Please don’t make me beg

James Caig
A Longing Look
Published in
7 min readJul 10, 2015

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A love letter to the lyrics of Chic, Madonna and Broken Bells

I think of you.
And I dream of you.
All of the time.
What am I going to do?

Each genre does sad differently. Country music revels in heartbreak. Soul does sorrow expertly. But disco… Disco was always about the ache.

Disco’s ache is the sound of wanting. And of waiting. The sound of not yet, or not quite. The sound of what you want more than anything else in the world, placed tantalisingly out of your reach.

That’s the ache.

With disco (the best disco), it’s not escapism you’re hearing. It’s desire. A desire that is sad and deep, trapped amid disco’s decadent and silken swell. A desire that pulls at your heart even as it moves your feet. An elegant pain that strains the soul, letting loose a profound and inadmissible longing. A desire that hurts.

It’s the desire for someone that doesn’t want you back. Or maybe the desire of being someone else. A love lost, or maybe never even had. A glimpse of someone through the crowd, unseen. A deep love, cherished in secret and never to be returned.

Denial and distance — that’s the essence of disco. It’s the sound of dancing on your own. Of footsteps in the powder room. Of wishing on a star.

Disco is not a time. It’s not a place or a style. It’s not even about the dancefloor. It’s the ache, the ache that comes Before, During and After love.

Disco.

Not D.I.S.C.O.

Disco.

1. Before

I want your love.
I want.
Your love.

I Want Your Love by Chic

How good was Nile Rodgers?

I’ll tell you how good he was. He wrote I Want Your Love in his sleep.

I Want Your Love is Chic’s most heart-breaking song, and it doesn’t even get to the affair. It is a six-minute supine howl for a love that can never be, a desire never to be fulfilled. And he imagined it from his subconscious, virtually fully formed. He dreamed it into life.

That’s how good Nile Rodgers was.

At the time his waking life was a torment, filled with unrealised obsession. He’d fallen for someone he couldn’t have — his girlfriend’s best friend. This illicit lust, suppressed and ignored, found expression in his dreams, in the form of the most perfect disco song of all time. Because disco, of course, is alchemy. It is the aural state of sublimated desire.

And so I Want Your Love is a song of desperation. The impossible, unbearable sense of wanting. That’s its DHM — the Deep Hidden Meaning that Chic carefully worked out for every song they wrote.

[See also He’s The Greatest Dancer by Sister Sledge, whose singer is unexpectedly entranced and impetuous, hopeless under the spell cast by an anonymous man in a club.]

But while the ache I Want Your Love transmits is one of someone trapped by circumstance, I’ve always heard something more universal. Chic always wrote for characters, but they concentrated on feelings, not narrative — so you can find your own story. That, together with the fact that these are a man’s words for a woman, being sung by a woman about a man, mean biography dissolves.

What I always heard was someone struggling to get noticed. She’s obsessed, he’s ignorant. She’s desperate, he’s unattainable. The distance between them feels painful, metaphysical. Her plea is hopeful, but doomed.

He’s out of her league and she knows it.

It’s because of that she’s willing to give him anything he asks for. She debases herself. She’ll even forego jealousy, love’s twisted sister (“on your ladder, I’ll be a peg”). That’s the desire. That’s the ache. That’s what it does to you.

Do you feel
Like you ever want
To try my love and see how well it fits?

Do you? Maybe? At all? Please?

Have you heard anything less sure, more tentative, more desperate?

She knows she can’t win, so she tries to do others down. The trash-talking starts.

Sometimes Do you feel
Like you’ve never had a love that’s real

And the empty promises.

Well, here I am
And who’s to say
A better love you won’t find today

This is getting embarrassing.

I’ll make you see
How bad your love I need.

She’s prostrate. Then she realises.

Please don’t make me beg.

Too late. The whole song is act of begging. Except, of course, too late doesn’t really exist. Too late never really comes. Because Disco is the sound of waiting.

2. During

Time goes by…
So slowly.
Time goes by….
So slowly.

Hung Up by Madonna

Tick tock tick tock tick tock.

The clock ticks constantly through Hung Up. More waiting, yes, but the way out isn’t far off. The ache is still there, but in place of Chic’s refined despair, there’s a twitchy sense of something about to snap. Less angst, more plain antsy.

The ache isn’t about desire, it’s about freedom from it.

Madonna is in a relationship — or at least believes she is. She’s stalking someone, calling them from outside their house just to confirm what she already knows — they’re out with someone else.

The first half of Hung Up is filled with this on-edge paranoia. The words repeat constantly, as if Madonna herself is stuck.

Fed up. Caught up. Time goes by slowly for those who wait. Tired of waiting on you. Waiting for your call every night and day. Every little thing that you say or do. I don’t know what to do.

She’s like a Synth from Channel 4's Humans, caught on repeat, her programmed language reduced to a few phrases. And like a Synth, her time isn’t her own. It’s a life of servitude, of stasis. She’s stuck in a never ending cycle of inbetween days.

She needs a re-set.

It happens mid-song, and she realises how trapped she is. “Those who run seem to have all the fun”, she sings. She envies the carefree ones, the ones who don’t have to live like this.

She becomes sentient again. Rock bottom hits — what am I doing? You hear the pattern break:

Tick tick tock
It’s a quarter to two.
And I’m DONE.
I’m hanging up on you.

And the realisation dawning:

I can’t keep on waiting for you.
I know that you’re still hesitating.
Don’t cry for me cos I’ll find a way.
You’ll wake up one day but it’ll be too late.

At last. A sense of self. She’s worth something again. Nile Rodgers never really left his dream, but here Madonna wakes up to realise it was just a fantasy. It’s futile. It’s an admission that she has to live her own life.

A confession, if you will. From the dance floor — of course. Because only when Madonna’s dancing can she feel this free.

Or rather she will be soon. Because this isn’t a win yet. The waiting doesn’t end when you win. It ends because you realise you can’t.

Then the hard work starts.

3. After

How did I get in this winding maze of love?
And there’s something wrong
And it’s sending you round and round
‘til we go nowhere

After The Disco by Broken Bells

After The Disco is when what felt like a dream starts to look like a maze.

It’s a tale of disillusionment and bitterness. It’s the moment when you realise that you’re awake. You’ve changed. But they haven’t.

No more the sound of wanting, just the sound of having once wanted. Desire once all-consuming, now gone.

After The Disco is the sound of desire being taken back, withheld, reclaimed.

And now, the morning after, the dream, the ache, doesn’t seem worth it anymore. Perhaps it seems as if it had never been worth it. Broken Bells’ James Mercer seeing the scales fall from his eyes. It’s the moment when “all of the shine just faded away”.

Make no mistake, this is a Disco song too. Denial and distance. It’s all ache. No more sublimated dreams now, though. It’s all there on the outside. Everything is bleak, lifeless.

I see the ashes on the ground.
I know the world is burning down
And under the cold and empty moon.

Recriminations fly. Words meant to wound.

After your faith has let you down
I know you’ll want to run around
And follow the crowd into the night.

But she doesn’t notice. She’s still carefree, like the man Madonna was Hung Up on.

The chill of night has got you dancing away.

That’s who she always was. Now you can admit you’ve been “waiting here much too long”.

Maybe Mercer got too close. Maybe the metaphysical distance endured by Chic made them safe after all. Maybe Madonna had a narrow escape the moment she hung up the phone. Maybe you should be careful what you dream for.

Maybe getting what you want but coming out the other side isn’t any better than not being able to have it in the first place. The bitterness eats you up.

Do what you want
Do what you will
Don’t tell me it’s not our time

because that’s what you always did.

Best out of it.

And the good news is, you really believe that now. You can afford to be strong.

Don’t assume
That I need your love.

Because it’s just not meant to be.

I’m not the dreamer
Or the dream
You’re out there looking for

And that’s OK.

You can be yourself again. There’s no need to beg any more.

It’s over.

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James Caig
A Longing Look

One half of A Longing Look, a music publication on Medium. Writer, consultant, strategist, facilitator.