‘Common People’, or, the chivalric romance of (mostly) the 1980s – Part 1
A knight presenting his heart to a lady in the Roman de la Poire, from Atelier du Maître de Bari, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
So you thought chivalry was dead? Think again. I’m not talking about the holding-open-doors, pay-for-her-drink, gentlemanly-pride kind of chivalry that so-called ‘men’s rights activists’ seem to consider the last bastion of the ‘rightful gender order’ (whatever they think that is). No, I’m talking about real courtship.
The language of chivalry flourished in northern European medieval courtly life, in the songs of travelling troubadours and love poetry in the centuries when the Crusades were floundering and the Hundred Years War between England and France was, well, really dragging on. Chivalry of this sort involved men in an arduous struggle, evolving, we think, as a way of motivating and celebrating the deeds of knights who pledged to fight in religious wars, to help prevent them squabbling within France. Such quests offered multiple ‘prizes’, often conflated and overlapping: masculine honour (vertu), religious salvation, and union with an unattainable, usually aristocratic woman, to whom poems and love ballads were often dedicated. Classic examples include Chrétien de Troyes’ Lancelot and Thomas Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, which detail Lancelot’s trials to prove himself to his Guinevere, and the quest for the Holy Grail. The chivalric love ethic operated on delayed gratification – a man submitted himself humbly to his ‘distant love’, in the words of one twelfth-century troubadour. Whether removed physically, by social status, or by being in heaven, the (mostly) female love object was, as we moderns would say, out of his league.
If this all sounds very melodramatic, formalised, and unrecognisable, consider whether you’ve ever listened to a song by The Smiths. Or The Police. I could go on. After studying medieval chivalry, I couldn’t help but recognise echoes of the romantic structure in a lot of (roughly) 80s classics. Hear me out.
The archetype of the doleful, slightly emasculated, slightly abject male voice is almost ubiquitous in the sounds and lyrics of the 1980s. The most obvious example is, perhaps fittingly, a narcissistic one: Morrissey. More on this later. We should really begin much earlier, in the ‘70s. Even in the more euphoric chords of Bowie we can discern a kind of precarity, through an often quite ‘thin’ musical texture, a choice voice-crack, and a sincerity derived from singing so much about children and reaching for celestial bodies. From the general register of an exposed male soloist, however, a more precise masculinity also emerges.
Take Roxy Music’s ‘Could it Happen to Me’ (1975), already in its title incredulous at the thought that little old me should be so lucky. Lead vocalist Bryan Ferry asks his listener to ‘take me as I am, an average man’, offering himself up as unremarkable – ‘my guilty secret, I’m not ashamed’ as if to say at least he’s honest. There’s a kind of sacrifice at work in this declaration, as he lays all his cards on the table. What he can’t offer, we infer, in material wealth or status, he can gain by escaping material hierarchies in a kind of exalted suffering, joining the ranks of ‘martyred’ crusading knights. He’s emotionally vulnerable, too – ‘God knows I’m beside myself / if a tear’s a crime, I must confess’ – resonating uncannily with the intense religious devotion often expressed in medieval chivalry, where the ‘devout Christian’ strove to be close to the ‘Beloved’ God. The figure of the Roxy Music song is just as morally self-scrutinising, aware that his decency is his most compelling quality. Through this literally confessional process, though, he also proves seriously self-absorbed. His romantic object is mentioned here and there, but only in abstract hyperbole (‘do you know what it means to me / to delight in your company’); love is a vehicle for navel-gazing men to find a vocation in angsting about their inadequacy.
Where it does relate to its object, this Roxy Music song (the earliest specific example I could find) bears traces of an uphill battle also highly reminiscent of the chivalric logic: ‘Oh boy is it getting rough / when my old world charm isn’t quite enough’. ‘Getting rough’ rubs up against ‘isn’t quite enough’ in a light rhyme that conveys the sheer struggle of striving to get closer to what would really be ‘enough’. It’s as if he is working towards, to borrow from one preacher of the Crusades, ‘the prize [that] is promised to those who start but is given to those who persevere’. This sense of upwards-oriented graft is also palpable in The Cure’s ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ (1979): ‘I would break down at your feet / And beg forgiveness, plead with you’. Notice how his love melds into a total state of supplication towards his love interest.
This song also captures something wonderfully offbeat – in both senses. The lyric ‘I try to laugh about it, hiding the tears in my eyes’ lingers awkwardly on some syllables, like ‘I’ and ‘laugh’, but skips through others in a way you would never speak the phrase. It’s jaunty, the boyish aggression of the singing hiding the possibility of a tremor in the voice. It’s as if we witness the ardent lover in the unravelling of courtship: women make boys cry, and Love has become, to quote Soft Cell, Tainted.