For my second post I will be analyzing One Direction’s second song in their “Take Me Home” album called “Kiss You.” The lyrics in this particular song are very sweet and light-hearted, and the boys are making it evident that they are interested in a certain girl. Though they respectfully let her choose how far she wants to go, they seem to hope that she will give in. The line, “If you don’t want to take it slow, and you just wanna take me home,” indicates that the boys will not say no IF she wants to do more than just “kiss them,” but they definitely are making it obvious that they WANT to do more than just kiss her. I understand that, like their first song, the following lines hold a double meaning:
“Oh, I just wanna take you anywhere that you’d like
We could go out any day, any night
Baby, I’ll take you there, take you there
Oh, tell me, tell me, tell me how to turn your love on
You can get-get anything that you want
Baby, just shout it out, shout it out.”
One interpretation could explain that that boys are referring to a sexual reference by not wanting to physically drive the girl somewhere to eat for example, but take her to another implied “place” of pleasure keeping in mind that they will not force anything. The proceeding lines indicate that, sexually, the boys want to know how to turn the girl on and have her “shout it out”… I think we all get the point.
Thinking about the Sex Role Perspective, I found a male stereotype in the lines, “Oh, I just wanna show you off to all of my friends, Making them drool down their chinny-chin-chins” because it is the ideal image in the media for a man, especially at the end of a movie or book, to “get the girl” and make his friends jealous. This song is less objective toward women, but there is still a lingering message that boys are only interested in “getting the girl” just to have one, failing to realize that she is not just a competitive prize to “win” but that she deserves more than just mindlessly kissing or going home with her; typically men are competitive and take on challenges to complete quests. Additionally they also mention, “Every time we touch, you get this kind of rush,” referring to the woman feeling a rush, but not mentioning the boys themselves getting an adrenaline feeling. In the boys’ mind, could this be just a kiss (or more) for pleasure? It very well could be.
Cleanly put, this song could just be about a nice guy wanting to take the girl out for a proper date while trying to express how he feels about her by performing acts of chivalry. But with a little extra digging into the lyrics like I mentioned above, it could imply so much more.
Shared by: Elyse Hornung
Image Credit: InStyle