On first impression, it appears that society, has played the trick of convincing those in love, or who wish to be in love, that what they indulge in is outside the public domain. This trickery might be understood as an autonomous, spontaneous, complex and, at tunes deeply confusing, set of individualistic, physiological or psychological experiences. While these experiences of a unique encounter with another person cannot be ignored, it is just as important to recognize that these events are difficult to separate from the historical and social contexts which help individuals make sense of falling in, heterosexual, love.

It is one of these social contexts, the relationship between the private experience of romantic love and its public representation in rock and popular music which is considered here. In particular, the romantic male’s appropriation and representations, in songs, of the remembrance of a now unattainable women. Within this context, it is possible, to suggest two common themes. One is the man’s unrequited love for a women, this is exemplified by the following lyrics from Billy Bragg’s 'The Saturday Boy’:

And she never came to the phone
She was always in the bath
In the end it took me a dictionary to
find out the meaning of unrequited
While she was giving her-self for free at
a party to which I was never invited

I never understood failings then and
I hide my humble hopes now
Looking back she made us want her
A girl not old enough to shave her legs

Bragg’s lyric, can be connected to the other common theme of representing the unattainable women. Bragg is "looking back" to his days at school when he and the unnamed girl sat together "in double history twice a week". While lyrics which narrate a present requited love cannot be disregarded, greater consideration is given here to this male retro yearning or remembrance for the now unattainable women. Remembrance, in this form, involves the man’s rescue from the present. It is more than nostalgia, for remembrance also evokes a melancholic attempt, which fails, to re-capture a more youthful and innocent time which was less cluttered with the cynicism of later life.

Remembrance involves the man’s escape from the present through the pleasure of suffering for the past. This escape attempt might be a pre-death acceptance of masculine failings, defects and imperfections. Consider Billy Bragg’s version of 'Walk Away Renee‘ which is appropriated by Bragg as a context for his own lyric. The opening and final verses are as follows:

She said it was just a figment of speech
I said you mean figure
She said no, I mean figment, because she
Could never see it happening
But it did.

I confronted her about it
I said, I'm the most illegible bachelor in town
And she said, yeah, that's why I can
never understand any of those silly letters you send

And then one day it happened
she cut her hair and I stopped loving her.

Bragg confesses to the listener his, or at least the narrator's, acceptance of imperfection as a man when at the outset of this relationship he reveals: "my nose began to bleed". In terms of the narrative the listener is being asked to situate themselves in the past and to look back from later life to the pain of adolescent love. A pain that is venerated as a site of innocence but also mocked as a location of inarticulacy - witness the use of inappropriate words like "figment", the repetition of conjunctions and phrases such as "I said", She said". That this is remembrance of a more innocent past is evident by the deliberately self-conscious use of these inexactitudes and the "Walk Away Renee" refrain which would only be appropriate to a narrator whose adolescence was at the time of this song's first release. While the lyrics cannot be ignored, for they create the narrative, it is the tune which locates the song as a remembrance of a now unattainable woman.

The public articulation through sound, and words of an unattainable love is read by men to encapsulate their own sense of loss. In this context artistic production is therapeutic because it either makes a personal sense of loss understandable or keeps the memory of unattainability alive. Pop and rock recordings provide a mass aide-memoir through which men's private feelings and experiences become public in the form of artistic expression. In turn such public expressions are re-appropriated by the listener as a text that connects with some aspect of their self-identity. Yet, the 'real' self-identity of the unattainable woman remains beyond the man. As an external, the woman is outside the ultimate control to the man. From this, it is possible to suggest that the unattainable women while a (loved) object of remembrance is also a source of male anxieties of insecurity and jealousy. To resolve this anxiety the romantic desire for the unattainable woman becomes a means of codifying a man's potentially disruptive, irrational self. This demands an object of desire on which to project and reflect the characteristics of the private self. This romantic 'other" usually manifests itself in the form of an 'us' but from somewhere else. In short, the object of desire - in this case, the unattainable woman - is an active male creation.

The desired, but unattainable, women while 'real' is appropriated and recreated, by the male, in the form of images of femaleness.

Anxieties, can be resolved through the individual's ability to work themselves into narratives of romantic love. This is reflected in Brunt's observation within popular art that it is like "getting to star in your own movie." Similarly, through pop and rock recordings attempts are made to liquidize the boundary between the public narrative of the song and the private listeners: it is not always decidable if the universal emotion and feelings of romantic loss or the producer of the "text" gives the lead in its production.

The listener actively enters and appropriates the song. A recording as a document is constructed as evidence of the listeners real past, no matter what the truth of this personal history may have been. In short, the recorded song as a document is proof of a past; yet such documents can be constructed and manipulated. It is this willingness to search for self-identity and a personal history that creates the unattainable women. However, the listener can only re-enter the narrative of the song by acknowledging the overwhelming power of the present.

The consumption of narratives on the remembrance of an unattainable women can be understood as a sanctioned emotional disruption. A sanctioned disruption unsettles the accepted social and cultural protocols, in the form of increased masculine self-indulgence and irrational behaviour, that is allowable and, to some extent expected. This is evident when we look at the lyric of 'Can t Stand Losing You' by The Police. A reading of the final verse reveals the immersion of the male ego in rejection:

I guess this is our last goodbye
And you don't care so I won't cry
But you'll be sorry when I'm dead
And all this guilt will be on your head
I guess you'd call it suicide
But I'm too full to swallow my pride.

There is here, the male's desire to witness his own death and the reaction to it. It is an interesting trait that in this kind of narrative construction the male protagonist's character is cast as in some way lacking. The character failing or even 'defect' is echoed in the above verse as the narrator wants witness recognition of his worth from reaction to his, hoped for, sorely missed absence. Whilst it is a case of 'I'm a good guy and a wrongs been done to me' as far as the songs protagonist's is concerned, the audience, is invited to share a different perspective. A perspective that sees this character as spiteful and petty: something given added emphasis when we consider this character's obsessive, list making nature suggested by the line

I see you sent my letters back
And my LP records and there all scratched

An initial observation might indicate that it is unclear what society gains from this indulgence. On closer inspections, it might be that love or its remembrance functions in a similar manner as, according to Bakhtin the medieval carnival did, as depicted by Rabelais: as a temporary suspension, even inversion, of the normal protocols and hierarchy. This too was thought to be autonomous and spontaneous but did in reality have a degree of official church sanction in the expectation that the pull towards disruption could be kept within confined limits and ultimately purged. Just as the potentially chaotic carnival had an unofficial agreed set of parameters so too does the potentially disruptive experience of past love.

While lyrics are not the sole factor to be considered, it is not too strong to write that they are basic to the majority of pop and rock recordings. This point can be support when it is recognized that instrumental hits remain relatively rare and Smash Hits with its heavy emphasis on the words of songs, is the market leader within the music press. To be more exact, the vehicle for the lyric is because, as Simon Frith Acknowledges, songs are speech acts; "plays more than poem". And as plays, what is obscured is as meaningful as what is made clear. Just as a De Niro mumble can be as expressive as a perfectly articulated Jeremy Irons phrase, so too can drowned out Robert Smith vocal where not much more that the title "Sometimes I dream", are audible as on 'Charllotte Sometimes', are all that is necessary for the gothically inspired narrative fantasies of the romantically suffering male. It seems clear that there is a close relationship at work whereby, to paraphrase Frith music gives lyrics their vitality and lyrics give music its social use. But social use which appears to be borne of such banality! Indeed, once divided up into discrete elements banal it is, but, as an integrated whole, it a medium that is capable of carrying a great deal of emotional baggage: and the reason for this, and a possible area for further study, is rock and pop's ability to defamiliarise the cliché and thereby, through being at once familiar yet strange, a suitable narrative medium for us to keep reconstructing ourselves in. This, as Shklovsky has stated, is the technique of all art; but it is one that seems particularly relevant to a major art form of an age when individuals no longer trust their own senses and emotions unless they are in some way mediated.