Love and Violence in the Music of Late Modernity

Abstract

Using evidence from popular music, this article highlights how contemporary definitions of love combine ideas about the modern self as autonomous and distinct with an emphasis on the importance of sacrifice and devotion to the achievement of successful relationships. The tension between these concepts is manifested in ambivalence to love, with pain, conflict, and violence reoccurring features within popular music. This article argues, that as love is not just a feeling but implicated in structuring intimate behaviors, this understanding of love leads to the naturalizing of conflict and violence in modern relationships.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge Professors Janet Fink, Christine Beasley and Carol Johnson for their comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

1. A later Newman video, Cheating, contains a newspaper headline that tells us they survive.

2. This won the UK Music Video Award for Best Alternative Video on November 8, 2012.

3. This quotation was originally made on Florence Welsh’s My Space page but is no longer available. It was widely cited – see, for example, kperfetto.

4. This occurrence of metaphors of pain and sacrifice has been noted by cultural studies scholars, but they have tended to emphasize, instead, love’s positive dimensions, or, as in Munck and Kronenfeld, construing sacrifice as gain (see Baxter; Johnson).