In defence of the soppy

I'm going to stand up for something with a very bad press. Little hearts in messages. Ridiculous pet names. The "I miss you" sent three hours after you last saw each other. Balloons shaped like numbers. Love songs that say exactly what they mean, no irony, no wink, no self-protection.

The soppy. What Spanish calls lo cursi.

I know it's risky. I've spent two years writing songs with humour, with camp, with exes being put firmly in their place. Someone might think my thing is laughing at the soppy. Sometimes I do. But it convinces me less and less.

The fear of looking stupid

Soppiness has a bad name for one very specific reason: it leaves you exposed. Whoever says something soppy is laying himself open. There's nowhere to hide. If someone answers with a laugh, he's left looking ridiculous, naked in the middle of the living room.

So we avoid it. Out of fear. We prefer irony, which is a very elegant way of wearing armour. If I say "I love you" in a slightly mocking tone and the other person doesn't love me back, I can always say I was joking. Irony is emotional life insurance.

And it's fine to have insurance. But a whole life of irony is a life in which you never quite say anything. And in the end, that's sad too.

Besides, irony wears thin. At first it looks clever, then it looks tired and finally it looks like fear. I've seen couples who've been talking to each other in sarcasm for years and can't remember the last time they said something lovely without pulling a face afterwards. I don't want that for my songs. Or for me.

Soppy isn't camp

It's worth making a distinction here, because the two get confused. Camp, which I talk about a lot, is conscious exaggeration. It knows it's exaggerating and plays with it. It has one foot in and one foot out. Soppiness doesn't. Soppiness means it. When someone writes "you're my sunshine" in a card, they're not playing. They believe it.

Both interest me, but for different reasons. Camp lets me tell the truth in disguise. Soppiness lets me tell it with no disguise, even though I know I'll get funny looks.

The odd thing is that lots of people who adore camp look down on soppiness. They think it's tacky, the province of people who haven't read enough. I think there's a bit of snobbery in that. Soppiness is popular in the most literal sense: everybody uses it, everywhere, without asking the critics' permission. It's in radio dedications, in tattoos, in grandmothers' messages. Sneering at it means sneering at how most people love.

Soppiness in gay love

For men who love men, soppiness carries a particular charge. For a long time our love stories didn't even have the right to be soppy. They had to be discreet, or tragic, or sexual, but rarely tender in public. A lad giving flowers to another lad in a restaurant was unthinkable in many places. In some it still is.

So when I write something soppy between two men, I feel I'm reclaiming something. The right to romantic silliness. To embarrassing pet names. To good-morning texts. If straight couples have spent centuries making fools of themselves for love in songs, we want our share of foolishness too.

How I write soppy without it cloying

Now the practical part, because soppiness carries a real danger: it cloys. A whole song of hearts and stars is hard to swallow, even for me.

What I do is mix. I let the soppiness turn up in the middle of something everyday, almost prosaic. An "I love you" said while someone's hunting for their keys. A declaration in the middle of an argument about who takes the bins out. The contrast lets the soppiness breathe. It steps off the pedestal and into the kitchen, and in the kitchen it's easier to believe.

I also let humour come along without mocking. There's a way of laughing at soppiness that destroys it, and another that hugs it. The first says "look how ridiculous". The second says "look how ridiculous, and how lovely". I'll take the second.

Something else that helps is precision. Soppiness cloys above all when it's generic: moon, stars, for ever. The moment you add a concrete detail, it changes. Saying someone is your sunshine isn't the same as saying he saves you half his sandwich even when he's starving. The second is still soppy, but it has body, and the body saves it.

And sometimes I simply do nothing. I write the soppy line as it is, unprotected, and leave it there. It scares me a bit every time. That's the sign it's worth it.

I'm not immune. When I read my own soppiest lyrics, sometimes I want to hide under the table. They're out there, full lyrics on the website, and once or twice I've thought about toning them down. I haven't. I think the version of me who wrote them was braver than the one rereading them.

Soppiness has an unusual dignity. That of someone who knows he'll be laughed at and says it anyway. It seems to me a kind of courage nobody gives prizes for.

So yes, I defend the soppy. Hearts, balloons, songs that say I love you without a sideways glance. The world already has enough people who don't dare.

The lyrics, soppy ones included, are at mikesaintlouis.com.