Kontextmaschine

21st October 2021

Post reblogged from argumate with 246 notes

argumate:
profound-yet-trivial:
The word/phrase “lovelight”, meaning how someone’s eyes look when they’re in love, comes up really frequently in pop songs written before 1980. Then it basically evaporated from culture in an instant. It’s not just that it’s an uncool word or concept, it’s that people stopped using it overnight.
Examples in old lyrics of significant songs:
Paul Simon, “Something So Right”
Steve Miller Band, “Jet Airliner”
The Supremes, “When the Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes” (their first Top 40 single!)
Bobby Bland (then covered by Grateful Dead), “Turn On Your Love Light”
ABBA, “Lovelight” (of course)
And now, when was the last time you heard it outside the context of an old song?
Now, I don’t like the phrase. It feels cloying and kind of… objectifying? Like the thing you’re admiring about the other person is how demonstrably they’re in love with you?
But the thing I’m fascinated by, here, is the cultural equivalent of an animal going extinct and being quickly covered up by a layer of sediment, so that the only people who will notice it are future archaeologists.
funky, I’ve never noticed that word at all
This is really stupid, but i feel the need to get this off my chest. I have thought about this, even if there is a Robbie Williams hit from the mid 2000s and ngram data that puts a lie to the premise. In the 70s, the most significant song usage of the compound word was Turn on your Lovelight - it was a cover of the song that got Them broken so Van Morrison kept playing it and it started to get legacy coverage by the Dead, Jerry Lee Lewis, Tom Jones, Edgar Winter Group and Bob Seger (I can’t be the only one here who has a Columbia Record and Tape Club issued Smokin’ OP’s) among others, but as the decade aged, curdling of the cultural touchy-feely that got reduced into 80s new ageism built up to a pushback against anything that smacked of moonbeam infused language, which fully crashed around the end of disco and the receding of adult contemporary radio dominance (1982). The phrase turn on your lovelight would have been a phrase floating in the ether.

My theory is that (again, I know this is incredibly dumb) Neil Diamond, Mr. woo woo schmaltz wizard, who was coming of of 4 top 10 hits in 2 years, put out “Turn on your Heartlight” (inspired by the film E.T., no less), a song that I repeatedly heard misidentified at the time as Turn on your Lovelight, that consolidated all the social forces surrounding the end of the era when anyone who liked piña coladas, repped Godspell, or mentioned von Däniken could walk around unashamed, ending his chart career (no more even top 40 hits) and the usage of the word lovelight in a case of mistaken identity. I actually think the song even hurt E.T.’s long term cultural impact since the last thing I can remember of the movie at the time it was out was Entertainment Tonight playing the song over a montage off the alien’s glowing chest saying El-i-ot and shit. The song was released Sept 1982. The first single from Thriller was Oct, with the album following in Nov. This was a hard close bracket for a big cultural Age, the jump the shark moment for the no-cringe era. I told you it was asinine, but now I can stop thinking about it.