Friday Fix: The Valentine’s Day Mix, 2009; or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love

CAVEAT: If you despise Valentine’s Day, it’s best to stop reading now. Or, perhaps, you should pay extra close attention.

In late September 2001, I was watching a Canadian benefit concert for 9/11 called Music Without Borders. At the time, The Tragically Hip was one of my favorite bands (and still is) and I vividly remember their performance of the song “Flamenco.” The song is wonderfully poetic, and Gordon Downie’s performance of this slinking, meandering ballad is passionate in an alarming, challenging way. The song itself is a kind of challenge, but not a challenge to provoke aggression. Just the opposite. “Does it diminish your super-capacity to love?” “Does it exhibit your natural tendency to hate?” “Maybe a prostitute could teach you / how to take a compliment.” What Downie gives us is a sort of teaching moment about love: of what you’re capable of, what’s holding you back, and what you need to do to get to where you should be.

But what I remember most is what he whispered into the microphone, as an ad lib, midway through the song. In some sort of ecstatic reverie, he sings as if he’s not surrounded by thousands of people but instead in some kind of private moment, just him and the microphone, advising gently, in a whisper: “Don’t be so tough. Don’t be so tough.” That always stuck with me, but I never heeded the words or understood what he meant until lately.

This time last year, I was responsible for this post. It’s a mix for St. Skeletor’s Day, the anti-Valentine’s Day, the day when bitter single people steal their co-workers’ Valentine’s Day flowers from their desks and run them through the shredder. I was at the time reading a book by Laura Kipnis called Against Love: A Polemic. And I was also in the middle of the third major relationship of my life, and things were going really well.

Why, some might ask, was I concentrating so hard on opposing love when I was in the throws of it?

Well, I don’t know, really. Maybe it’s because sometimes the human heart is a stupid idiot. But I will say that I’ve always been fascinated with opposing love, and, in particular, opposing romance, especially on Valentine’s Day. Sure, I’ve done sweet things for girlfriends–charming, affectionate surprises, thoughtful gifts, romantic gestures–I’m actually quite good at it when I want to be. But for some reason, I wouldn’t completely let myself become the arch-romantic that I think I have in me. And Valentine’s Day has always been to me much like Christmas: it’s all about capitalism finding a reason to make you spend your money on baubles, corrupting true feeling with a Hallmark carbon copy that makes you less, not more, human. Down with the cheesy bourgeois and their manufactured sentiments! Viva the hard-working and anti-sentimental.

I’ve spent the majority of post-high school Valentine’s Days in relationships, and demanded a pledge of nonconformity from my different significant others, warning them well in advance to expect nothing from me on this most insincere of days masquerading as something special and out of the ordinary.

But this year, I find myself single on Valentine’s Day. And while I don’t feel bitter about it, I also don’t revel in being alone, independent, and self-focused. For some reason, I’m more sentimental about Valentine’s Day this year than ever before.

Maybe it’s because this Valentine’s Day there is no pressure to take part in the sacraments St. Valentine demands. Or maybe it’s because I’m getting older and more sentimental (I’m reminded of the graffiti left by Leonard Cohen on a Montreal cafe wall in Ladies and Gentlemen…Mr. Leonard Cohen: “Marita. Please find me. I’m almost 30.”). Or maybe it’s that you can only practice the self-damaging repeated behaviors of loving and losing so many times before you get sick of it and realize that maybe it’s less important to exercise defiant self-control and better to just give the self up to what honest and unguarded love can mean, and what it offers. Maybe it’s time to stop being so cool. Maybe it’s time to stop being so tough.

It’s difficult to say when or why wisdom eventually dilutes the arrogant defenses of cool self-righteousness. But after having spent most of my Valentine’s Days on this planet vengefully monastic toward love as a socially displayed behavior, I somehow feel that perhaps Valentine’s Day can fulfill its promise after all. Perhaps the answer is to challenge the gooey faux-romanticization of the love so often peddled by the love industry on Valentine’s Day by being so genuinely romantic and sentimental so as to vanquish that formidable faux. I suppose that what I was reaching for all along was some kind of authenticity.

And so I offer my small sacrifice to St. Valentine, Venus, and Cupid, in the form of this, The Post-Rockist Valentine’s Day Mix 2009.

It’s divided into three parts with an epilogue. Download the ZIP file, extract the files, and put the songs in a playlist on your iTunes or other music player so that they run in order.

To you newly found lovers, to you couples married for years and years, to you wanderers and hunters of the heart, to you lonely yearners, to you too-cool-for-love naysayers, to you ardent companions, to you all, Happy Valentines Day.

And remember, don’t be so tough.

The Post-Rockist Valentine’s Day Mix (in Three Parts)

Part I: Love Defined, and Believed In
1. Daniel Johnson – Love Defined (more)
2. The Rachel Nevadas – Love (more)
3. Cole Porter – C’est Magnifique (more)
4. Jonathan Richman – Tonight (more)
5. Richard X (featuring Jarvis Cocker) – Into U (more)

Part II: Just Spending Time Together, and Glorying in it
6. Jens Lekman – Your Arms Around Me (more)
7. Billie the Vision and the Dancers – Overdosing with You (more)
8. Nat King Cole – Walking My Baby Back Home (more)
9. Nedelle – Our Little Selves (more)
10. Otis Redding – Cigarettes and Coffee (more)

Part III: The Laws of Attraction in Action, or “I Think You’re Freaking Amazing”
11. Moldy Peaches – Anyone Else But You (more)
12. Daniel – Hard Core (more)
13. Leonard Cohen – Dance Me to the End of Love (more)
14. The Blow – Parentheses (more)
15. Tommy James and the Shondells – Crimson and Clover (more)

Epilogue (because I couldn’t leave this one out)
16. Mitch and Mickey – Kiss at the End of the Rainbow (more)