Culture Club, "Love Is Love"

By the tale of the tape, "Love Is Love" isn't one of Culture Club's stronger singles. Its lyrics are at times a little hokey, the bridge fumbles clumsily into the solo, and Boy George doesn't pour his entire soul into it the way he did "Church of the Poison Mind" and "Time (Clock of the Heart)."

But "Love Is Love" was nevertheless put to marvelously effective use in the forgotten of-its-time mid-'80s film Electric Dreams. The film's plot: Man buys computer, which comes to life. Computer falls in love with neighbor across the way and composes her a song. She thereupon falls in love with man, making computer jealous. Computer accepts defeat - because, c'mon, who can love a computer?

In some ways, Boy George was the right one to sing this moment - he surely knew from love forbidden at this stage, "Victims" being his best take on the subject. "It's written in black and blue," indeed. Whether you're a computer forced to pretend your emotions and needs are irrelevant, or a drag queen forced to pretend you prefer tea to sex so that a nascent MTV generation will still find you palatable, the deprivation is smothering. But any similarities between the computer in Electric Dreams and a certain walking encyclopedia of a blogger are, as they say, purely coincidental.

PS: No Friday Funtime tomorrow - Pop Argot will be out of town.