Can't Buy Me Love

The four most eligible bachelors (although shhh John was married) did a lot of running and joking in the early years. Just watching them jump around is entertaining. Can't Buy Me Love is about matrimony and/or true love. Paul sings that he'll buy his girl a ring if it makes her feel alright, but he really wants her to like "the kind of things that money just can't buy". Here we have a balance to the cover of Barret Strong's Money, and also the line in I Feel Fine: "he buys her diamond rings, you know". The material basis of a happy marriage balanced against the promise of true love. The Beatles, at this point, were presenting themselves as ideals: playful, funny, good-looking and, most importantly, full of love. But Paul didn't quite want to walk down the aisle yet, let's leave the ring till later, he's suggesting.

What is love? For the early Beatles love was everything. It was the dream and the snare that they used to sell their records, and yet it was more than that, it was a door which led away from the hate unleashed by WWII and the strict moral code of the earlier generations towards a new place, new horizons. In the beginning love meant desire and the loss of control, tempered by the promise of faithful devotion. The Beatles seduced their audience but quickly it became much more than the Beatles, it was a youth movement, a cultural event and the Beatles, although instrumental in many ways, were also along for the ride. Their idea of love grew with their audience. The Fab Four got tired of singing simple love songs, and as they quit touring, their quest became more internalized. John's idea of love moved together with his naive hope for revolution and world peace. But one can't fault him for taking on the larger issues. George moved in a more spiritual direction. Love, he came to understand, is a cosmic force. Paul stayed the most pragmatic and canny. He was a performer and love was the product. Paul kept it simple, and so did Ringo, As in the clip from Hard Day's Night above, Ringo didn't jump quite so high as the other three, but in this way he was left alone to simply love as much as he could. Many Beatle's songs began dealing with escape from the pressures of stardom, and Ringo found, hopefully, his octopus' garden.

Can love be bought? Money buys us security and yet in every direction traps seem to lie in wait. To be a superstar or to be unknown, to marry and raise a family or stay single and live alone, each act wraps us in chains of a kind. Early in my marriage a so-called friend accused me of buying my wife's love through supporting her economically. As if relationships are purely economical, or like some sort of radical feminist critique of marriage, that all hetero-normative relationships are somehow predicated on prostituting the self. Such views, I believe, take a rather bleak and materialistic view of lived experience. Love and money, although forcibly entwined by social conditions, ultimately remain opposed. Love is the greater force of the two, but you can't buy anything with it. When it is given freely, in its true form, it expects nothing in return.