Best of love songs - Romantic music

If you enter “love songs” into any search engine, you will find billions upon billions of results of lyrics, downloads, ring tones, karaoke tracks, anything you can imagine. Even responses filled with ‘Free online dating’ and ‘Christian online dating’ or even the online dating info with the top 10 online dating! Poems about love date back centuries, not the least of which is anything from the pen of old mate Shakespeare. What is it about affairs of the heart that we find so consuming and fascinating that new verses are being pumped out day after day, often reflecting the same thoughts and conclusions?

Even more fascinating is that they never provide us with an answer to the love paradox that is satisfactory enough so that the long line of bile about unrequited whatever and adolescent claptrap can be ended. Do I sound cynical? Well, put your iPod or your mp3 on shuffle, or turn your radio on.

Is the first song that plays something to do with this noxious paradigm? Is Taylor Swift belting out about her fairytale romance, or Simple Plan whining about how no one likes them (surprising, given how upbeat and positive a persona they proffer) or is it more of a classic, like Elvis Presley’s ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight’?

True, nobody could have done it better than Elvis, but in recent times there has been such an overwhelming torrent of mass-produced bile (you can stand under my umb-a-rella-ella-ella-ella yeah yeah, comes to mind) that the classics that really touched our cold unfeeling hearts are now fast becoming obsolete.

That’s not even to go into the depreciation of the whole emotion of love in most of today’s pop culture – can something that proclaims “You make me want to la-la” ever really take the place of “Embrace me, my sweet embraceable you”? Maybe it can, if your level of romance extends only to the local online dating scene, or even exotic Nigerian online dating. I’ll stick to Presley.