Baby, Let Me Follow You Down

Abstract

In this article, we examine the love–death dialectic through a mosaic of story and song. Layering personal narrative and musical chronicles about love, life, and death—from the heroic to the tedious, the passionate to the mundane, the tragic to the contented, the transgressive to the faithful, and fantasy to reality—we consider the marriage of love and loss in narratives where multiple instantiations of the truth mix and mingle. We use these disparate creations to evocatively dramatize the magnetic allure of endless, inexhaustible love in light of our inevitable extinction. The love impulse, says Becker, is the antithesis to the fearful losses that mark our long descent to the grave. Following Becker’s lead, we take the measure of idealized passion in enduring relationships and assert the catalytic dynamism of heroic transcendence in everyday intercourse. From the storybook tales we author with family, lovers, and other close conspirators, sagas of romance, lasting companionship, marriage, hearth and home, birth and death; to the songbook—with a focus on splatter platters—the trite songs of teenage tragedy and mayhem produced in the last half of the 20th century and still popular into the 21st—juxtaposed with German Romantic opera, we examine how celebrated artists, Brill Building songsmiths, and everyday dreamers aestheticize love, life, and death. In pillow talk, in conversational idylls, and in song, what we say about love tells us what it means to live, to desire, and to die.