Love songs are an antidote to the culture of death

Love songs make us happy. They rekindle delightful memories and remind us of the people who matter most in our lives. Interestingly, contemporary songwriters are composing fewer love songs these days, as I’ve written before. There’s a reason love songs began a precipitous decline beginning in the mid nineties: Roe v Wade.

Bear with me. The Roe decision hit on January 22, 1973. The decision devalued human life by affirming your worth was conditioned on another person or persons. And it devalued human sexuality by removing the self-giving, life-giving beauty of sexual intimacy. It turned sex into simply a physical act and removed the dignity and spiritual implications. In other words, the generation that grew up after Roe confused real love with the sex act.

An attack on human dignity

Roe was a headlong attack on the inherent, God-given dignity each person possesses, as proclaimed in the sacred texts that spawned Western Civilization.

Roe was a repudiation of the very meaning of life. It suggested that your life had absolutely no intrinsic meaning, because it made it contingent on another person.

The Roe generation came of age in the 1990s. That generation’s songwriters slowly, but surely, stopped writing love songs. After all, they grew up in a milieu that devalued human life and the Judeo-Christian underpinnings that animated our belief in the sanctity of life.

Christian scripture tells us God is love. So love songs are all about God and His creation, whether the composer realizes that or not.

What does the world need?

I recently heard a Sister of Life speak. Sister Bethany Madonna asked, “What does this culture need? What does the world need? What the world needs now … is love sweet love.”

And with that simple phrase, ‘love sweet love,’ she and an audience of 50,000 people were instantly connected. Everyone knew what was coming next as she sang, “It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of.”

The power of a love song!

The Jewish born songwriters, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, had no idea that their love song, “What the World Needs Now is Love,” would be invoked at a Catholic Eucharistic Congress 59 years after they penned this gem.

52 Greatest Love Songs Ever

The world needs love songs as an antidote to this culture of death. That’s why Pulse’s blogpost is going to reveal to you the “52 Greatest Love Songs Ever” over the next year.

Once a week, we will unveil a legendary song which can serve as an antidote to the apathy and cynicism bred by the culture of death.

A freelance music blogger named DJ Rob actually tracked the decline of the love song by analyzing Billboard’s Premier Singles Chart. He tallied the number of #1 songs with the word ‘love’ in the title decade by decade. Here’s what he discovered:

1960s: 23 love songs
1970s: 26 love songs
1980s: 25 love songs
1990s: 24 love songs
2000s: 7 love songs
2010s: 5 love songs

Again, the drop kicked in around 1994 as the Roe generation came of age. Sadly, when you listen to a contemporary song that invokes the word ‘love’ in the title, you quickly hear that the song has nothing to do with love. Take Jason Derulo’s #1 hit, “Savage Love.” The title itself is a tip-off that this song isn’t really about love as, let’s say, a St.Thomas Aquinas would define love. Especially when Derulo purrs:

“When you kiss me, I know you don’t give two f*#ks … but I still want that.”

Ugh.

Aquinas says that to love is to will the good of the other. This blog is going to look at the great love songs that helped to civilize a nation. These are the songs that soften your heart and indirectly remind you that God is Love.

Different types of love songs

Just as there are different types of love, there are different types of love songs, including:

• Young love (or new love)
• Romance
• Torch songs
• True love (aka agapé or sacrificial love)

The ’52 greatest love songs ever’ that you’re going to hear are my list. Yours will be different than mine. In fact, my list is constantly changing. But I have given great consideration to this list. These are the songs that have affected my life in wonderful ways.

I hope it does the same for you.

Be sure to subscribe to our blog for a weekly dose of love.

Tomorrow kicks off this series with song #52 on my list, written by a songwriter EVERYONE reading this knows. It’s a song that explains the necessity of my list.

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