2870: Love Songs

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Love Songs

Title text: The Piña Colada song carves a trajectory across the chart over the course of the song.

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a CREEP- a WEIRDO- Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

The comic shows an xy-chart of various love songs, graphed according to how the subjects of the song feel. The x-axis represents the narrator/singer's feelings for whomever they are singing to or about, from "No!!" to "Yes!!", while the y-axis represents the other person's feelings for the one singing the song.

Song	Artist(s)	About the lyrics	Do I like you?	Do you like me?
No Scrubs	TLC	The narrator is the target of another person's affections but considers that person completely undesirable as a romantic partner.	No!!	Yes!!
That Don't Impress Me Much	Shania Twain		Unclear/Neutral	Yes!
Cry Me a River	Justin Timberlake or Knight/Cocker/Wilson/Welch/Bublé		No!	Yes!
We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together	Taylor Swift	At the start of the song, the narrator has spent a prolonged time in an on-and-off relationship with someone, repeatedly getting close to them before they distance themselves. As the song progresses, the narrator expresses their frustration with their partner and makes it clear that this time, they are the one leaving, and they're never coming back, no matter what their now-former lover says or does.	No!!	Yes?
You're So Vain	Carly Simon		No!	Unclear/Neutral
I Will Survive	Gloria Gaynor		No!	No!
Somebody That I Used to Know	Gotye feat. Kimbra		Unclear/Neutral	No!
You Oughta Know	Alanis Morissette		No!!	No!!
Thank U, Next	Ariana Grande		Unclear/Neutral	Unclear/Neutral
Teenage Dream	Katy Perry (or T. Rex or others)		Yes!!	Yes!!
Shape of You	Ed Sheeran (or Beverly Knight)		Yes!!	Yes!!
I Will Always Love You	Dolly Parton, cover: Whitney Houston		Unclear/Neutral	Yes
Call Me Maybe	Carly Rae Jepsen		Yes!	Unclear/Neutral
Killing Me Softly	Lori Lieberman, cover: Roberta Flack, The Fugees		Yes!!	Unclear/Neutral
Girlfriend	Avril Lavigne (or many others)	The narrator is in love with a boy who already has a girlfriend, and spends the song trying to convince him to dump her so she herself can go out with him.	Yes	Unclear/Neutral
You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'	The Righteous Brothers		Unclear/Neutral	No?
You Belong with Me	Taylor Swift	The narrator has a crush on someone already in a relationship (implied throughout the song to be a toxic one), and lists various reasons why they would make a better partner. It's also worth noting that in the music video, the narrator's crush is actually on decent terms with them, rather than flat-out disliking them as the chart suggests.	Yes	No!
Creep	Radiohead		Yes!!	No!!
The Piña Colada Song (title text)	Rupert Holmes	The narrator is stuck in an unfulfilling relationship and takes out a personal advertisement looking for a new partner. He mentions that he likes Piña Coladas (And getting caught in the rain). He responds to the ad and goes on the date, only to find out that the woman is his partner. They recognize that their relationship isn't as bad as they thought resulting in a trajectory from the lower left to the middle or upper right.	varies	varies

Transcript

This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.

[Y-axis label:]

Do you like me?

[X-axis label:]

Do I like you?

[X- and Y-axis values (from bottom left):]

NO!!; No; Unclear or Neutral; Yes; YES!!

[Top left quarter:]

No Scrubs

That Don't Impress Me Much

Cry Me a River

We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together

[Middle left:]

You're So Vain

[Bottom left quarter:]

I Will Survive

Somebody That I Used to Know

You Oughta Know

[Center:]

Thank U, Next

[Top right quarter:]

Teenage Dream

Shape of You

I Will Always Love You

Call Me Maybe

[Middle right:]

Killing Me Softly

[Bottom right quarter:]

Girlfriend

You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'

You Belong with Me

Creep

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Discussion

I need to know which axis means “does the ‘me’ like them” because I fail to understand it.--172.71.134.164 23:53, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

Pick a song you know that isn't near the (X=Y) line, and it should explain it.

e.g. "That don't impress me much", at centre-top. Clearly the other party is trying to impress (likes the 'me') but Shania is ambivalent in response (she doesn't actually love their being a rocket-scientist, nor hate it).

"Killing me softly..." is from 'me' having love, whilst "You're so vain..." is actively insulting the other party (but indifference by the target could be the attitude).

Though for X=Y items (e.g. "I will survive" - it's declared to be an unamicable but ultimately mutually-acceptable split) the way round of course doesn't matter. 172.69.194.224 00:12, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

I'm hoping "I Will Survive" isn't a reference to the Zootopia abortion comic. 172.68.174.82 23:56, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

Well, some of the (apparently obvious) references I didn't know. First thought about "Girlfriend" was the The Smiths song almost of that name. (And it looks like there are almost thirty possible songs... not sure how many are covers of others... under that exact name.) Can I suggest that any possible songs that could be confused (but maybe not match the plotted position, being of a different story/tone) be recorded in a "Not to be confused with..." section? 172.71.178.177 01:02, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

At first, I confused "The Shape of You" with "The Shape of Things". Whose position and trajectory on the chart would be complex. BunsenH (talk) 19:14, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

not pictured: Jim Steinman songs, which spend most of their time out of the XY plane. 172.69.214.109 00:14, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

Gotta say, Perfect is a far better Ed Sheeran song than Shape of You

The fault here is not so much with the axes or their interpretation as with the verb, "to love." Nothing can be done about the verb "to love." 172.70.210.62 04:19, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

(reads comic) (automatically sorts in all "Offspring" love songs) (thanks very much, xkcd, you got me again) 172.71.160.124 09:24, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

Or Rammstein. 162.158.95.114 10:21, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

"Girlfriend" by Matthew Sweet doesn't remotely follow the narrative in the explanation, but could nevertheless be graphed as shown.Yorkshire Pudding (talk) 10:07, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

Why is "I Will Always Love You" higher on the Y axis than the X axis?? The title and chorus seem genuine to me, and the rationale for breaking up is "I'm not what you need." 172.68.34.58 15:08, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

I love the way this came out. Mad props to everyone who worked on the table summaries. Were LLMs employed? Liv2splain (talk) 18:31, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

yes, and it made a mistake. Well, I made the mistake.In my prompt I was asking for a summary of the Song T-Rex from Katy Perry and chatGPT did neither complain nor correct - THAT is their mistake. And several people did not recognize even as it was obvious - including me. 🫣 --LaVe (talk) 23:43, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

In my opinion the Y-Axis of "Girlfriend" does not fit Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend", it should be closer to "Yes" than to "No". The lyrics include "I see the way you look at me [...] I know you talk about me all the time again and again". If the video counts: The guy ends up without his girlfriend (red-haired Avril) and seems to always enjoy the company and a kiss of black-haired Avril. The video ends with him and blond-haired Avril disappearing into a bathroom stall. Whomever you see as the "I" in the song, black-haired or blond-haired Avril, he seems sorta interested in both, so a "Yes". 172.71.134.31 18:46, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

Idea: We could add a column for the year the song came out. It would be interesting to see the year distribution and if it clumps in the late 90s (when Randall was a teenager). Laser813 (talk) 19:33, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

It needs a third (time) axis: in "You’re so vain", for example, there's the line "But you gave away the things you loved/And one of them was me" which suggests that the Warren Beatty^w^w male character at least USED to live the singer, and "when I was still quite naïve” might imply the feeling was once mutual, regardless of the current degree of indifference and/or active disdain. 172.69.135.129 10:56, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

That's just the same issue as the Piña Colada, really. What you could do for those (and others) is trace a track leading up to the dot (probably, from whatever history the song narrative describes as having come from). And maybe a short dashed onwards line to where they hope/fear/want/expect the relationship to progress to. Could get busy. And would need (probably subjective) analysis of the full lyrics then work out how best to tweak it not to get a plate full of undifferentiatable spaghetti. 172.71.178.111 11:24, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

While both are past tense, it seems to me that "You're So Vain" is describing history (focused on how we got to the "now" of the song), while Piña Colada is presenting a narrative. 172.69.247.40 05:24, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

Something that could replace the Piña Colada song in the title-text: Blank space - Taylor Swift B for brain (talk) (youtube channel wobsite (supposed to be a blag) 20:41, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

Created a Spotify playlist with above love songs. Shivank (talk) 10:15, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

'Creep' really should be in the middle of the Y axis. We have no clue how the object of the narrator's affections views them - only that they hate themself! 172.70.85.161 12:33, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

I agree with other commenters that the Y-Axis value is too low for Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend." For this reason, maybe a different song with the same title was intended. 'NSync's song "Girlfriend" matches the data point coordinates better. 172.70.214.43 05:49, 9 January 2024 (UTC)