Should pop stars air their dirty laundry in public?
Johnny Depp is the latest celebrity to reference a painful break-up in the lyrics of a song, ng, says Chris Harvey arvey
When it comes to airing dirty laundry, the Johnny nny Depp vs Amber Heard civil vil defamation trial – in which Heard was as accused of defecating on their marital tal bed – set new lows. But lest anyone ne think its divisive verdict might be e the end of the matter, Depp has now released leased a rock album, 18, with guitar hero ero Jeff Beck. It’s an album about love and betrayal, which apparently shows no intention of letting things lie.
In Sad Motherf------ Parade, arade, the actor gets personal. “You’re sitting tting there like a dog, with a seven-year itch” he sings about who-do-you-think. k. “And I think you’ve said enough for one ne motherf------ night”. Elsewhere, ewhere, he makes a snarling reference rence to money: “If I had a dime/ e/ it wouldn’t reach your hand.” But what is Depp achieving from this nastiness, beyond cruel vengeance and bitter rage? Of course, Depp isn’t n’t the only one to have interned rned a bad relationship within n a song. The actor may even have e found inspiration in Marvin Gaye’s ye’s 1978 divorce album track, You u Can Leave, But It’s Going to Cost You, , which contains the lyric: “Her lawyers awyers worked so hard/ tryin’a take my riches”.
Or he could be aping the he Rolling Stones – he’s often accused ed of having stolen Keith Richards’s look ook after all. Their 1966 track Under My Thumb more than flirts with misogyny sogyny by referring to a woman as “under my thumb/ it’s a squirming dog who’s just had her day”. When Mick k Jagger was told, 10 years later, that the he lyrics made many women bristle, he laughed it off as about adolescent experiences eriences by quoting another part of the song. “If you listen to the lyrics closely osely – not too closely – ‘Under my thumb/ mb/ The girl who once had me down’ – you see? It’s not so unfair.” He later said: “All I did was turn the tables around.”
Often, bringing a soured relationship into the spotlight is a recipe for controversy, and female songwriters are not exempt from such bad PR decisions. Ariana Grande’s 2019 single thank u next was hiding very little, naming, if not exactly shaming, a clutch of real-life ex-partners, thanking them for making her a better person, before dismissing them with a biting, “I’m so f------ grateful for my ex/ Thank you, next”. While the song has since become an anthem of selfempowerment, it attracted criticism at the time because one such ex, Mac Miller, had died only months earlier (even though it was former fiancé and Saturday Night Live regular Pete Davidson who appeared to be the intended recipient of the title line).
Meanwhile, Taylor Swift’s adored 2012 song about a lost love, All Too Well, from her album Red, drove fans to speculate that it was about actor Jake Gyllenhaal, with whom Swift reportedly shared a three-month relationship in 2010. The impression was not exactly dispelled when Swift created a 10-minute version of the song for her re-recording of the album in November last year, then directed a video for it starring Stranger Things’ Sadie Sink and Gyllenhaal lookalike Dylan O’Brien – which some felt was a step too far. Gyllenhaal told Esquire: “It has nothing to do with me” and complained of online attacks from Swift’s fans: “I think it’s important when supporters get unruly that we feel a responsibility to have them be civil and not allow for cyberbullying in one’s name.”
Yet Gyllenhaal also made an essential point: “Artists tap into personal experiences for inspiration, and I don’t begrudge anyone that.” In fact, intense and deeply personal lyrics about romantic break-ups are key to some of the greatest songs ever written, dealing with emotions we have all felt: jealousy, desire, pain, regret, and longing.
For instance, Joni Mitchell’s masterpiece Blue was recorded after her break-up with fellow singersongwriter Graham Nash, at a time when, as she described it, “I had no personal defences. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes.” It includes aching songs such as A Case of You – “Oh, you are in my blood like holy wine/ You taste so bitter and so sweet”. Then there is Bob Dylan’s 1976 album Desire, in which he yearns for his wife Sara Lownds in the song Sara: “Sara, oh Sara/ Loving you is the one thing I’ll never regret”. The song goes into intimate detail about their lives together: on the beach with their children, Dylan staying up for days “Writing Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands for you”, and it concludes with the heartfelt plea: “Don’t ever leave me, don’t ever go”. It’s frozen in time, a year before they divorced.
The poignancy of an emotion captured at the moment when it is most acute is there, too, in Abba’s The Winner Takes It All. Agnetha Fältskog sings words written for her by her husband Björn Ulvaeus (“But tell me, does she kiss/ Like I used to kiss you?”) in the summer of 1979, just after their separation. He would later claim it wasn’t about their soon-to-be divorce, but Fältskog was more candid: “Björn wrote it about us after the breakdown of our marriage.” m
Fleetwood Flee Mac’s Rumours, though, is the b break-up album to end them all. Almost every track details the agony of a band whose interconnected marriages marria and relationships were all on the roc rocks, and they’re not holding back. Stevie S Nicks’s Dreams pictured a lonely future for her then partner Lindsay Lindsa Buckingham, in which he would rue her forever, “remembering what y you had/ And what you lost”, while h he appeared to be expecting the same fo for her – “You can go your own way…/ You can call it another lonely day”. With W three exceptional songwriters song in the band, Rumours is perhaps perh the only work that has ever caught caug what heartache feels like from both sides, as it is happening, and it remains one of the bestselling selli albums of all time.
This T moving expression of raw pain reached new depths on Amy Winehouse’s Win Back to Black, in which the s singer tried to deal with the torture tortu of the end of her drug-fuelled relationship relation with Blake Fielder-Civil, with hi him going back to his ex. “He left no time to regret/ Kept his d--- wet with his same old safe bet.” Her love for this man, however bad he was for her, feels so intensely truthful and real, it still shocks. Sometimes, break-up songs can end en in a happy reunion. On her 2016 video album Lemonade, Beyoncé Beyon works her way through a gathering gather storm of feelings about betrayal betray that implicate husband and rapper Jay-Z, from “you come home at 3 am and an lie to me” in the opening track to “are you cheating on me?” in the last. last She imagines a future beyond him. The Th effect is pointed and powerful, powerf and it arguably saved their marriage marria – Jay-Z admitted his infidelity and sought sou therapy. Later that year, his wife joined jo him on his own song, Family Feud, and in the summer of 2018 they toured together.
Depp should have known that anger mixed with contempt is never a good look. Perhaps the interpersonal conflict played out in court was still too recent. The actor could have taken note of the sardonic tone of Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain – “you gave away the things you loved/ And one of them was me… I’ll bet you think this song is about you”. Simon teasingly suggested it was about three different men, but only ever named one of them: actor Warren Beatty. Amid the sarcasm, there’s a wistfulness that suggests love, and genuine heartache. In contrast to that, Depp’s “I think you’ve said enough for one motherf------ night” simply leaves a bad taste.
Johnny Depp and Jeff Beck’s album ‘18’ is out now (Rhino)