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Cristian Bustos

Prof. Dr. Lars Eckstein

Masterkolloquium

15 September 2016

“Fastlove,” the Love Ballad of the Information Age

You’re in love. You just don’t know it yet…. But you might as well join

the orgy, succumb to the pleasures of the information age. After all, a

computer has already changed your life. (Jack Rochester, John Gantz)

An R&B, disco track, George Michael’s “Fastlove” was released in 1996 through

Virgin Records and it was met with critical acclaim and commercial success in both the

UK and the US. In an Entertainment Weekly review, Jim Farber stated: “It took real guts

to release a salute to a one-night stand in this, the era of abstinence” (“Fastlove”); Al

Weisel from Rolling Stone magazine called the track a “bouncy disco concoction,

flavoured with Dr. Dre-style whistling synths” (“George Michael: Older”). Just nearly a

year before the song’s debut, American entrepreneur Gary Kremer had launched

Match.com, the world’s first mainstream dating site, which ignited a boom of love

chasing through digital technology; a boom which, according to Moroccan sociologist

Eva Illouz, delineated an era in which we started to behave more like shoppers and less

like lovers when it comes to love and dating (qtd. in “Love Hurts More than Ever

Before”); an era in which the technological platforms of social media have converted

people, friends and relationships into data (Van Dijck and Poell 9); an era in which

digital interaction has spawned new forms of emotional clinging, if any; an era in which

love moves and swerves at a higher speed. And it is with this socio-technological

background that I will show how George Michael’s 1996 hit single “Fastlove” can be

the textbook backing track of the fleeting erotic encounters in the information age.

As Illouz puts it in her book “Why Love Hurts,” the perilous state of love in

modern times is not due to broken infancies or the upswing of feminism, but due to

another more pecuniary reason: “The increasing choice from internet dating has

encouraged people to act as ‘shoppers’–demanding, comparing alternatives, constantly

trying to get a better deal and killing off the gut instinct and chance that has always

helped humans to find a mate” (qtd. in “Love Hurts More than Ever Before”). Now we

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are living in the era of Tinder, Hinge and Coffee Meets Bagel. And the success of digital

love is deeply entrenched in the generational shift away from marriage in the UK, the

primary market of “Fastlove,” as 47 per cent of women and 48 per cent of men aged 20

have no intention to marry according to a 2014 report by The Marriage Foundation

(Edgar, “Half of 20-year-olds Will Never Marry in ‘Devastating’ Trend”). These

statistics stand in stark contrast to those of British baby boomers’, whose marriage rate

averages 89,5 per cent in both genders (ibid.). Although the song looked to cater more to

late male baby boomers at the time of its release–those who were in their 30s–it really

seems to predict the dating and mating behaviour of both genders in the following, more

tech-savvy generations. But, how?

It is “Fastlove’s” own musical style that directly lands the listener in the realm of

the information age: from the synthesiser’s whistling run in the intro, to the sampled

drums, double-tracked backing vocal motifs, the scratching pre-outro break, and the

scattered sound effects across the flanging stereo spectrum, this sexy R&B track is

imbued with digital production techniques, courtesy of Michael himself. The singer also

puts up a tremendously devilish act, impersonating an insistent homme fatale in this

erogenous song that blends equal measures of skin, flesh and Pro Tools circuitry.

So, in such acutely technological soundscape of the song, with the asserting

macho irritableness of the singer’s performance, our male “I” looks for an absolutely

instant erotic connection, worthy of Bluetooth, USBs and SD cards: “All that bullshit

conversation/Well, baby can’t you read the signs?/I won’t bore you with the details

baby/I don’t even wanna waste your time/Let’s just say that maybe/you could help to

ease my mind.” Women’s bodies–present in the female backing vocals–seem like a

metaphor for PC detachable external devices under “Fastlove’s” male exasperation with

emotional bonding; even the pervasive unethics of Tinder, OkCupid and Badoo seem to

be predicted in the last line of the verse with, “Baby, I ain’t Mr. Right”, sung by Michael

with seductive affront.

And it seems that “Fastlove’s” digital ambient and mischievous lyrics also

portray committed love as an analog obsolescence: “My friends got their ladies/And

they’re all having babies/But I just wanna have some fun.” In times of reel tape

recordings, even one-night stand songs seemed to have a more romanticised approach;

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Bob Seger sings with intense sentimentality in his 1978 power-ballad, “We’ve Got

Tonight”: “I know your plans don’t include me/Still here we are, both of us

lonely/Longing for shelter from all that we see.” On a similar note, Mick Jagger spurs

one-night stand nostalgia in 1976’s “Memory Hotel”: “We spent a lonely night at the

Memory Motel/It’s on the ocean, I guess you know it well/It took a starry night to steal

my breath away.” Two decades later and through tons of digital wizardry, the “I” in

“Fastlove” enquires his casual lover with sheer macho cynicism: “If you’re looking for

Fastlove/If that’s love in your eyes/It’s more than enough.” He also dares to suggest

“some lessons in love” that go along with this emerging love standard.

And in line with the lyrics of the song, Illouz claims that, “Pre-modern people

felt bound by a simple declaration of love (whilst) modern people prefer to keep their

options always open, even after getting married” (qtd. in “Love Hurts More than Ever

Before”). And she goes further by blaming technology: “Individuals now face a market

of choices, a market of sex, and that can create great conflict and disconnect” (ibid.). She

also asserts that internet’s increasing focus on appearance is diluting the concept of the

soulmate in favour of the sex mate, for which “Fastlove” has an irredeemable Facebook

clue in the lines, “So why don’t we make a little room/In my BMW babe/Searchin’ for

some peace of mind.”

Finally, Illouz concludes that men of the information age have become

“commitment-phobes because the rise of capitalism has encouraged them to be

autonomous and self-centred” (ibid.). And one might agree with that. Still, there is a key

hint of male vulnerability in “Fastlove” that spins her capitalism thesis into a way more

psychological path; by the end of the song, after his unrelenting persuading antics and

succumbence to the pleasures of technology, this new Tinder lover–“Stupid cupid keeps

on calling me/But I see nothing in his eyes”–looks back at his more analog past of

emotional commitment: “I miss my baby, oh yeah/I miss my baby, tonight.” As if his

new cyber-promiscuity in the hyper-connected world actually concealed an emotional

wound, a daunting plea for affection and longing for that partner that he is so eager to

negate with the help of Gary Kremer’s Match.com.

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Works Cited

Dijck, José Van, and Thomas Poell. “Understanding Social Media Logic.” Media and

Communication 1.1 (2013): 2-14. Web. 15 Sept. 2016.

Edgar, James. “Half of 20-year-olds Will Never Marry in 'devastating' Trend.” The

Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group, 9 June 2014. Web. 15 Sept. 2016.

Farber, Jim. “Fastlove.” Entertainment Weekly's EW.com. Entertainment Weekly Inc., 3

May 1996. Web. 15 Sept. 2016.

McVeigh, Tracy. “Love Hurts More than Ever before (blame the Internet and

Capitalism).” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 12 Feb. 2012. Web. 15

Sept. 2016.

Weisel, Al. “George Michael: Older.” Rolling Stone. Jann Wenner, 2 Feb. 1998. Web.

15 Sept. 2016.