I figured the theme of the week these two posts should be lovers, so I’m going to give you a visual/auditory synthesis of epic proportions! Last post we talked about Plath’s poem that deals with inverted love and the benefits and dangers thereof. This post, we’re listening to a Germanic synth-pop/darkwave interpretation of a Shakespeare classic!

(Yes, this is what being in my brain is like. If you’d like an even broader example I will direct you to my notes that I wrote at 3 this morning for short story ideas: Hates colors in LL Bean — replace w/ Raskolnikov’s yellow, Prynne scarlet, etc. Hates mirrors — sister Frankensteins bikini bodies like he paper maches literature. Likes dulling of darkness like B&W TV — hates when TV goes off — reflection, darkness for ppl inside TV. It makes vaguely more sense to me than you, but, there you go.)

This song plods along, building tension, scratching out a melody before going back to a simplistic metronome-like piano rift until the climax and eventual denouement. And boy, howdy, does this song deliver. There are two things that always get me with songs: an awesome bass line and grungy, crunchy percussion.

Don’t lose your heart
We’re made of sterner stuff
We like a bit of rough
Nothing in this world
Can keep me away from you
Lights up the night like you do

Life goes on
It holds no fear for us
Taking the smooth with the rough
Everything seems familiar
Weightless like a dream
Sometimes I can’t even feel

Nothing too amazing in the lyrics here, but, remember this is the same country that gave us “Du Hast,” so you have to be patient. There’s a creeping sense of an unhealthy relationship dynamic here, just like the bottom-of-the-wheel, luckless chap whose passion is turned against him in Plath’s poem. In the song, he’s a controlling, Sting-listening creeper whose entire existence is pivoted on the object of his devotion, and he sees himself as a soldier-of-fortune, a fatalistic man who makes his universe die around him just so he can show how great his love is.

They are, to his mind, “star-crossed lovers / like no others.” He will make her his possession* until there’s nothing left of her; her “heart,” her light, even her dreams are “familiar” because he’s made them for her. He’s unable to anything else because, like Leo in Inception, he can’t tell what is his own creation and what is merely reality, and even if he did, it wouldn’t matter. This is Romeo and Juliet today because there’s no way in hell any parent would allow their 14-year-old daughter to run off with some Don Juan who may or may not be a ladykiller. Shortest play, ever.

Love and what it does to people, good and bad, is obviously a universal theme in poems, songs, *ahem* novels about vampires, but I tend to like the somewhat inching, lurking covetous lust that suffocates all else until love is perverted into a mockery of its true form.

No, I’ve had healthy relationships with all of my boyfriends. Why do you ask?

Also: naked ladies. Your argument is invalid. Is it me, or does that hand on the left there look like it belongs to someone else?

*My father upon listening to Death Cab for Cutie’s “I Will Possess Your Heart”: “Ooh, it’s the stalker song!”