Just about the only time I ever gain insight into the present state of pop music is at the tail-end of long road trips. It is then, after the twelfth hour or so of driving, at the end of a long day on the road, when my brain has thoroughly melted and formed two running rivulets down the sides of my face, that I am finally forced to silence whatever audiobook I was enjoying and resort to the radio to keep me in a state of minimal consciousness. I then start seeking through the multiple layers of FM stations, dodging the Christian rock ones (instantly recognizable by their generic chords and tell-tale vocabulary choices (if you hear the word “glory,” and it’s not followed immediately by “days,” run)), skipping over the hectoring talk radio, and trying to find some basic catchy beat to bounce to.
In any given summer, there are usually only about two new songs on the radio that will achieve this purpose (a frequency that works great for me, since this is about the number of times per year I make a long road trip of this sort). And these are so easily distinguishable that merely by virtue of searching through stations enough times, catching only the first few seconds of most of the offerings, I am usually able to tell within a few rotations which they are. This summer, one standout was that Olivia Rodrigo vampire song, which was undeniably compelling and engrossing (though, as other critics pointed out, a bit too heavy-handed in its lyrical choices; a trace more subtlety might have helped).
But the indisputable frontrunner—the official song of the summer—was that K-Pop “Cupid” song that was playing on half the stations every hour. It had all the elements of the perfect pop song. Catchy, simple, memorable, stirring, and with exactly the right quantity of melodrama and self-pity. The lyrics are maudlin and overstated in describing a plight that is eminently survivable and temporary in reality, but that seems fatal and eternal at a certain age. In this way, they somehow manage to wring the heart, while also providing one the assurance that everyone involved will ultimately be okay. (Plus it’s all such a perfect commercial work of pre-packaged and marketable teen angst that one does not fear for an instant anyone here is actually suffering.)
But what especially caught my attention in the song was a line pondering the inexplicable absence of Cupid as a demigod, precisely when his services are most needed. He is the deus absconditus of the song—a being prayed too and invoked, but who never manifests. “I guess,” the speaker eventually observes, despairing of the demigod’s assistance, “he got lost or flew away.” And one detects in the line a trace of the satire with which the prophet Elijah heaped scorn upon the worshippers of Baal. In quizzing them as to why their god never seemed to put in an appearance when summoned, he taunts: “Maybe he’s off on a journey? Maybe he’s wandered away? Maybe he’s asleep?”
I have often had the thought in listening to the endless love songs on the radio that they make a kind of god out of the idea of romantic love—projecting what are essentially transcendent ideals onto a mortal and necessarily finite and disappointing human institution. (The Christian Rock stations I always skate past with revulsion at least don't make that mistake—their god is a literal one—though they undoubtedly make others.) It therefore makes all the sense in the world to me that a pop song exploring disillusionment in love would first personify romance in the form of a god; and then proceed to explore the theme of theological disillusionment by pointing out—Elijah-style—the failures of this deity to intercede when he was called.
In Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the great Victorian skeptic similarly echoes the passage from Elijah, and cites to it obliquely, but he turns his wrath upon the Christian deity of his own society, rather than the Canaanite one. He is pondering the question, after Tess is abducted, of why no cosmic protector intervened to save her in that moment. “[W]here was Tess’s guardian angel? where was the providence of her simple faith? Perhaps, like that other god of whom the ironical Tishbite spoke, he was talking, or he was pursuing, or he was in a journey, or he was sleeping and not to be awaked.” It is this stuff in Hardy that elevates his tales of private suffering into cosmic tragedy—a fist shaken at the heavens, on behalf of an outraged and defenseless humanity.
Similarly, I feel that this one line in “Cupid” changes the song from a mere plaint—a personal, or perhaps more likely, commercial effort to channel an individual’s state of teen angst—into a more universal statement. It is a sigh of private anguish and longing, but also a suggestion of disillusionment with the ideal for which one yearns, and an expression of scorn at a fatuous cosmos that would place one in such a condition, provide one with such hopes and promises, only to completely neglect them and leave one in despair. It is this line that changes the song into a cry of Hardean moral indignation; an expression of what Camus would call “metaphysical rebellion,” the basis and precursor in his scheme to all more complex forms of resistance.
If one is going to be promised transcendent ideals and denied them, one has every right to be angry about that fact. One should shake one’s fist at Cupid for being asleep or wandering off on a journey when he is supposed to be ever-vigilant for precisely these needs. And because it is a deity she indicts, not a merely human oversight, and it is the cosmos she confronts, not merely an individual happenstance, the singer is registering a protest on behalf of us all. She is saying not only that this state of affairs is undesirable, but that it is unjust. And, as Camus would say, what has once been declared unjust must be regarded as wrong not just for me, but for all people. It is a gesture toward human solidarity, in the face of divine indifference.
This is what I hear in it, anyway. And it made “Cupid” the song of my summer.
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