More Food of Love

An alternate five:

"Forbidden Fruit" by the Blow Monkeys, a song of tragicomic, debonair delirium, saw me through my most passionate crush, in eighth grade, on a Swedish girl named Livia Millhagen. The great line "I have never seen a girl as beautiful as you... well that's not exactly true-- only yesterday" demonstrates the truth of Grigorii Kruzhkov's observation that "The greatest Romantics are also the greatest Anti-Romantics."

"If I Were a Bell" by Frank Loesser is another delirium, sung by a Salvation Army officer to an incorrigible gambler in Guys and Dolls after he gets her drunk in Havana. Corroborates my theory that love between human beings allows us to see the true lovableness of "inanimate" objects, whether through metaphors or in themselves.

"Hey Bulldog" by the Beatles-- soundtrack to another eighth-grade crush.

"Das geht doch keinen etwas an" by Suzanne Doucet-- 1960s West German bubblegum, with a certain undertone of sadness. Don't know what the title or most of the words mean, but I gather it's a lovesong. Must have listened to it about 50 times on a Lufthansa flight back from Europe with my grandfather in 1994-- along with another song, "Auch der schonste Tag geht mal zu Ende," it was the only song on the German Oldies channel that sounded like it could be used on the soundtrack to a movie of a book by Patricia Highsmith. Haven't heard either since, but I still remember the melodies of both songs and particularly the shy, Stoic sound of Doucet's voice.

"The Death of Tybalt" by Serge Prokofiev. I've often said that Wagner and Tchaikovsky were the greatest rock composers of all time, but Prokofiev is rock and emo and grunge and jazz and pop all put together. This song begins with something out of a Gene Kelly musical and then builds to a climax with the only fight music that has the intensity of one of those long fight scenes without music in a movie-- just recently saw such a scene on TV, at the end of some old Janet Leigh movie about King Arthur. The movie's not great, but the scene was. There are other songs in the ballet that are more beautiful-- the love music, the lovers' funeral march-- but this is the most intense.