Best Love Songs (Ever)
What’s your favorite love song? This Valentine’s Day the Multimedia Storytelling students tell us why they think their favorite song does the job best. Visit their class blog for more stories at https://usfhivemind.wordpress.com/
The Occult Heartbreak of ‘Eyes Without a Face’
The only experience nearly as romantic as love is the ensuing heartbreak from a love lost.
With Valentine’s Day encroaching upon us like a bullet train, there are only two options, RUN far and fast or embrace it with open arms. Your choice of action will no doubt depend on past experiences, good and bad. No matter the particulars, there is universal agreement that love hurts. And the only thing that stings more than love, is when the flame is extinguished and a pile of ashes lay where there was once passion.
In my own defense, this post may seem cynical and perhaps even bitter, but as a freshly heartbroken teenage girl… I am allowed my mourning period. Alors, if you are in my position or feeling similarly distraught by love, let me suggest to you my favorite “love song.” Billy Idol’s “Eyes Without A Face” has all the key components of a successful ’80s love song: dreary lyrics, excessive use of synth and a haunting music video complete with bad graphics and occult undertones. How, you may ask, could this be considered a “love song?”
Throughout the song and accompanying music video (a masterpiece in my humble opinion), Idol tells the story of a once-rich and feverish love turned cold and heartless.
Idol opens the song with a desperate plea: “When I’m far from home Don’t call me on the phone To tell me you’re alone“
My interpretation is intimately entwined with my own experience. Idol is expressing the hopelessness felt after an already bad relationship has become markedly worse. He is warning his lover not to rely on him; the right to his companionship has run dry. This feeling is all too real and almost too raw for my own state of being. The emotion poor, heartbroken Billy is singing about could be compared to a lover only needing and appreciating you after the fact — the kind of lover that creeps back into your life again and again with a text or a call (or God forbid, a Facebook “poke”), only once you have just begun to feel relief in his or her absence.
