Love is the Drug

For Georges Bataille, who thought a great deal about what constitutes human pleasure, for pleasure to be what it is, it has to exceed a limit of what is perceived as “wholesome” or “healthy”—it must be transgressive. The demands of pleasure (as opposed to, say, mere “happiness” or “contentment”) force us to confront the limits of our being. One way to exceed or surpass this limit is through chemical prosthesis—the use of drugs. Indeed, “addiction” is a common idiom for the way our culture perceives any excessive pursuit of pleasure, whether that be “sex addiction,” “shopping addiction,” or “drug addiction.” Our colloquialisms, however, also reflect the double nature of pleasure: we don’t “enjoy” or “really like” something—we “love” it, or perhaps “crave” it. When something strikes deeply in our being, it is “stunning.” “You send me,” Sam Cooke sang decades ago, employing a quaint metaphor of being sent into orbit, by which he meant, “You send me off the planet,” synonymous with the expression, “out of this world.” But since pleasure is also structured as destructive excess, we can also say we are “blown away,” or “knocked out,” or “floored.” “It stoned me,” Van Morrison sang, but he might just as easily have sung, “It almost killed me.”

Our popular music, particularly jazz and rock, traces the double nature of pleasure as excess. “Within jazz mythology,” writes Michael Jarrett, “drugs corroborate an ideology of control: playing one’s body as if it were a horn. Within the realm of rock, the reverse obtains. Drugs underwrite an ideology of freedom; they promise loss of control—the bliss of one’s body played as if it were a horn” (248). In effect, one’s self is either pumped up, or depleted, by chemical prosthesis: the limits to the self are surpassed either by the illusion of omnipotence or by the illusion of possession by an ego alien.

The number of popular songs about chemical prostheses—drugs and alcohol—is vast, so vast and so innumerable that it is impossible to name them all. But here are thirteen more unusual ones outside of the standard playlist that have the virtue of equivocating pleasure and addiction:

“For My Lover” – Tracy Chapman
“Pump It Up” – Elvis Costello & the Attractions
“Emma” – Jonathan Edwards
“Sister Morphine” – Marianne Faithfull
“Gold Dust Woman” – Fleetwood Mac
“White Lightning” – George Jones
“Addicted to Love” – Robert Palmer
“Mary Jane’s Last Dance” – Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
“Comfortably Numb” – Pink Floyd
“She’s My Cherry Pie” – Poison
“Something Happened to Me Yesterday” – The Rolling Stones
“Love is the Drug” – Roxy Music
“Carmelita” – Warren Zevon