During my freshman year, one of my resident advisors wrote a love song to a girl in my dormitory. He recorded it by himself using an acoustic guitar and presumably a computer microphone, burned it onto a CD and gave it to her. Of course, the CD got turned into an mp3 and shared on the network and we all got to hear it. It was by far one of the most embarrassing pieces of material I have ever heard and strongly relied on lyrics like, “When I see you the only letters I think about are L-O-V and E.” Yes, lyrics so creepy that four years later they are still branded in my mind. People with horribly restrained sexuality should never try to write love songs. Additionally, writing a love song directly to someone is possibly the quickest road to artistic failure. Most people screw the pooch by filling the song with kitsch and clichés and avoid any sort of reality. Advice: buy her chocolates instead of taking a gigantic dump on her doorstep and thinking she’ll swoon for you.
Unless you are Passion Pit, that is. I’d been listening to Passion Pit for a few weeks when I found out that the debut EP was initially a Valentine’s Day present for lead singer Michael Angelakos’ girlfriend. Immediately, I went from lusty dance rock love to fear. When I heard lyrics like “You’re the best damn friend that I ever had / You always smile on me when the season’s bad / and I smile upon you too,” I gagged. I questioned myself, my critical integrity and my sentiments about love. How can I look down upon music with such elitism if I’m going to fall for someone’s sappy love letter just because it sounds like lo-fi MGMT mixed with the Stars, just a splash of Lucky Dragons, all stirred together with some Chromatics?
And then I listened to the album for another two weeks and realized that it’s great because it’s soooo creepy and rad. I don’t know if this is a coincidence but the band name is also the name of an adult movie from 1985 starring Traci Lords and John Holmes (thanks IMDB!). I’m deciding against coincidence because those are household porn names and because it’s just what I want to believe. It’s like buying a Valentine’s card and taping a picture from goatse.cx inside. Buying into the holiday and then slapping it’s clichéd shit across the room in favor of realistic relationships.
Angelakos uses the album to completely reenact relationship drama and enlists a girl singer to bounce lyrics against. Let me tell you there is nothing better then portraying the start of a relationship for your girlfriend and using someone other than her as the female vocalist. And it’s especially true when said vocalist is singing: “Can you see me cry / Tears like diamonds / Down until until they fly / Faster and faster like the speed of love.” Yes, handing your girlfriend a CD where the girl is an overdramatic wreck desperate for love and telling her you recorded it for her for Valentine’s Day is f**king amazing. The album is littered with relationship drama mixed with a cliché statements of love, which may sound like it’s an uneven piece of crap. Instead, it comes off as a real statement of love and thankfully, it’s perfectly sculpted for the dance floor.
So, what have we learned? Stalking a girl and writing her a masturbatory song filled with kitsch and clichés? Bad. Writing your girlfriend a Valentine’s Day dance song about relationship difficulties filled with overdramaticism, clichés about love and naming it (possibly) after a porn? Good. Way good.