Stop in the Name of Love: some reflections

 

“Let not mercy and truth forsake thee; bind them about they neck; write them upon the table of thine heart.”

So we are advised in Proverbs. Good advice. Although I don’t know if I have bound mercy and truth about my neck in all instances. As for the table of my heart, well, upon that table there are certain songs.

Why these songs and not others? I don’t know. I don’t know why certain songs make me perpetually happy and at the same time, by a negation that is not a negation, also make me perpetually blue.

It is a mystery.

For instance, take the Supremes “Stop in the name of Love.” Is life worth living without “Stop in the Name of Love"? Apparently it is, or at least the generations that lived and made love and died before February 8, 1965, the day the song dropped, did not know that they were missing something essential to their salvation, and may have died in their ignorance perfectly content with whatever they experienced – building pyramids or cathedrals or inventing the lightbulb and so forth. But those who have lived past this date have no such excuse: to not love Stop in the Name of Love is to be a pore lone critter, embittered and marooned in the midst of life. A poor excuse for a biological similitude to a human being, a misfit under the music of the spheres.

2.

Of course, the song comes with several pluses. For instance, the Supremes in all their gowned beauty, debuting it in 1965, included, from the very beginning, the dance that is its signature. They sway, they smile, they come to the chorus and arms out, hands up, the eternal gesture of the traffic cop on a Detroit crossroads, but a cop that accompanies the gesture with a sensuous movement of the hips that turns this stop into Cupid’s own arrest. It is not possible, it is not humanly possible, to ever hear the song and see that dance and not want to make that same gesture, dance that same dance, when the song comes on. And if the Elohim have poured out their blessings on your life so that you have been to a disco or club or dancehall and heard this song and poured out with your date or friend or partner or some stranger and hit the floor, you have thrust out your hand to stop, in the name of love, your errant lover.

3.

But to me, the Supreme happiness is not simply the irresistible Motown arrangement, which is, like everything Motown was doing in 1965, the best thing you ever heard – nor is it the choral response of (think it over) that Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard sing back to Diana Ross’s lyrics (although that is, when you see clips of the song being performed, an amazing and complete work of art in itself) – no, the best thing is that moment, a moment that transcends time, space, and my ability to pile exaggeration on exaggeration, that moment when the doublet ending the stanza is: “after I’ve been good to you/after I’ve been sweet to you”.

It is the way Diana Ross sings sweet. She makes of that word, in the beat of turning it on her tongue, into a sound encompassing all honey, all sex, all delight – and she does this by uplifting, by the slightest of note changes, the “sw-“ in sweet. And yet, and here is the miracle that makes one even belief that the word becomes flesh – it is also the saddest of inscriptions on the tombstone of this relationship to a cheating man. That is sweetness the man has turned his back upon. It is the sweetness of Paradise. He has become an outlaw of love. He can never go back to that Paradise. That sweetness as passed, in a lightning flash.

And all of this is blindingly clear by the time the repeat line is sounded for the first time. Already we know that Stop in the name of love is a command that is bound not to be obeyed.

So, in conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, “Stop in the name of Love” not only justifies our existence but also explains why justification is never enough. Justification is hollow. Paradise is closed.

Which is why the same double verse in the next stanza, in the repetition of  “after I’ve been sweet to you”, the sweetness has lost some of its savor. The “sw-“ here does not aim at transcendence. It is a resigned sweetness.

Man’s fall is all there. The loss in that note, which we barely register, is infinitesimal and infinite. It is the mystery that makes this song ever-listenable. Bound around my neck with mercy and truth.