I'd like to thank Invader Stu for drawing attention to this song... Bruno Mars – Granade:
The fact that a bearded blogger has to draw my attention to a best-selling, Grammy-winning artist shows how out of touch I am musically. I just don't like to look at music news in case Ike and Tina have split up.
The song is basically an insanely intense young man dragging a piano through the streets of LA and listing all of the ways ye would kill himself to prove his love. He'd catch a grenade, put his hand on a blade, jump in front of a train, take a bullet through the brain, drink strychnane, and many more vaguely rhyming deaths and mutilations. He makes the mistake of many insanely intense young men and takes his death wish as proof of the depth of his feelings. His girlfriend, quite rightly, is not so keen to have her innards blown out or receive an extreme manicure just to show she has feelings. In fact, in the video, she has rightly moved on to someone who rather than wanting to get his guts spread along a railway track wants to make sweet love to her. I would argue that three weeks in four girls would much rather make sweet love than become a widow. The other week, it's not so clear.
There is a film title that comes to mind as being apt... Mars Needs Women. (Note: the title is apt; not so much the plot.) Maybe Mars just needs to get out there and experience a lot more women (as many of his lyrical contemporaries are advocating) to temper the intensity of his yearnings. Otherwise I have a terrible picture of young Bruno Mars rushing ecstatically up to his girlfriend's side and saying, "Hey, baby, look what I caught for you!" Turns out she would die for him, or, rather, because of him.
At the end of the video, it implies he does actually step in front of a train (alone, which means that somewhere on the streets of LA is a random, abandoned piano). It reminded me of James Blunt videos. They usually end with him jumping into a ravine or some other act that could be taken as ending it all. With James Blunt I'm always left with the feeling, "three minutes too late, buddy." With Bruno Mars, I can't help wondering if this intense reflection and constant referencing to bullets in craniums couldn't be turned outwards somehow and used to create something altogether more worthy.
Random Link: Rage Against the Machine - Bullet in the Head