There’s a dark secret in me
A love letter to the lyrics of Can’t Get You Out Of My Head by Kylie Minogue
Had you forgotten how good it is?
If so, watch this again. It won’t take long to remember.
Of course, the important bit, the bit we remember, is the bit without words. It’s the bit we sing along to. The bit where we lose ourselves.
La la la
La la la-la la
What else is there, really?
So much. So much.
But let’s not go there yet. Let’s stay here for a moment, in this place, la la la, the place we lose ourselves. Or more accurately, the place in which we’re trapped. It’s a siren’s call, this hook. There are few in pop to which so few are immune. You only need to see the letters on the screen…
La la la
La la la-la la
La la la
La la la-la la
… and you drift away again. You are helpless. We all are. Not even the strongest of masts, the tautest of ropes, could restrain us. It’s so intoxicating, the softness, the way it rises like a curlicue of smoke, delicate like vapour, a thickening of the air. It circles around — around you — forever, could go on forever, we could stay there forever, willingly, forever, for ever and ever and ever and ever and…
It’s so beguiling that Paul Morley wrote a whole book about it. Though really it’s a book about pop, as all Paul Morley books are, and also about Paul Morley, as all Paul Morley books are. It starts by drawing a line between Satie and Kraftwerk — two arbitrary points as valid as any other — and uses as its conceptual device this song, or rather the holo-futuristic world conjured by the video of this song: Kylie driving, from the past to the future, from pop as idea to pop as artefact. And why wouldn’t it? This song and its video are a combination which fixed forever — and ever and ever and… —Kylie in our collective consciousness, and also a connection between Kylie and the perfect pop song, between Kylie and sex and lust and robot dancing and aural pleasure and futurism, between the breathy relentless pulse of pop and a hooded trouser-suit so precarious it’s like a paper snowflake you cut too much and too deep and so close to its centre it simply cannot hold.
Paul Morley was helpless in the face of it. And so are we.
We are trapped.
Can’t Get You Out Of My Head is about obsession, but not in the way you think. It’s about the release that comes with getting what you want, but not in the way you assume.
I just can’t get you out of my head
Boy, your loving is all I think about
This man— the object of her affection, or perhaps the idea of him, the wanting of him, the whole desperate wanting of it all — is something she can’t escape from.
He is trapped in her mind. She in turn is trapped by his presence. She is under his spell. Bewitched.
I just can’t get you out of my head
Boy, it’s more than I dare to think about
And she doesn’t dare think about it, so besotted is she. She is full — too full — of desire. She wouldn’t have it any other way.
Every night, every day
Just to be there in your arms
Just to be there. She can’t escape it. The idea of being loved by this man. The prospect would be a dream come true. She is haunted by her own fantasy. It is wish fulfillment in action, a thing that hasn’t happened but is all that happens. A living paradox. An unimaginable thing you can’t stop thinking about.
And so the yearning, the plea:
Won’t you stay?
Won’t you lay?
Stay forever and ever
And ever and ever
And ever and ever…
But, I have to ask. This obsession. Does it not feel off to you? Does that ever and ever and ever feel less like a dreamy fantasy than a slip of the mask? A bit of a leap, isn’t it. From dare to think about to stay forever… There’s a stalker-ish quality here, a one-sided intimacy that’s a little disquieting.
Never mind. Clear your head. Here it comes again, the siren’s call.
La la la
La la la-la la
La la la
La la la-la la
And once again we’re beguiled. Disquiet dismissed. We’re lost again, adrift and trapped.
Until she let’s slip. Breaks the spell. The fantasy sours. The siren’s mask falls away:
There’s a dark secret in me
Don’t leave me locked in your heart
What is this dark secret? She never says. Yet the rest of the song is cast in its shadow. Were it not for that line, everything else would seem benign; love as a kind of madness. But in that line’s (absence of) light, it’s hard not to see something darker. That plea — don’t leave me locked in your heart — comes off as a warning, or a threat.
Hard to say how exactly, but things have decidedly turned. A song that appeared to about a woman’s lustful obsession has turned sinister. She claimed she was possessed, but now claims to be imprisoned herself. The focus has moved from her head, where she couldn’t escape the boy, to his heart, where she is locked in. Is she claiming they equate to the same thing? Or is she turning the tables on him, drawing him in only to cast him as the prisoner? Something about that plea has the whiff of gaslight about it, too. Calculated. Like she’s making him responsible for the hold she claims he has over her. Like she’s labelled her obsession as an occupation, and turned the object of her affection into an agent of oppression.
Was the siren’s call a honey trap all along?
Set me free
Feel the need in me
Now it’s all about her. Her freedom. She wants out, and she’s made him responsible for her release. Help me, validate me. Feel the need in me. You don’t have to know the Detroit Emeralds song to know what an impossible, imploring demand that is — a plea of desperation and attraction.
What exactly does she expect him to do?
Set me free
Stay forever and ever
And ever and ever
Set me free, she says. Stay forever, she says. Here is the paradox. The beguiling prison. To free her, he must stay. As torment ends, so bondage begins. For her, obsession is the route to freedom. In a song of pure pleasure, a dark secret hides. Is it desperate love or a desire to possess? Madness, or love? Maybe both. A mental torture, one Shakespeare might consider. And he did:
Love is merely a madness; and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punish’d and cured is that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.
“A lunacy so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.” That’s from As You Like It. The pain we inflict as we succumb to pleasure. There’s nothing we can do. We are all helpless. We all trapped.
Sing along with me.
La la la
La la la-la la
La la la
La la la-la la
If you liked this, you might also like this love letter to the lyrics of In Every Dream Home A Heartache by Roxy Music.
