The song “Masculinity” by Lucky Love was released a year ago in 2022. Almost immediately, a video was released on the work, which complements the meaning of the song, the name of which is translated into Russian as “masculinity”.
Lucky love group
The band’s name echoes the title of the song “Ace of Base”, whose “Lucky love” was featured at the opening of the 1995 World Championships in Athletics. In the same year, the single hit many world charts, including in its homeland – Belgium.
The modern “Lucky love” is a musical group that has collaborated with Russian producers in recent years, but the performers themselves are from Belarus. During their creative career, the guys managed to visit America, and on the group’s page it is indicated that this is a team of three continents.
The meaning of the song Masculinity
The song is performed in the first person, so we can talk about the fusion of the lyrical hero and the author. It is impossible to put an unambiguous equality between them, but one can say that the experiences of the hero of the song are well understood by the author.
In the first verse, the hero sings about losing himself. There are some boundaries that have been put around him, but these boundaries are not material, they cannot be destroyed by physical force – they are walls of words. And they are built around the hero himself. But the words that became the basis of the walls were not spoken by the hero, but by the people around. Someone hurt the man so much with inaccurate statements that he feels real physical pain from these intangible stones. Repeated repetition, almost memorization of hurtful words led the lyrical hero to injury and loss of himself as a person and as a man.
This meaning is revealed by the couplet. The main question is: “What happened to my manhood?” – the song asks over and over again. Maybe the character has lost his masculinity because something is wrong with him or with his body? But the following lines, consisting of rhetorical questions, reveal the reason. Someone in this world tells a man how he should be. And it is this “should” that makes him lose himself.
There is someone’s opinion that determines how a man loves, moves, even kisses. In the second verse, it becomes clear that the song is not about the concept of “masculinity” or “masculinity” at all. The author raises a serious social problem: why people should meet the standards that are imposed by someone from the outside. Usually this issue is covered in the context of self-acceptance by girls who do not meet model standards: tall, thin waist, big eyes, long eyelashes. But the songwriter goes beyond discussing looks. It is a matter of meeting society’s expectations of a person as a representative of a gender or social stratum.
In the second verse there are questions that are probably heard more than once by men whose appearance is not similar to the standard idea of a man. Why long hair, why there is no developed muscles, why does the voice sound not confident or rude enough? It is this otherness that makes the hero feel out of place not only in the world around him, but also in his body. It is these lines that explain the cause of the physical pain that the performer sang about in the first verse.
The chorus and refrain between the verses repeats the same questions over and over again about the discrepancy between appearance and gender. But the main thing is that in the finale the hero declares in just one line that the expectations of others from his appearance do not excite him and will not become an example of how it should and should look like.
It was this message that made the song famous and, no less important, discussed. In the comments under the clip, you can find words of people in different languages from different countries with gratitude for sincere words and support.
The meaning of the video for the song
The video design of the song is also not unimportant for the work. In the video, the performer himself plays the main role. In the frames of the first verse, he lies on the surgeon’s table, his hand is changed. Perhaps this is how the main character tries to fit in. But then he moves through the cafe, down the street, other men gather around him, and they all look different. But the main thing is that they move in sync – in a dance that only girls could dance before, but now it looks like a dance hymn of men who were able to free themselves from the influence of extraneous opinion.
