Sun, 21 March 2010
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From Tina Turner to self-help books, online dating and a flirting “expert,” the modern world is full of people capitalising on that age-old question: what is love? Jessica Dorrance takes on this ephemeral subject by examining love in pop culture and one man’s flirting initiative.“Oh, what’s love got to do, got to do with it?” Tina Turner belted out in 1984, setting the stage for what many have billed as the most spectacular comeback in rock music history. Eight years earlier, Turner had left her husband and musical partner Ike Turner after a fight, with only 36 cents, a gas station credit card and the legal burdens of a canceled tour.
Turner’s throaty song, which went on to launch her prodigious solo career, is surprisingly ambiguous. In it, Turner is essentially asking, “What is love?” However, interestingly, Turner never literally asks the question in her song. Instead, like a wounded lover, she circles around the point, sketching in areas around the question but never truly quite getting there.
In “What’s Love Got to Do with It” Turner sings about the differences between rote physical sensation and love. She sings about her confusion – about experiencing something she has read “someplace” but can’t name. She sings about warding off something that scares her. And yet, the only thing she ever directly says about love in the song is that it’s a “second-hand emotion” – which is, in itself, a curious phrase. Is Turner saying love takes a back seat to sex? That love is something that has never truly belonged to her? That love is something that is so worn out that it is perennially unattractive?
Grappling with love 
The Queen of Rock n’ Roll is not the first person to grapple with the subject of love. Throughout history, from Plato to Shakespeare to Oprah, love has always been a force that is at once overwhelmingly powerful and yet utterly perplexing. Humans have harnessed love to defy all kinds of obstacles but love is also something that itself inevitably defies understanding: We just can’t seem to figure it out.
While our century has undoubtedly taken up the mantle of “making sense” of love, modern times and modern capitalism has also led to the development of money-making industries around eros. These industries includes artists like Turner, who make their living off of writing and singing about the subject. However, the contemporary market has been particularly successful in focusing the discourse around love into an exploration of one, evidently marketable subject: dating.
Witness, for example, the phenomenally successful book on dating, “He’s Just Not That into You,” which has become a cultural touchstone for many Western women.
Recently made into a movie starring romantic comedy powerhouses Jennifer Aniston, Drew Barrymore and Ben Affleck, the book was written in 2004 by two former “Sex and the City” writers – a show whose bread and butter was exploring the idiosyncrasies of dating in the bourgeois world of single New York women.
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