“Lips Of An Angel”

I am known to be — at least by myself — a par­tic­u­lar­ly for­giv­ing (or undis­cern­ing) con­sumer of both music and movies. I have nev­er, for exam­ple, walked out of a movie, either in the the­atre or — per­haps more telling­ly — in what might loose­ly be described as the ‘home view­ing expe­ri­ence’ regard­less of actu­al res­i­den­cy. I think the low point of this might have been late one Sat­ur­day night when I swung by one of the floor lounges in my dorm and stopped in to see what the guys were watch­ing. They were just start­ing to watch Bat­man and Robin, and since I had nev­er seen a Bat­man movie, I sat down to join them. Before too very long into the film, every­one else in the room had wan­dered off to bed or bot­tle, and I was left alone with what even I could see was not a very good movie. But I watched it — alone — to the bit­ter end. True story.

And the same with music. I may not rock out to every song that comes down the pipe, but I roll with a lot of dif­fer­ent stuff. But then Hin­der’s “Lips Of An Angel” comes on the radio, and a part of me that I am not real­ly famil­iar with switch­es on: the part of me that pro­duces strong feel­ings. I hate this song, not dis­like, hate. And it is a hate that has long since crossed into the realm of the irra­tional, which makes it not one jot less intense. 

I can’t quite put my fin­ger on why I feel so strong­ly about this par­tic­u­lar song. It is not a bad song in the strictest sense of the word. It is insipid and pal­pa­bly com­mer­cial, but so are a hell of a lot of oth­er songs that still bring at least mod­er­ate enjoy­ment to this lis­ten­er. It is not the band itself: the band is respectable and not ridicu­lous­ly-heavy, the vocals are decent­ly-exe­cut­ed, and I very much like their pre­vi­ous sin­gle, “Get Stoned”, which I am lis­ten­ing to right now in an as-yet fruit­less attempt to ban­ish the song in ques­tion from my intol­er­ant mind. 

I am tempt­ed to think that it is the con­tent of the lyrics that I react so adverse­ly to. I am for some rea­son very uncom­fort­able with the sto­ry. It seems sil­ly for a devo­tee of Mar­i­lyn Man­son such as myself to raise a moral objec­tion to the lyrics of a song, but nev­er­the­less. Man­son’s lyrics are over the top and dense­ly-lay­ered mas­ter­pieces of shock, schlock and scathing social com­men­tary; Hin­der’s song is an utter­ly straight­for­ward expres­sion of very pedes­tri­an emo­tions of long­ing for a pre­vi­ous sex­u­al part­ner, even (or espe­cial­ly) in the prox­im­i­ty of one’s cur­rent main squeeze. Maybe I am get­ting old and stodgy, but I just don’t rock that way.

I just wish this song would leave me alone.