Sappho Walked so Taylor Swift Could Run: The Evolution of the Love Song from the Ancient Agora to the MetLife Stadium

Our ancient Greek and Roman ancestors had surprisingly similar relaxed attitudes towards love and sex to the attitudes we have today. Many antiquity experts trace the love song origins to Sappho, a Taylor Swift of her day of whom Ovid said: “What did Sappho of Lesbos teach her girls except how to love?” Accompanied by her lyre, she sang frankly and unapologetically about romantic love and desire and is considered to be the originator of “lyric poetry.”  Her male contemporaries, however, considered love to be dangerous and destructive, not to mention distracting to their heroic pursuits, expansive war campaigns, and patriarchal state-building. They dismissed romantic love as an affliction, a madness of the mind, a mischief of the Gods, so hilariously depicted by Shakespeare in “A Midsummer Night's Dream.” So, whether it was tales of Odysseus and his men plugging their ears in order not to fall prey to the enchanting songs of the sirens or using sex as a weapon to defeat Circe's sorcery, their songs warned of the dangerous, destructive nature of romantic love. Ovid and Virgil, their Ancient Roman descendants, wrote similar cautionary or cynical tales that pitted men and women against each other, and presented love as a power struggle that threatened emotional ruin and humiliation.

During the Middle Ages, after Christianity took a firm hold of the European continent, longing and restrained adoration from a distance replaced physical desire and emotional turmoil in the western love song. Somehow, medieval troubadours misread and misunderstood the irony and the ridicule of Ovid's advice and “Ars Amatoria” and took him at his word. They sang of unrequited love, suffering and chivalrous sacrifices, laying the foundation to our modern views on courtship and romance. In these songs, women were no longer powerful, dangerous seductresses, but distant, chaste, unattainable objects of romantic desire. Men in these songs became slaves to love, falling to women's feet, at their beck and call, like Wesley in “The Princess Bride.” Women's complete loss of agency in these love songs, on the other hand, closely paralleled their loss of agency inside the patriarchal structures of medieval Europe; they were mostly mute. But this new power dynamic reflected one important evolutionary truth — women were far more important from an evolutionary perspective, so they needed to be shielded and protected. So, unlike their ancient Greek and Roman predecessors, these medieval love songs were scrubbed clean of all physical desire, prompting men to courtly love and injecting the love song with longing, angst and misery of heartbreak that dominates the genre to this day.

In the following centuries, the love song continued its sentimental trajectory down into musical purgatory, moving out of the public sphere, where it was shunned and despised as trivial and irrelevant, and into the private parlors, where now women sang the words that men wrote for them and about them. That is until something unexpected happened in America at the end of the 19th century. The slave ships that unloaded African men and women on the American continent in bondage, against their will, brought along a rich music tradition with its own beats, rhythms and notions of love, that weren’t burdened by Ovid, the courtly troubadours or the morals imposed by Christianity. The arrival of blues and jazz on the American Music Scene was slavery's ultimate revenge — slavery may have taken away these people's physical freedom, identity and even language, but it could not take away the rhythm and the beat to which their hearts fell in love and sang about it. So, while the European Love Song continued to linger in saccharine sentimentality, blues and jazz singers in early 20th-century America revolutionized the genre by singing about love with raw, unapologetic honesty. These weren't just songs about love, these were songs about freedom and identity, turning the love song into a form of protest. 

New, loud, and rebellious, rock-n-roll burst on the scene by the mid-20th century. Born in the clash of the Western and African musical traditions, rock-n-roll love songs challenged the quiet, polite narratives about love and romance. These love songs were about youth, rebellion and freedom, shaking the establishment with their loud chords and loud lyrics that did not shy away from passion and desire. Rock-n-roll shook, twisted, and shouted about love the way that no one had shouted about it before. By the 1960s and 70s, during the height of the anti-war, civil rights, and women’s rights protest movements, love songs moved firmly into the counterculture and became unapologetically political. This defiant soundtrack to the sexual revolution challenged the power structures, rejected rules and conformity, imposed by the establishment, and celebrated love in all forms. Love, in these songs, was a celebration of freedom and a weapon against war, racism, and misogyny. 

Today’s love song seems a lot tamer and quieter by comparison, but it continues to push boundaries and challenge the status quo by singing about nontraditional love and defying gender stereotypes with unprecedented emotional honesty and vulnerability. Just as it did throughout the course of human history, the love song continues to highlight and reflect the flash points of our social and political discourse. But, more importantly, these songs remind us of our innate need for connection and our shared human experience. So, this Valentine’s Day, whether you are in love, newly heartbroken, quietly pining or intentionally single, you will surely find a love song that reflects exactly how you feel to remind you that you are not alone.