Johnny Nash :: Love Ain’t Nothing (But a Monkey On Your Back)
I sometimes feel that talking about love is, in many respects, an unavoidable fool’s errand. While trying to articulate how, why, and for whom our bellies burn, we may find ourselves first having to suppress that knee-jerk tendency to employ some of the clichés that our pervasive culture industry has defined narrowly as love. From coveted blood diamonds to hokey pet names, the commercially viable “I love you” dialect has been systematically embedded in our subconscious and can impair our ability to communicate creatively and authentically how and why we adore, want, and need one another. To be sure, each of us is an inimitable occurrence in this vast universe and, despite our individuality, we continually resort to the use of hackneyed statements, predictable behaviors, and borrowed gestures in an awkward attempt to say just what we mean. I think that the poet protests this state of affairs and struggles constantly to speak of love descriptively and evocatively. Of the standardized love vernacular in question, Nietzsche said that poets and artists “despise the lax procession in borrowed manners and appropriated opinions.” Sure, such a statement is arguably pretentious and maybe even cruel in some respects as it arguably insults millions of well-meaning lovers. To be fair, the customary tongue can and does, to some extent, work. However, for the millions more that find love to be less than all it’s cracked up to be, the expression of amorous sentiment is an enterprise mired in hogwash, greeting card pretexts, and unrealistic expectations.
Within this line of criticism, one can also discern a marked disjuncture between popular culture’s reductive definition of love and the infinitely varied ways we experience it. While the Hallmark/Hollywood love model is most assuredly flawed, academic assessments are equally dubious. That is to say that formulaic and absolutist explanations of amore fail to grasp the totality of the nebulous subject. So I ask, must the way in which we talk about love (like every other human possibility), become routine and quantifiable? Is being in love best described as a mere chemical reaction?
According to Johnny Nash, “Love ain’t nothing but a monkey on my back, a word, a word I wish I never heard.” As he belts out those lines with sultry woe, I can’t help but feel like he’s all ‘pure being’ and shit because he draws an implicit distinction between the tired concept and the elusive real thing for which pedestrian parlance (and science) has no perfect moniker. I think that he is suggesting that his faith in essentialist notions of love has brought him misery instead of the joy he once expected. While he rejects the booby-trapped trope of love, he nonetheless showers you with something reminiscent of what love might really entail as he sings with such passion, ardor, and pain. Furthermore, for him (and us) love is not yet a specific taste or a precise recipe; rather, it remains something far beyond the reach of slogans and equations. In short, there’s nothing like the real thing, baby.
Love Ain’t Nothing (But a Monkey On Your Back)
Johnny Nash (wikipedia)
oh D,
Such beautiful words.
I show my love with money. Straight up dollar bills yo!