My name is Lars, and I’m an addict.

Wait, let me rephrase that.

I’m more… obsessed. Or compulsed. Compulsively obsessed.

With a music video.

No, not a music video. They didn’t exist back in 1965, when this was recorded. It’s a clip from a TV show called Hullabaloo, which I vaguely recall from my teenage years. We didn’t watch it very much.

And I wasn’t actually much aware of this song when it rose to Number Two on the Billboard chart. When I first noticed it, it was already an oldie. What it actually is, is an arrangement of the Minuet in G Major, which was long attributed to Bach but actually appears to have been first composed by a guy named Christian Petzold. The arrangers changed the time signature from 3/4 to 4/4, gave it lyrics and a Motown arrangement, and handed it over to a girl group called The Toys. And this is the result:

I can’t get enough of this video. I watch it over and over, for the same reason a drug user goes back to his pusher – because it makes me happy. I watch it, I feel happy. I’m not naturally a happy guy, so I crave the pleasure.

Romantic Delusion?

Now even while entranced, I’m perfectly capable of thinking critically about this song. It’s romantic. It’s unrealistic. Not only does it promote the myth of human True Love, but it views it from the viewpoint of a starry-eyed teenaged girl, who thinks her boyfriend (who probably has a police record, multiple piercings, and a dagger tattoo) will provide her with a passion that fulfills all her needs and lasts forever.

Nobody ever finds quite that kind of love. They may find love that’s very good and satisfying (many do), but it will never be what she’s dreaming of right now.

Romantic Truth

But I don’t think that says it all. The fact that a yearning has no earthly fulfillment doesn’t mean it’s a contemptible yearning. It may be all the better for looking beyond earth and a single human lifetime.

We’ve all read C. S. Lewis’ meditations on what he called “Joy,” the yearning for something transcendent, a yearning in itself more delicious than anything we can find in our world to satisfy it. That yearning, which Lewis first satisfied through Norse mythology and Wagnerian music, finally led him to embrace Jesus Christ as God.

When I watch this video, I feel as if it’s the complementary opposite of porn. It makes me want to be a better, purer man – to be the kind of man a girl who yearns this way dreams of. I know that will never happen in this world. But I believe in another world beyond this one. This song points me in that direction.

Now please excuse me, I have to watch it again.