As the web’s resident critic of pop song lyrics, I appreciate the sentiment behind Jesse McCartney’s Beautiful Soul, but I’m not sure the chorus is exactly what your object-of-smittenness wants to hear:
I don’t want another pretty face
I don’t want just anyone to hold
I don’t want my love to go to waste
I want you and your beautiful soul
In other words, McCartney wants to have a homely girl who doesn’t believe in the use of birth control. Then again, maybe I’m just reading too much into his use of the phrase “I don’t want my love to go to waste”...
6 comments:
You think WAY too much about this sort of thing.
(ps…couldn’t he simply be wasting his love on a vapid beauty who is too shallow to appreciate it….as opposed to…uh…the thing suggested in your post)
/never heard the song
//pop music sucks
///sorry..I mean “sux”
Ah, yes, that’s the surface interpretation, but you really need to deconstruct the lyrics.
And how can you be a tragically hip professor without a working knowledge of pop culture?
I always knew you were a closet post-modernist
At my age, the words “tragic” and “hip” are usually interspersed around the words “fall” and “replacement.”
Well, closet something at any rate.
But, seriously, it’s biblical, man.
Hey, maybe it’s just a modern version of an old song: “If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, never make a pretty woman your wife, so from my personal point of view, find an ugly woman to marry yoooouuu!”
In my average-looking person experience, I think all we average-looking people have an implicit mistrust of the “beautiful ones,” as Prince dubbed them, who “always smash the picture, always, every time.” So I find myself agreeing with Scott that it is about a man who is tired of betting on a beautiful face – as many men throughout history have done – only to be let down in the end.
I get paid by the word, if you can’t tell. ;)
Oh, I’m sure that’s what McCartney thinks he wrote. But as anyone in the English department would tell you, he actually is subconsciously lusting for his mom or something.
BTW, if someone’s paying you by the word for comments here, it certainly isn’t coming from our Amazon.com or AdSense money. Especially since it adds up to, er, basically nothing. Sorry to disappoint!