“I want you to stay / until I’m in the grave.” The most listened to song on Spotify in 2024 starts with verses that beg for eternal love. “Birds of a feather” by Billie Eilish It garnered 1,775,172,881 views. We are talking about a single platform. The official video, on YouTube—where she is dragged by an invisible force into empty offices—has 166 million more. It would be necessary to add alternative channels, radios, streamings. We could even add up the humming of everyone who has had the song stuck in their heads since they heard it for the first time. A commercial, pop, industrial theme, whatever you want, but let’s not miss this: it’s a love song.
The music is catchy, somewhere between festive and nostalgic, with typical beats of a hit. But the lyrics are more than understandable: “Until I rot, dead and buried / Until I’m in the coffin you carry. / If you leave, I’ll leave too”. Possibly the translation does not help, it even removes the colloquial and direct mantle, but let’s continue with the underlining: “And if I turn blue, please don’t save me.”. Billie Eilish He is 23 years old—he just turned 23: December 18—and yet, or precisely because he is young, he sings a love song begging for eternity: “I will love you until the day I die / until the light leaves my eyes”. His breathy, heartfelt voice gives him verisimilitude.: “I don’t think I could love you more”.
To say “I love you”—a sincere “I love you,” of course—you need courage. But always, even in declamation, shame appears, the trap of kitsch. “I don’t know why I’m crying.”Eilish sings, as if leaving the scene, as if leaving the interpretation. And immediately: “I don’t think I could love you more.”. “Cheesy is any feeling that is not shared,” said the Spaniard. Ramon Gomez de la Serna. quotes him Martin Kohan in his book Witchy eyes: love fables in mass culture. “It is enough to distance oneself from the vehemences of sentimental discourse to turn it into kitsch, but it is enough to engage in it for the ironic attribution of kitsch to fade,” Kohan writes.
“In this sense, the observation that intellectuals, to say: ‘I love you’, say: ‘As I said Corín Tellado‘I love you’, in some way marks the impossibility of sustaining the discourse of feelings without taking charge of the formulations that are established for this purpose from mass culture. Mass culture would then have a dictionary and a grammar of sentimentality,” adds the author. In songs, love becomes a ghost that possesses us all. Even those who deny that commercial origin. “I met you in another life / You had that same look in your eyes / I love you, don’t act so surprised,” says the most listened to song in the world.
Billie Eilish She is a girl of this era. To begin with, it was born in this century. He lives with his family in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, where he came into the world. His brother is O’Connell testified —musician, producer, composer, four years older—and his parents, both actors and musicians, are Maggie Baird y Patrick O’Connell. His mother is also a teacher: the two children did not go to school, they did “home education.” More information: she was conceived by in vitro fertilization, she was raised as a vegetarian and became vegan in 2014, she is bisexual, she supported the last two Democratic candidates, she called for a “ceasefire” in the war between Israel and Hamas, she suffers from Tourette, also depression.
He started playing the ukulele at six, joined a choir at eight, wrote his first song at eleven—they say it’s about a zombie apocalypse, inspired by The Walking Deada very fashionable series at the time—and at fourteen he recorded “Ocean Eyes,” written and produced by his brother Finneas, author of several of his songs. He uploaded the song to SoundCloud in 2015 and it went viral. On Spotify it obtained two million views in its first year. He opened a YouTube channel, signed with Interscope Records, and three years later was certified Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America for having sold one million copies. Since then, the massiveness.
Many years ago, in an old interview, they asked Ricardo Iorio what was “his most direct dream.” The camera takes his face in close-up. He doesn’t let a second pass. With a sad look, a raspy voice, a perfect cadence, he says: “stay in love. I think that if you don’t feel, don’t fall in love, everything dies. Even if you fall in love with a stick, even if you fall in love with a chobi. Being in love is beautiful. Especially when terrible things happen in people’s lives.” The terrible things that happen are not just the extraordinary ones. Iorio does not only refer to illnesses, deaths, accidents, but also to precarious daily life. Love as an antagonist of reality?
In 1977 a Spanish rumba group called The Chunguitos released a song that gives a good response. Almost two decades later, he popularized it Manu Chao and recently Rosalía gave it a revival. It is titled “I stay with you” although many know it as “If you give me a choice.” It says like this: “If you give me a choice, between you and my ideas, / although without them, I am a lost man. / If you give me a choice, between you and glory. / To carry the story of me, for centuries. / If you give me a choice, between you and that sky / where the flight is free, to reach oblivion /. If you give me a choice, I’ll stay with you.”. Even, above all, despite. Love above the world.
“Perhaps we are one of the last generations to learn about romantic love,” he writes. Guido Arditi in Volksgeist: love and capitalisma book published by Grupo Editorial Sur in 2022. With the emergence of the “modern way of life” individuality appears: the possibility of choosing who to love. If “every personal relationship always reflects the social totality in which it is formed,” then “as that system mutates, the feelings that people are capable of experiencing must necessarily also mutate.” Therefore, “the way of life proposed by advanced capitalism undermines from within the cultural-ideological bases on which the concept of romantic love was sustained.”
But romantic love finds a way to circumvent its own traps. Like a reptile capable of self-regeneration, it also combats that individuality: “Its mythology includes the idea of loss of individuality, of cohesion, communion and fusion with an other; or, in less romantic terms, the myth of love admits the possibility of sharing biographies, something that is increasingly lacking in the modern world, providing security in the face of a world and a future that, perhaps for the first time in history, human history, are presented as uncertain,” writes this young author, born in 1986 in Buenos Aires, Argentine, with a degree in Philosophy from the UBA.
The question that remains hanging around is whether romantic love is “palliative regarding the state of alienation or isolation” or “a direct consequence of the ideological crystallizations that capitalism brings with it.” For the author, both. Perhaps its power lies in that ambivalence. Even certain proclamations of “free love” come up against a “fetishism for freedom.” So? “It is important not to lose sight of the fact that the objective is not the replacement of existing or past social forms with new ones with a lower level of commitment, or, what is the same, with less social integration, but rather to The objective is the humanization of the totality of life and social relations.”
One day in 2019 the police ring the doorbell Ian Trainer but he doesn’t answer. We are in Merseyside, England. Along with the officers there are about ten neighbors: all angry. For several days, very, very loud music has been coming out of that house. That’s why the complaint. Half an hour and the door opens. Trainer looks serene—the music continues playing—and asks what they want. He is 82 years old: he is a music lover without fear of anything. They take him into custody. After a few months they release him, he arrives home and the first thing he does, after taking off his jacket, is put play. The police return, the scene repeats itself. He died in the hospital, in 2020, handcuffed to the stretcher and – they say – with a smile: humming his favorite song. Surely, one of love.
