off as cruel and manipulative, but rather some secret outsourcing which is morally ambiguous given the combination of deceit and (mostly) good intentions.

Of course, there is an alternate reading of this song, where the baby is wholly unintended and she only wanted to have a good time, after all, she had a pretty rocking night with the hitchhiker (he "brought out the woman in [her], many times, easily"). If you really want to have a baby without your partner there are other ways of doing it which might give him fewer misgivings, like a trip to the sperm bank. That certainly puts a new (and humiliating, for her partner) spin on her explanation to the hitchhiker at the end of the song that "what he couldn't give me / Was the one little thing that you can."

The only problem with that reading is the hilariously stupid note that she leaves the hitchhiker after their night of "magic." In what is an amazing case of mixed up metaphors, she declartes

"I am the flower and you are the seed
We walked in the garden
We planted a tree"


First of all, this woman needs to study some botany, because she clearly doesn't understand plant reproduction and is obviously confused by the fact that human sperm is sometimes (especially in olden times) called seed. Flowers are crucial to the sexual reproduction of many plants, but their seeds would be the products of the pollination of flowers, not what pollinates them. It would have made more sense if she was the flower and he was the bee, but she clearly sings "seed" (well, actually, it sounds like "sea" but the s-sound is there). So technically, if he's the seed then he is her offspring (since she's the flower) which would add some pretty strange dimension to this song if that's actually what they meant. Anyway, this note, as confused as it may be (especially since it goes on to talk about walking in the garden and planting trees--I thought they were the plants?) it does clarify this woman's intent in terms of the one night stand, she's clearly got fertilizin' on the brain (let's just hope her reputation isn't soiled by this! She should be guard'n it more closely...)



*As tempting as it might be to do this with romantic-sounding songs with creepy lyrics, that is a more dangerous game. For instance, you never know what you're in for when it comes to people who play The Police's "Every Breath You Take" at their wedding, you always run the risk that they really do know what the song's about...

Musical Mathematics Part Two

I see the last song in this particular equation, "The Gash (Battle Hymn for a Wounded Mathematician)" by The Flaming Lips, as a kind of inspiration for the sound of the particularly jarring and clashing part of "The Shrine / An Argument" that I have been focusing on.




I see a similar motivation in each. The Fleet Foxes emphasize the violence and destruction that logically accompanies the cycle of  renewal. After all, without death there would be no need for renewal. But at the same time, being part of that cycle gives this violence a different form than if it were just on its own, it elevates it. That is why I particularly enjoy these two songs, because rather than just being loud and clashing for the sake of stirring shit up, they spiritualize the sense of strife that they capture.

"The Gash" puts a particularly "spiritual" spin on strife, indeed it makes the spiritual a matter of strife. Of course, this is only if you understand "spiritual" in the sense of the highest concerns and values of human life from within human life, and not stemming from some transcendent origin. Indeed, the "spiritual" is only won from out of struggling with the messy world of human affairs, not by some appeal to a pure, unsullied conception of truth as if everything in life could work out as clearly as a mathematical equation (hence the title character).

Among other things, this means that the truth needs forms of renewal and preservation and that it is susceptible to being lost. The gash that the song is named after reflects the contingency and the vulnerability of truth, as well as those who search for it. But what is interesting about the way that this song presents this issue is the fact that it is not the gash that is finally the problem, that it is not our "quasi-animality" (as I have been calling it) that is at issue, but this intra-spiritual concern:


Is that gash in your leg
Really why you have stopped?
‘Cause I’ve noticed all the others
Though they’re gashed, they’re still going
‘Cause I feel like the real reason
That you’re quitting, that you’re admitting
That you’ve lost all the will to battle on


As I believe the lyrics make clear, the gash is not in itself what makes this mathematician give up the struggle, indeed, the gash may only be one more occasion for the struggle. Instead, the whole issue concerns the reasons we have for continuing to fight; whether the gash counts as a reason to stop or not is a matter of self-determination, of how we understand it and ourselves. This is why I speak of this as a spiritual issue solely from within life; it is this focus on self-determination that makes the struggle spiritual, and lends this song its credibility when it stages the whole issue as one of sanity:

Will the fight for our sanity
Be the fight of our lives?
Now that we’ve lost all the reasons
That we thought that we had


Still the battle that we’re in
Rages on till the end
With explosions, wounds are open
Sights and smells, eyes and noses
But the thought that went unspoken
Was understanding that you’re broken
Still the last volunteer battles on.

In the struggle of what can ultimately only be reason, all of the combatants are volunteers and they could only ever be so. Very eloquently put.

Musical Mathematics: XTC--"Sacrificial Bonfire" + The Flaming Lips--"The Gash" = Fleet Foxes--"The Shrine/An Argument"

If you have not yet seen the official video for the Fleet Foxes song "The Shrine/An Argument," then I would highly recommend it. Surprisingly for a band as generally gentle and melodic as the Fleet Foxes, the video itself contains quite a few disturbing images. Of course, if you know the song, especially the "argument" part of it which starts around 2:30 or so, you can see how there is room for some disturbance.



Anyway, in watching the "argument" section I mentioned above, going from about 2:30 to 4:22 I couldn't help but think of some other songs that I love quite dearly and think are, at the very least, spiritual ancestors of this song. This is the quite unmathematical sense in which I am claiming that this song is the sum of the other two.

Anyway, on to the first song, XTC's "Sacrificial Bonfire," which is off of their best album, Skylarking (which is also what this blog is named after, as it had a huge influence over my musical interests, acting as a sort of gateway album to all kinds of other harmonious pop sounds). The link between these two songs lies in those human (?), marked (?) figures dancing around the fire in the Fleet Foxes video, which so remind me of these lines from "Sacrificial Bonfire":


"Assembled on high
Silhouettes against the sky
The smoke prayed and pranced
The sparks did their dance in the wind.
Disguises worn thin with less and less skin
And the clothes that were draped
Was all that told man from ape."





Against the stately drumbeat and melodic arpeggio that give the song a measured thrust, "Sacrificial Bonfire" is about the various kinds of imaginative practices throughout history humans have directed at promoting renewal, be it the renewal of the seasons, or of generations and societies (the disjunction between the joyous renewal of the world in spring and the much more anguished and fraught human potential for renewal led Eliot to remark that "April is the cruelest month," although he was by no means the first to dwell on this). The rhythm to the song is important because like the seasons, its power comes from cyclical renewal.

I see the quasi-animality of the human figures dancing around the campfire as a sign primal nature of their participation in this practices of renewal, and as a sign of the quasi-animality that remains with us no matter how civilized we think we have become. Likewise, in portraying this in the context of the memorial practices of the deer (?) in the video (at least that's what I assume is going on with the stakes), it reminds us that animals participate in some of the same activities even if in different and less elaborate forms.

At this point I would like to digress for a moment and discuss Skylarking itself, if for no other reason than to introduce my namesake a little more. The album itself is a playful "concept album" tracing the cycles of the seasons alongside the various developments of human life albeit loosely. Beginning with youth, freedom and love in their height with summer ("Grass" and "The Meeting Place" most clearly, though of course "Summer's Cauldron" starts everything off), the album moves on to the the doubts and disappointments of life and love  with its autumnal tracks (from "That's Really Super, Supergirl" to "Big Day" or so), to the coldness of final loss and separation ("Another Satellite" to "Dying"). "Sacrifical Bonfire" is the official final song of the album (the later inclusion of the surprise hit and atheist anthem "Dear God" onto the album tends to mess up the track order somewhat, though thematically the song surely belongs in the "Winter" section given its relative negativity). The significance of this position is that it makes it the only spring song on the album and that is indeed fitting given its subject matter.

Ok, I've rambled enough about these songs (there's nothing precise in these mathematics) and would like to turn to the last one by  The Flaming Lips--"The Gash (Battle Hymn for the Wounded Mathematician)," but will do so in the next post.