'Take Responsibility'

Take Responsibility? For What Exactly?

This is part 1 in a trilogy of love-gone-wrong songs. As noted previously, I'm not great on love songs.  It takes a special talent to write love songs and sing them with a straight face and mean it. You have to be like Paul McCartney or something but try as I might, I don't really have the earnest-ness nor the un-ironic belief in love. They make a stage show out the Beatles' music and it's titled 'LOVE'. The Beatles wrote exhaustively about the condition of love and even told us that the love we take is equal to the love we make, and by golly I'm not even sure what that bit of rhetoric means in real life.

It's very strange when something moves you deeply and yet you don't relate to it. I've been listening to the 50th anniversary re-mix of 'Abbey Road' and I tell you, it's a very different world we live in today, and it's a different kind of cultural landscape we inhabit. A lot has happened since then to re-contextualise all those fab songs. It actually is really hard to "get back home" as Paul sings in 'Golden Slumbers'. And yet one basks in the glory of the testament to love that is 'Abbey Road'. It's great, even though I'm now convinced Paul McCartney might be insane based on the psychotic emotional detachment of  'Maxwell's Silver Hammer'.

I tend towards Frank Zappa who wrote broken hearts are for assholes ("yes yes!"), and  I feel far more equipped to exhaustively survey that emotional terrain than others simply because I am wired the way I am. I am also sensitive to the manner in which people talk about love but go in hard for self-serving platitudes or downright selfish acts. There's nothing like a break up to demonstrate how awful human beings can be, and for some reason I have an eye for it. The various divorces and breakups that happened to the people around me have fed plenty of grist in to this mill. We are all capable of being such assholes when things go south - and in the end the grief you get is equal to the grief you give.

In the five stages of grief there's Denial and Anger as the early stages of responding to bad news.
This is the song that covers those bits. The overriding thesis will of course forever be "broken hearts are for assholes"

Are you an asshole too?



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