Thoughts, insights, opinions and advice from Dr. Dorothy

Saturday, September 1, 2007

Relationships and Top-40 Music

Who’s to blame in relationships? An intriguing question. Several books by relationship therapists (John Gottman’s The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work and Terrence Real’s How Can I Get Through to You?) make the claim that men are the ones who need to change to make lasting relationships. The pressures to be masculine while growing up create males with less ability to manage their feelings. And also because women have had decades of personal growth, starting with consciousness-raising sessions in the 60’s, men have yet to catch up.
My friend Laura D’angelo, a recently divorced psychiatrist, discovered men were always making excuses for their unfeeling and crude behaviors, proclaiming: Men are schmucks! So Laura interviewed almost 100 men and they all pretty much said the same thing. Men are selfish creatures who don’t treat women as well as they should. This was not women complaining at all.
Lest you think this is some new phenomenon, it’s not. I’ve been doing research on Top-40 song lyrics, using themes to track social change and attitudes towards relationships. In my research, I found that the realization of imperfections in relationships began in the 1920’s with African-American women singing The Blues, which were often laments about how A Good Man is Hard to Find. Whereas back then male blues singers were lamenting life, women were mourning the pitiful behavior of men. Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith were among the first to do so.
Complaining about the other hit mainstream pop music with full force in the 60’s, with men singing about being unfaithful. starting with The Wanderer by Dion and followed by Lou Christie’s Lightnin’ Strikes (where he just can’t stop himself from kissing new lips, but he expects her to be true until he’s ready to settle down), and of course, Mac Davis’s Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me, etc., etc. Agreeing with men, women basically colluded to accept such a reality. Leslie Gore’s That’s the Way Boys Are explained how guys just can’t help themselves. However, women did re-iterate the complaints again in the 60’s, starting with Sweet Talkin’ Guy, He’s a Rebel, Son of Preacher Man, You’re No Good, etc. During the period that I studied in depth, from 1930 through 1990, there were 95 Top-40 songs about bad boys, but only eight songs about bad girls. What I found most interesting is that while men accepted their need to wander, if she did it, she was Runaround Sue. Except for Torn Between Two Lovers, women didn’t see themselves as needing more than one man, and yet many male songs expected her to cheat (Suspicion, Running Scared, Suspicious Minds). Was this projection?
The culmination of the men’s songs for me is Willie Nelson’s Always on My Mind, where he apologizes for his lack of lovingness. Similarly, in that same period hit songs included Chicago’s Hard to Say I’m Sorry and Elton John’s Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word.
If you look at Top-40 music then, you can see that women started complaining about men in the 1920’s and men began listing their defects in the early 60’s, and ultimately apologizing big time in the 80’s.
Women do get some blame in relationships, but it is often around the guy being jealous or scared, as in Clyde McPhatter’s A Lover’s Question or Gene Pitney’s Half Heaven Half Heartache. As one proof to those fears was Mary McGregor’s Torn Between Two Lovers, but there weren’t many more of those types of songs.
So I ask you dear readers, do you agree with my interpretation of the music? If not, list some other songs that prove your point of view.

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