A Modest Proposal by
Mr Julian Gough.
Truth in Pop.

The Soviets and Chinese used sinister, hidden messages, buried in continuous, repetitive sound, to break the will of prisoners and spies. Such techniques were known as "brainwashing". We would be more familiar with them today by the name of "daytime radio".
There are two components to daytime radio: advertisements, and (as a kind of filler to keep the blocks of adverts apart) a thing called "pop music". The effect of the advertisements is straightforward and uncontroversial: they tell us to buy their biscuits, we buy their biscuits. The government is well aware of the danger of abusing this power of suggestion. Thus, radio
advertisements are strictly controlled by law. All claims made in advertisements must be honest, and capable of proof. What is madness is that the far more insidious and dangerous "pop songs" between the adverts escape this simple and effective law.
You may well have heard these "pop songs" without paying them much attention. I have listened to and studied them at length on your behalf. The results have been fascinating, and frightening. There is a single subject about which pop songs wish to brainwash us. They are obsessively and repetitively concerned with selling us love. The type of love is referred to as being "eternal" , lasting "forever", or "always". This, it is emphasised, is "true love". The dramatic physical symptoms of "true love" are listed.The effect on the listener of such a message, repeated many times a day for year after year, is catastrophic. Whatever love the listener feels for their girlfriend, boyfriend or spouse lacks the symptoms of true love. The listener becomes unhappy and dissatisfied with his or her love, which is obviously untrue, or false, love. These dissatisfied listeners postpone their marriages, break off relationships, refuse dates, and grow miserable in the vain pursuit of a love that will last forever, while making their heart go boom. In fact, all the symptoms of "true love" as illustrated in pop lyrics, are those of obsessive compulsive disorder, or mild psychiatric illness. The belief that one "cannot live" without this other person, often after only one "look" or "glance", is delusional, obsessive, and close to psychotic. The pop lyric is the language of the stalker. Indeed, the physical symptoms of true love include not only "feeling my heart go boom", but being "brought to my knees", and "breaking out in a cold sweat". These are the physical symptoms of a panic attack. It is scandalous that a major industry, such as the pop music industry, should actively push its consumers toward psychiatric illness. The devastating effect on the humanpsyche is obvious. As recent surveys show, people are marrying later and later. Many are not marrying at all. An entire generation, bombarded all their lives by propaganda pushing "true" love and "perfect" happiness, have remained single well into their thirties. Truely, pop music has, as it were, put the disco into discontent. As for the effect of this propaganda on vocations to the priesthood, it has been shattering.
There is, thankfully, a solution. We must take the rigorous existing laws covering truth in advertising, and extend them to cover everything broadcast on daytime radio, including the songs.
The results would be immediate and beneficial. Currently, 17 year-old boys such as Westlife can promise to love any random girl "forever". Under the new regulations, they could only promise to love her for up to eighteen months. "Forever" would be defined in law as an unbroken period of thirty or more years. In practice, such lyrics would quite correctly be restricted to happily married couples in their fifties.
Likewise, teenage men who promised to give (or make) good (or sweet, or hot) love to young women "all night long" would be restricted to promising to give, or make, love to them "for up to five minutes" unless a doctor's certificate could be produced to vouch for the fact that they could indeed maintain a continuous, overnight erection. Any use of Viagra to gain the certificate would have to be mentioned in the lyric. Likewise, for every song about sex, bands would be obliged to release, nine months later, a song about babies. Bands would be exempt from this obligation only if some form of contraception was used in the original lyric.
The tricky problem of the lyrical metaphor would be dealt with by having an approved board of linguistic philosophers turn all metaphors into similes. Thus Westlife could no longer claim to be "flying without wings" but could legitimately claim that "The subjective feeling of loving you resembles, in certain aspects, the sensation of flight."
Taking these changes as a whole, we would soon see a certain thoughtfulness entering the pop lyric which has been absent these many years. We need considerably less true love in pop, and more love of truth. Petition your MP today.