The Origin of Love
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| “The Origin of Love” | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Song by John Cameron Mitchell | |||||
| Album | Hedwig and the Angry Inch Original Cast Album | ||||
| Released | 1999 | ||||
| Genre | Rock Cast recording |
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| Length | 5:27 | ||||
| Label | Atlantic | ||||
| Writer | Stephen Trask | ||||
| Hedwig and the Angry Inch Original Cast Album track listing | |||||
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"The Origin of Love" is a song from the stage show Hedwig and the Angry Inch and subsequent film written by John Cameron Mitchell. Stephen Trask wrote the soundtrack for the film in collaboration with Mitchell. The song is based on a story from Plato's Symposium.
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[edit] Origins
In the Symposium, a party is being held in which a series of speeches are given paying homage to Eros, the Greek god of love. "The Origin of Love" is taken from the speech given by the playwright Aristophanes.
According to the speech, long ago, humans were composed of two people stuck back-to-back, with two faces and eight limbs. Male-male humans came from the Sun, female-female humans from the Earth and male-female humans from the Moon. The gods, out of jealousy, split them in half. Now, throughout our lives, we are always trying to find our "other half", and sexual intercourse is the only means we have to put the two halves back together; this desire to be one person again is what we call "love". However, it is impossible to fully rejoin two people because it is our souls and not our bodies that most desire to be reunited.
[edit] The song
The song was originally Mitchell's idea, and Trask approached it with ambivalence. Trask says of the song's form: "When I starting writing that song, the only way I could think to write it was as a picture book. So I wrote it, all the images in it, and the way the story gets told, as the language of, like, a Dr. Seuss picture book. If you read the lyrics out loud, they read like a picture book."[1]
While taken from the story within the story in the Symposium, the song deliberately jumbles characters from different cultures (for instance, Zeus appears alongside Osiris.) It also features some eccentric grammar, with lines like, "You was looking at me, I was looking at you." It puts forward Hedwig's idea that humans have pre-destined soul mates, and that she is seeking hers, Tommy Gnosis. At the end of the film Tommy addresses this idea in the reprise of the song Wicked Little Town, arguing that no cosmic force controls our destiny ("And there's no mystical design, no cosmic lover preassigned.") and suggesting that she needs to move on.
The song was performed in the film by the band Cheater, made up of Stephen Trask, Theodore Liscinski, Rob Campbell, and Michael Aronov, with vocals by John Cameron Mitchell and Miriam Shor. According to the Internet Movie Database, the vocals for this song as it appears in the film were recorded live.[2]
The animation that accompanies the song in the film version was drawn by Emily Hubley.
[edit] Covers
- On the album Wig in a Box (a charity cover of the Hedwig soundtrack), "The Origin of Love" is covered separately by Rufus Wainwright and Jonathan Richman.
- The song has been covered by Bonnie Pink.
