J Alfred Prufrock’s Awkward Love Songs, Catcher in the Rye and Smells Like Teen Spirit

The word “woo” isn’t used much anymore. Not just because the word itself sounds dated, but because the relationship scene has changed quite a bit in the last hundred years.

The new social flexibility has taken away a lot of the love ritual, which is great if you don’t want to be traded with the neighboring villager for a goat, but less great when you’re trying to figure out how long to wait before you. call someone back Or what to say when you call. Or if there is something to call first. Or, dare we speculate, if the call could somehow result in marriage, children, and a fixed 10/30 mortgage.

Suffice it to say that the relationship between modernity and love is “complicated.” If you’re having trouble with today’s mating rituals, here’s to these awkward 20th-century suitors: J. Alfred Prufrock, Holden Caulfield, and Kurt Cobain. In addition to being elusive, tongue-twistering male lovers, all three figures emerge during particularly wealthy and happy times in American history, which certainly doesn’t help if you’re already feeling like a loser.

J. Alfred is the original guy who awkwardly falls for the girl at the party. Her entire 132-line “love song” is speculation on whether or not to get close to his love interest, whose identity she doesn’t even have the guts to divulge. There are several alternative interpretations of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, including the following:

1. Prufrock approaches the woman he loves, loses his temper, and gives up without saying anything.
2. Prufrock wanders the city streets imagining getting close to said woman, then anticipates rejection and gives up without saying anything.
3. Prufrock spends the entire poem at home, where he imagines himself wandering the city streets imagining his fantasy self approaching said woman, being rejected, and then giving up without saying anything.
4. Prufrock isn’t even in love with anyone in particular and only likes to torture himself.

Friends, welcome to modernism. It doesn’t get any easier from here.

Fast-forward thirty years to The Catcher in the Rye: the heyday of Ford Mustangs, burger joints, the nuclear family, postwar aimlessness, and incredible pressure to conform. Then imagine trying to get out.

Although Catcher may not sound like a love story so much to you as the disillusioned ramblings of a naive seventeen-year-old, once you strip away all the criticism of falsehoods, meanness, adulthood, and popularity, you’re left with… not much. of whatever. Which is why we can’t ignore the fact that the two areas of Holden’s life that remain unscathed are his (deceased) little brother, Allie, and his (absent) crush, Jane. These are the rules by which Holden measures everything.

Of course, Holden never works up the courage to call Jane, either time he tries, but he violently attacks his roommate after suspecting she’s “buying him time” (possibly under duress). As far as Holden goes, that’s quite the knight in shining armor display. Unfortunately, the fact that the book ends with Holden in some kind of institution gives us the distinct impression that things with Jane never quite work out.

Fast forward another forty years to the disjointed and forsaken love story of the 1991 smash hit Smells Like Teen Spirit. In it, Cobain describes a woman, “too boring and self-assured”, which automatically makes her mind jump to “a dirty word”. He then says “hello” several times before asking “how low?” You’re a smooth talker, you.

Then comes the chorus, which assures us that “with the lights off it’s less dangerous.” In case you’re not already feeling uncomfortable, Cobain rattles off the following elements as if they somehow go together: “a mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido.” Yes. Nothing puts a girl in the mood like a pejorative racial term, a pigmentation disorder, a blood-sucking insect, and talk of old sex drive. We can’t say we’re surprised that the song ends with a famous repeated “denial.”

For someone so romantically inept, it’s only fitting that Cobain would be dubbed the “self-hating icon of the inarticulate generation” by the UK Telegraph. Then again, if they think the 1990s were the only disjointed generation, the joke is on them.