You Just Put Your Lips Together and. . .
Rock and roll, from the very start, has always been about love. Not necessarily deep, abiding love because, let’s face it, the audience for a classic 2:30 song is not someone who is necessarily going to spend time pouring over the Compleat Works of John Donne—
“Come live with me, and be my love,
And we will some new pleasures prove
Of golden sands, and crystal brooks,
With silken lines, and silver hooks.”
–after listing to “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” #15 on Rolling Stone‘s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time”; #1 is Aretha’s “Respect” and there is something about more than kissing going on here:
“Ooh, your kisses, sweeter than honey
And guess what? So is my money
All I want you to do for me, is give it to me when you get home”
Uh, yes.
And on the subject of kisses, there is the all-time lip-locking Hall & Oates’ “Kiss on My List”:
“But if you insist on knowing my bliss
I’ll tell you this
If you want to know what the reason is
I only smile when I lie, then I’ll tell you why
your kiss is on my list”
Which leads to this fun fact of the staple of songs, kissing.
So far as I know, there are no songs about cold sores. (Perhaps an opportunity there for someone.) [I apologize in advance, Mac, for introducing you to this one. -ed.]
According to a study recently published in Science Advances on DNA extracted from a 5,000-year-old tooth, HSV-1, the herpes strain that gives rise to said sores, “hint that changing cultural practices during the Bronze Age—including the emergence of romantic kissing—could have factored into HSV-1’s meteoric rise,” writes Nature.
As the uninestimable Toby Keith has it in “You Shouldn’t Kiss Me Like This,”:
“I got a funny feeling
The moment that your lips touched mine”
I’m thinking HSV-1.