fredkontur.com - Diary - Archives - Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Andrew Sullivan is having an 80s-music video contest on his blog. The categories are - Best 80s Video, Worst 80s Video, and the Best-Worst 80s Video. In the spirit of the contest, he had a post today which linked to an extended "intellectual" discussion of Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" video.

The essay is entitled The Moral Battle That Rages In Bonnie Tyler's "A Total Eclipse of The Heart", and it ramblingly seems to describe the video as a clash between traditional religiosity and perverse sexual desires. This conflict plays out, at one point in the video, by the singer/narrator taking on the persona of Mary Magdalene wanting to have sex with Jesus and, at another point in the video, by the (adult) singer/narrator desiring young altar boys... It's silly and disturbing and time-wasting to talk this way about an 80s pop song, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that "Total Eclipse of the Heart" is a pretty interesting song. In fact, it's not at all a conventional love song. Actually, aside from the fact that it is a love song, I couldn't tell you at all what the song is even about. Gun to my head, I would guess that it's about someone who just went through a recent breakup and is taking it very badly. But there is very strong and unconventional imagery in the lyrics. For instance, the most repeated lyric (so repeated, in fact, that most everyone who doesn't know better assumes it's the song's title) - "Turn around, bright eyes". Bright eyes is a pretty strange way to refer to a lover. "Blue eyes", "Brown-eyed girl", "Pretty eyes", "Beautiful eyes", "Sultry eyes" all make sense, but "Bright eyes" isn't something that's usually considered a particularly attractive (or, for that matter, not attractive) quality in someone. But "Bright eyes" makes more sense when one thinks of the song as a series of contrasting light/dark images. The song's title, "Total Eclipse of the Heart", is obviously an image of darkness. Almost every line mentions darkness or lightness.

"Total Eclipse of the Heart" falls into the group of songs, best epitomized by Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody", of rock drama ballads that sound and feel momentous, but upon further analysis, are mostly just confused imagery with orchestral backing. Which doesn't make them bad songs, but doesn't make them good songs either. Led Zeppelin's "D'yer Maker" is a cousin of these songs. It's a love song that forgoes sappy love lyrics and uses mostly nonsense lyrics - "Oh oh oh oh oh, you don't have to go oh oh oh oh":

Contrast these songs with something like the Beach Boys' "Wouldn't It Be Nice" which talks about teenage love in a simplistic and still-unappreciated way as a manifestation of the desire to enter adulthood. In the song, grown-up love and marriage is not poetic or blissful or any of those other clichés; rather, it is sleeping in your own bed, with the person you love, and doing what you want with your own time. The song is a realization that thinking about love and marriage as a teenager is, in many ways, the first concrete experience you have in planning your adult life. Naturally, most of the thoughts are a bit naïve and simplistic, but they're also charming in their innocence. I think the spirit of this song still applies today. One of the core yearnings behind teenage pregnancy and high school dropouts and similar phenomena is the desire to be a grown-up on your own timetable rather than society's timetable.

Of course, a song can be simple and profound without making some grand statement about childhood or adulthood or society. You probably couldn't get a simpler song than Janis Joplin's "Mercedes Benz" which, if you wanted to, you could analyze as a deep, meaningful statement about God and religion in our society, but really stands on its own as just a lament about how it'd be nice if all it took to have a Mercedes Benz and a color TV was to be a good, hardworking person:

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