Silly Love Songs

I'm a reader of National Review, in the digital sense. This includes a subscription to NRO with an online account. The internet is wonderful in that regard, allowing access to such publications without having to deal with magazines lying around until you throw them away. But I digress. One of their contributors, John J. Miller, compiled a list of the top 50 conservative rock songs. The list included such songs as Sympathy for the Devil, Won't Get Fooled Again, Taxman and Sweet Home Alabama. Leaving aside the politics of the individual songs, I find the whole exercise absurd. Pop songs are good at capturing a moment, a single thought, an emotional experience, etc. They do not do well at capturing larger concepts, and when acts try to broaden the sentiments it tends to sound incredibly shallow and trite. That has been a conservative claim of music and artists since the '60s when music became highly political. More to the point, it's true, regardless of the message of a song. To single out songs for political purposes devalues the artform. Music is about, well, music. The message of the lyrics is inconsequential. I Am The Walrus is a prime example of this. The lyrics are intentionally nonsensical. "Yellow matter custard dripping from a dead dog's eye" is not meant to convey some deep meaning. Yet the song stands as a testament to the Beatles' and Lennon's ability to craft and produce a song. I understand the conservative desire to attach the meaning they prefer to songs they love, but just leave it alone. It's silly when liberal slogans make it into songs, and it becomes no less silly when some kind of conservative interpretation is applied to songs that happen to have an anti-authority message. To quote the Doobie Brothers, "listen to the music."