#ALL FOR ONE AND ALL FOR LOVE MUSIC VIDEO TV#
It’s not impossible to enjoy a song like this one, but it’s really not that different from enjoying a TV commercial.Įven before you hear “All For Love,” you know exactly why the song exists. Even if you like “All For Love,” you can’t admire any of the impulses that went into its creation. The song itself isn’t noteworthy enough to obscure all the machinery at work behind it. On “All For Love,” the big and hoary soundtrack song from three down-the-middle rock stars, you can hear exactly what those three stars are trying to do, and you know exactly why they’re doing it. But when you’re listening to a song, you probably don’t want to hear the gears of the mechanism turning. This column is, in part, all about the processes and motivations behind the songs that conquer the charts. It always feels weird when a pop song flaunts its status as pop product. (Plenty of rappers make songs about capitalist domination as the hard-fought reward for their own Horatio Alger stories, which is certainly one way to handle that whole suspension-of-disbelief problem.) But a pop song doesn’t have to be great to convince us that it’s art rather than commerce. It’s not easy, but a song can work as art and commerce at the same time. Sometimes, that’s exactly what those performers are doing. We want to feel like we’re hearing someone baring the depths of their soul at us. We all want to think of pop product as pure expression. For any pop star, one of the most important jobs is to make you forget what you know.Įven if you know that pop music is pure product, nobody wants to think of it that way.
You know all of this on an intellectual level. When you decide whether or not to pay money to buy a certain product - or, more recently, to not pay money to stream that product - your decision has spreadsheet implications. A pop song’s release involves real work from professionals at all points in the process, and there is money on the line. Some part of you knows that this music has been packaged and sold to you as pure product. If you love pop music, you have to be able to suspend your disbelief. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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