Cheery Songs About Unintended Pregnancies #4: Madonna--"Papa Don't Preach"

Now we're talking unintended pregnancies with Madonna's "Papa Don't Preach"!

As with Ace of Base's "All That She Wants," I guess there could be some potential ambiguity about the "baby" she's worried about (I've had discussions of this song with people who didn't think it was about a pregnancy), but it seems pretty clear to me that the baby in question is an as yet unborn child, not her lover (although keeping the former is tied up with the latter).

Now some “technical” details. As far as "unintended pregnancies" go, this one was definitely unintended by both parties given that the speaker/singer is clearly young enough to still need to clear this with her father and not just as a kind of formality—clearly much depends upon his blessing (plus her friends tell her she’s too young and that she ought to give it up). Maybe unwanted is a little strong given how she has (apparently) decided to “keep [her] baby,” but given the issue of age in the song, the “unexpected and unprepared for” side of “unintended” is definitely there.

The interesting twist on the “genre” that this song presents is that, rather than working from a perspective divorced from the pregnancy itself--either forecasting it like Ace of Base or looking back on it like Heart, this song's perspective is planted firmly in the middle of the pregnancy. It is less a warning or a story as it is a plea understanding and approval, and the combination of “Papa” and “preach” here highlights the religious (read: Catholic) background to it. This background also leads me to assume that the alternative to "keeping the baby" is giving it up for adoption, but it doesn't explicitly rule out abortion so there's something to chew on next time you hear it.

Lastly, the bassline running through the song has some serious groove to it.

Cold War Kids - "First"

Ok, so speaking about the difficulty of changing oneself and all of the factors outside of our conscious control in the previous post leads me to the next song I want to discuss, “First” by the Cold War Kids. (I specifically write “conscious control” in order to indicate that not everything that poses such a problem is outside of ourselves—at least not as long as what counts as ourselves is fairly broadly construed a la what Daniel Dennett captures with the ironic statement “If you make yourself really small, you can externalize virtually everything” and his endorsement of its opposite, “You’d be surprised how much you can internalize, if you make yourself large.”)

Anyway, the general theme of the song is expressed in the chorus:

First you get hurt, then you feel sorry.

Flying like a cannonball, falling to the earth
Heavy as a feather, when you hit the dirt
How am I the lucky one?
I did not deserve

To wait around forever, when you were there first.

First you get hurt, then you feel sorry.

Structure-wise it’s a little ambiguous whether the “First you get hurt, then you feel sorry” (and its variations like “First you lose trust, then you get worried,” and “First you get close, then you get worried”) belong to the chorus or not, but they certainly do thematically. Just as the “First….then….” clause denotes a sequence governed by cause and effect, the images of falling objects (cannonballs and feathers) likewise indicate a kind of mechanistic trajectory. The idea is that there can be a certain kind of causal determinism to our emotional lives that can be incredibly difficult to escape from once it starts. That is, I think, the tragedy of “first,” not just in the sense of the “First…then….” where once it starts you can’t stop it, but also what it is like”To wait around forever, when you were there first.” Being first is also a mark of the dyssynchrony that comes from such a lack of control over’s ones emotional life: there is always the possibility that one person is lost to the other in being swept up and away.

Indeed, the first lines of the song outline just such a situation and the powerlessness of ours attempts to do something about it: “Cheated and lied, broken so bad / you made a vow, never get mad.” While the song doesn’t indicate who cheated and lied, whether it is the “you” who everything happens to or the person they are in love with, I’m not sure if that matters. After all, the important thing is that the situation is one of broken trust, and the implications of that inevitably weigh upon cheater and cheated upon in ways that neither can necessarily control or repair, no matter how much they would like to. In fact, the whole drama of the song is focused on how broken trust has a causal power of its own above and beyond what we might try to do about it (“You made a vow, never get mad”—we shall see that this vow won’t hold up). The rest of the first verse details some of the self-destructive ways that we react to this kind of betrayal: cynical rationalization (“You play the game, though its unfair. / They’re all the same, who can compare?”); and being driven to distraction/forgetfulness/oblivion (“Night after night, Bar after club, / Dropping like flies, who woke you up / On the front lawn, sprinklers turned on / it’s not your house, where’d you go wrong?”). It is this aspect of the song that ties into my previous post about choosing what to worship. At issue here is the impossibility (or at least difficulty) of choosing to trust—you can go through all of motions and want it ever so badly without ever being able to bring yourself to it, or without being able to resist the force of mistrust.

After the chorus we get a short section that just confirms the seeming irreversibility of the course of the broken relationship in the very attempt to repair it through forgiveness, attempting to begin again by rewriting the old problems as a “dark night of the soul”:

There comes a time, in a short life
Turn it around, get a rewrite
Call it a dark night of the soul
Ticking of clocks, gravity’s pull
First you get close, then you get worried

What interests me is the alignment of the “dark night of the soul” with the “Ticking of clocks, gravity’s pull.” As the embodiment of time and space, the latter are the embodiment of the mechanism and determinism already suggested by the cannonball and the feather—we’re talking about a kind of psychological law of gravity here. (Incidentally, I wonder if the pairing of cannonball and feather is meant to hearken to Galileo’s famous contention that a cannonball and a feather would both fall at the same rate in a vacuum—or maybe its just that we are unstoppable in our falling, but then unlikely to just remain where we fall.)

"We all worship something, the important thing is what we choose to worship."

A church that I often pass by on the way to and from work has, as churches often do, a sign upon which someone writes pithy and pseudo-profound statements about faith—the religious version of by-lines for the week’s sermon or something. (Can you tell that I’m not really impressed with what tends to get written there? I may appreciate the fact that church is a place where people openly try to discuss some of the more important things about human life, but the mere fact of that attempt doesn’t make up for the fact that the framework within which that discussion takes place is, to put it charitably, outmoded and incoherent given what we know about the world.)

Diatribe aside, for several weeks the sign outside the church said the following: “We all worship something, the important thing is what we choose to worship.” I am trying hard to be as accurate as possible but I can’t guarantee I have the wording exactly right, but I think this captures the spirit of it, Now, if I want to cut it some slack, it seems that the most charitable (but the least philosophically interesting) interpretation is simply that we need to evaluate our priorities and make sure that they are good. In this form its bland but inoffensive, but in the form posted on the sign itself, there are some problematic things suggested by its phrasing.

The first problem, then, has to do with the idea that “We all worship something.” Well, I’m not sure if this is true. After all, worshipping is not just a generic human activity, but a very specific and very historically inflected complex of beliefs, emotions, and practices, and I’m not so sure everyone—or maybe even very many people—actually “worship” in this strict sense. In particular, the religious and indeed, ritualistic, connotations of worship, especially of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic sort, means that it is already dubious that everyone worships something. Do Buddhists or atheists do anything comparable to worshipping? Can relatively irreligious people who might only go to church on Christmas, but still vaguely identify as Christian, be said to worship God?

While I think that the answer to the above questions is probably “no,” or at least a very qualified “yes” in which the differences involved are pretty sizeable, maybe I am just being too strict about what is meant by “worship” here. Maybe all the sign means by “worship” is to “value highly, or to actively recognize as an authoritative value or set of values.” After all, the point of the sign does seem to be a matter of identifying what our priorities are. But this doesn’t really save the sign from incoherence because it still runs into the second problem concerning the idea that we can choose what we value, much less worship. Now, I am not saying that worshipping is something done involuntarily, since one element of worshipping is an intentional commitment to what is being worshipped (and to worshipping itself). As a rule it doesn’t make sense to worship against one’s will: you wouldn’t worship something you didn’t admire or revere (and therefore want to worship) because those feelings are integral to the motivation of worship and are part of what give it its meaning.


But at the same time, this doesn’t mean that worshipping is the result of an intentional choice, or is something that we can just will to do. Like so many aspects of our lives, the truth of such a choice lies somewhere in the middle. And its here that we get into the difficult territory, where it is not clear-cut at just what point the will—where what we can said to be responsible for—begins and ends. Now, we often think it would be nice to be able to say that every decision that we make is the result of a process that was absolutely under our conscious control. However, not only is that not the case, but that is probably a good thing since that would likely make everyday living quite overwhelming. But everyday things aside, we would still like to think that the big things like what kind of people we are to become, and what we value, are in some way up to us. And I wouldn’t deny that they are in a large part up to us, but they are not so in the sense that we can just sit down, deliberate about them for awhile, and then simply choose and be done with it.

To use worship as the example, consider how you can decide to adopt all of the outward forms of worship—perform all of the rituals, say all the words—while remaining inwardly unconvinced or unmoved, just as you can do all the things to try to get your mind into a “worshipful zone,” but still fall short of feeling it. One reason why a choice like that doesn’t stick, I think, is that it gets the role that such a belief plays backwards: it is against the background of such a belief and on its authority that we make decisions. If you choose to worship something it is not the choice as such that makes the difference, but whatever it is about the thing that made it worth worshipping. Think about it this way: it makes no sense to say that people who become born again Christians accept Jesus as their personal savior because they choose to (that’s just a tautology that really doesn’t explain the choice itself), no, they choose to accept him because (and here I’m worried about not getting the language right) the Holy Spirit enters their hearts and lifts them up to Jesus. There are undoubtedly lots of preconditions for being able to have such an experience, and some of those are under our direct control, but that’s pretty murky territory in terms of conscious and unconscious decisions, motivations, etc. (And that’s coming to worship something else as an adult in full command of one’s rational capacities, things are even more complicated when it comes to the determination of what we have grown up worshipping since so much of the determination of that lies hidden in the mists of childhood prehistory.)

But to return to the slogan that instigated all of this: “We all worship something, the important thing is what we choose to worship,” I think what I’ve said does confirm one element of this, namely, just how important it is what we choose to worship. But even if we treat this charitably as a call for self-reflection about our values (and ignore the misunderstandings about the relationship between choice and worship that it seems to flirt with) I still think the sign is far too optimistic about our ability to intentionally effect self-change. The point may seem pedantic, but that misguided way of thinking about the will and choice is longstanding in the Western philosophical tradition. Plus, this discussion sets up the next song I wish to examine.