After all, given the general blandness of most love songs, to say something like I love you like a love song sounds like it is just compounding abstraction upon abstraction. But even though the song isn’t good or enjoyable, upon listening to it a little more closely I can at least say that the song wears its abstraction knowingly, perhaps even to the extent that it could be said that it is unconsciously critical of its entire genre. Maybe that last claim stretches it too far, but I try not to be too abstract myself by one-sidedly condemning things (see Hegel’s twistedly charming little essay Who Thinks Abstractly? for an abstruse but fun illustration of how easy it is to be abstract without knowing it—also note that there is nothing redeemable about Fergie’s “Me Myself I”).
Anyway, if you want to follow me down this path, just consider the line “I love you like a love song.” Its pretty bland since there is nothing unexpected or unusual about the simile, and verbally the repetition of the word “love” contributes to this (as does the near-endless repetition of the line itself). But all of this should not let us overlook what it means to love someone like a love song, for it is not as if the two terms of comparison are identical. Love songs tend to portray the extremes of love: intense obsession (I’m thinking primarily of the very first moments of falling in love, but also the scarier forms of obsession) and heartbreak, but they also tend to be simple, catchy and repetitive, which is to say, the very epitome of pop songs.
What’s worth noticing is the way that these two sets of qualities tend to go together—obsession and heartbreak alike tend to provoke repetition: “I need to see them again,” “I can’t stop thinking about them,” etc. This need for repetition, it seems to me, comes from the fact that both obsession and heartbreak are defined by the lack of their object. Both are in their own way blinded to the reality of their object by the desire for its possession, a fact that renders the whole relation rather abstract and thus in need of constant reinforcement.
In this regard perhaps there is something to this idea that there is a type of love like a love song: one that is intense, immediate, overly dramatic, and a matter of compulsive repetition in order to keep the feeling alive. And there is one more commonality linked to these, the abstractness of the love song, which we see in the vagueness of the image of the beloved and concomitant overemphasis upon the lover’s relatively unanchored feelings. This abstractness helps to fulfil the function of the love song, which is to promote identification with the song’s affect and to prompt its repetition. After all, the more abstract the lover and beloved the easier it is to project one’s own feelings onto them while at the same time enjoying their apparent objectification.
The qualities of abstraction and repetition at in the love song here happen to be just what Gomez’s song is about, particularly if you note that the line after the repetition of “I love you like a love song” is “And I keep hittin’ repeat-peat-peat-peat-peat-peat.” While this message comes through more on a formal level through its intense repetition than any real lyrical exploration, even at the level of its lyrics there is self-awareness about this fact, as the beginning of the song introduces its context as one of the depletion of the content of a love song in favour of repetition:
“It's been said and done
Every beautiful thought's been already sung
And I guess right now here's another one”
Now to return to the issue of abstractness, I guess we can say that this is a song that at least semi-self-consciously revels in its own abstractness by making itself into the formal convergence of love and love song and the abandonment of any content.
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