Song #778: "That's The Way Love Goes" by Janet Jackson

Date: May 15, 1993
Weeks: 8

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I've said before that I prefer high-intensity songs, and that I have no use for relaxing and low-key songs. Sometimes low-key songs can work for me, but they have to include some kind of emotional intensity, a meaning that impresses me. And in order to attain that emotional intensity, such a song would need to avoid the following:

- Pitch-shifting the lead singer's voice in an obnoxiously artificial way to repetitively state the song's title over and over again. If you want to achieve this sound, hire some other singers of various ranges. And in particular, avoid making this silly choice even more intense toward the end of the song.

- An overly trite hook repeated a thousand times. "Like a moth to a flame, burned by desire." Heard it! Before I even came here. Sing something else, please.

- A musical track badly in conflict between its deep, bass-y, earthy verse and a major-chord, piano-sounding transition that never resolves into anything actually different. This entire song is like the verse build-up to a song that's actually interesting.


- Unclear pronouns in the chorus that don't even hold up on inspection of the lyrics. What's the way love goes? I suppose there's possibly an over-literal interpretation that the song just tells the story of an entire relationship, from the phase of nervous affection, to the phase of asking the other person out, to the first sexual encounter. That's the way love goes, from common point A to common point B. But then at the end the lyrics about "a moth to a flame, burned by desire" repeat, and it's not like we'd been told the relationship ended, so I don't think that interpretation actually works.

- A semi-ironic self-aware music video that spends half the time taking the song seriously, and half the time laughing about how silly it is. You can't express emotional vulnerability if you're just going to protect yourself from that vulnerability.

My verdict: Don't like it. It's not badly made overall, and Jackson sings it well, but there are a lot of weird choices that completely undermine this song.