Male Suffering in Song
• Headspaces
This follows on nicely from my Emotional Sadism entry…
It took me a while to work this out. I love it when men sing sad songs. My favourite misery album is Disintegration by The Cure. At those rare times when I need to cry I put this on my headphones and it won’t be long before all the bad is out and I feel better.
Merely being mopey is not enough. Not by a long shot. I want to hear pain and anguish in the boys’ voice. To taste it. Robert Smith does this very well and with a sexual edge and it makes me melt. Often, I like to imagine myself as the cause of the pain. Of course, songs don’t have to be literal - they are verbal fantasies, often deliberately vague so that one is free to interpret and let the imagination run wild. This is a very good thing : )
Marc Almond is another great example, and as well as being a very sexy and expressive voice he seems attracted to that dark territory that I love. The part from Tainted Love that goes “I gave you all a boy could give you, take my tears and that’s not nearly all!” has been known to send shivers down my spine. He just sounds… at his wit’s end. It’s wonderful.