I was listening to, “I love you like a love song baby,” by Selena Gomez, in my car the other day. Initially, I thought, “how stupid, a love song can’t love.” Is her love like the love expressed in other love songs, or does she love love songs? Or does she indeed love, like a love song, a thing?
And the lyrics.
"There’s no way to describe what you do to me,
You just do to me, what you do
…
You are magical, lyrical, beautiful, You are…
And I want you to know baby."
There’s no way to describe what he does, he just does what he does? I took this to mean, just seeing him say, eating a sandwich, makes her heart flutter, but I read the lyrics to my boyfriend, and he thought it was something sexual, which makes sense too. She lets us fill in the blanks.
Which is dangerous. I once heard a story: four young men in the south during the 60s were driving in a town, and they heard the radio announcer say that a local high school had been recently integrated, and that there was a crowd of people protesting. “What, I can’t believe it, let’s go over there right now,” they all said. They drove up to the area, and two went to the side protesting the integration, and two went to the side supporting the integration. They had all thought they were outraged by the same idea, but no one explicitly said what outraged them.
Back to Selena. The more I listened to the song on the radio, the more I knew exactly how Selena Gomez felt. She was in teenage love, overwhelmed, and god, he just did what he did, he was just so, so, exactly….yeah.
But I plan to practice the discipline of actually using words.
