“Technique has taken over the whole of civilisation. Death, procreation, birth all submit to technical efficiency and systemisation.”
-Jacques Ellul
“…To Be Loved” was the lead single from Papa Roach’s 2006 album, The Paramour Sessions. Produced by Howard Benson and mixed by Chris Lord-Alge, it was clearly made for radio and TV circulation. And it worked.
I like it just fine. The track hits hard, and it’s catchy as hell. It has this semi-rapping/rhythmic singing during the intro and outro, and then just singing during the verses and choruses. Then, it continues Papa Roach’s progression from nu-metal to more straight-ahead hard rock, which a lot of bands were doing at the time. Adapting, switching. But it has just the right amount of aggression that it could very nearly, clearly, barely, almost fit in with the material found on Infest. It serves as a mission statement of sorts, with frontman Jacoby Shaddix belting, “Listen up, turn it up and rock it out.” Crowd-commanding, and totally appropriate for a lead single and opening album track.
The music video has the band performing with a bunch of strippers/performers of sorts. Very much made for airplay — trite, dull as hell. The song was also used as the official theme song for WWE Raw from October 2006 to November 2009. The lyrics are about reinvention and a renewed sense of self-worth, which pairs up nicely with the high testosterone stylings of professional wrestling. You can associate it with that, the “walking through the curtain” thing.
It’s almost like a pseudo-event, a term coined by Daniel Boorstin in The Image. Not that the song is just fake, I think Shaddix and the guys really pour their emotions into their work. But it is a rock radio single obviously geared towards mainstream exposure. Every album has one, I suppose. Blame it on the suits.
And that’s basically what the song is to me — a theme song for professional wrestling. Not bad by any means, but maybe an example of a song that’s more about the presentation of an idea than the idea itself. Plus the rest of the album — especially some of the mellower tracks — is where the real fun begins. More on that some other time.
Another thing that’s always stood out to me — why is the title written with an ellipsis? Radio and TV didn’t seem to know whether to list the song with our without it. Apple Music has the album version listed with the ellipsis, but greatest hits compilations don’t have it. Goodness knows what that has done to the song’s metadata. Not that it changes the song, just a funny detail that seems to have been completely memory-holed.
Lawrence Deveney 