Do people have the kind of longing that makes them brave, forces them to act foolishly, or even risk damnation?
Mostly not. The Motels, a great and sultry band from the 1980s, just re-issued their best album, 1982’s All Four One, on pink vinyl. After weeks spent listening to Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande and Olivia Rodrigo, the songs on All Four One leap off of the turntable—sweaty, horny, crazed with desire. I don’t mean booty calls or the crudity that’s part of modern pop music. I speak of the soulful, emotional and erotic desire that consumes the body as well as the psyche—what makes you lose all sense and that was once central to pop music.
Motels singer Martha Davis delivers these great songs with a defiantly vulnerability, a willingness to push past irony and self-protection and expose a raw nerve. There’s the slow-burning “Take the L”:
Watching my head, holding my face
One more evening gone to waste
No longer do I know my place
Killing time and missing my cues
Watching her belong to you
Tears could only change my view
Take the L out of lover and it's over
Take the L out of lover and it's over
The big hit on All Four One was “Only the Lonely,” which still holds up. Still, my favorite track on the album was always “Art Fails”:
Life tears
Money screams
Love aches
Art fails
But I don't want you to see me this way
Hold me for a moment
Hold me if you can
Hold me just a second
In the face of all I am
Damned
The sweaty Los Angeles noir painted by the Motels is a contrast to a 2025 piece in The New York Times, in which Jean Garnett described her date that turned into a belly flop:
Back at my place he was a little shy, I thought, or a little out of practice, but I felt he wanted me, which was what I wanted—to be organized and oriented by his desire, as though it were a point on the dark horizon, strobing.
“I was really looking forward to seeing you again,” he texted me the following week, around lunchtime, “but I’m going through some intense anxiety today and need to lay low :(.”
“Totally understand,” I replied, but I didn’t. Feeble, fallible “looking forward” is not longing; a man should want me urgently or not at all. I was about to collapse into a ritual of frustrated horniness (fantasy, masturbation, snacks) when a friend urged me to join her and two other women for dinner.
It’s gotten so bad that writer Magdalene Taylor took to the pages of the New York Times to announce that “there’s nothing wrong with wanting men.” Taylor notes that “in the past year or so, heteropessimism has become a different beast. Essay after essay has chronicled the ‘trouble with wanting men,’ as Jean Garnett wrote last summer, and men’s ‘retreat’ from intimacy, as Rachel Drucker wrote around the same time. Ms. Drucker wants men to ‘come back’ — but how can we urge them to do so when women are so keen to frame a desire for men as ‘trouble’ to begin with?”
Again, we’re not talking about the cheap eroticism that modern pop stars play with but the desire that inflames the heart and soul and that great musical artists, especially soul singers, have always expressed. In his great book Body of Symbols: The Christian Tradition the Song of Songs, which was just reissued, philosopher Jean-Louis Chretien explores the meaning of our bodies and how they relate to sex and desire. He notes that the word heart “is found hundreds of times in the Bible. Far from being reduced to the organ of our body, the heart is the very location of our identity of our ipseity. It is what we most properly are, and this the place where we can shirk what we most properly are. For where there is the highest responsibility, the abyss of the deepest irresponsibility also opens up. Christians observe that in the Bible the heart rejoices or grieves, it rises or sinks, it hardens or softens, it opens or closest expand of contracts, it tutors away from God, from other people and from its task, it turns towards them, it trembles and it strengthens itself.”
We deserve pop music that reflects this—that doesn’t shrink away from the heart. Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande and Olivia Rodrigo sing non-stop about relationships, sex, emotions hurt, girl boss power and games lovers play, but they never go all in, cast doubt and self-consciousness aside, and visibly burn with desire.
In her astute review of Olivia Rodrigo’s new album you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, NPR critic Hazel Cills criticizes Rodrigo for keeping so much in control. While there was once “a very slight edge to her stardom that only intensified when stacked up to the comedic kitsch of peers like Sabrina Carpenter or the tediously virtuous, theatrical storytelling of Taylor Swift,” Rodrigo now “pushes her songwriting closer to mainstream ideals, sidelining that rebellious spirit of critique to embrace a cohesive narrative of a relationship.” We never “hear Rodrigo truly exposed.”