“The Way I Loved You”: love and suffering in popular song

In this article, we intend to show how closely love relates to suffering in Western culture, and specifically, in popular music, to the point where being in pain for love seems virtuous. Based on this hypothesis, we have built a corpus of six songs from the genres pop, Kpop, and 'cuarteto', which will be explored using theoretical tools from the field of social discourse analysis. We will not take into account the sound properties of these songs, but rather will focus on the contents of their lyrics, as well as some visual aspects in their music videos. With this corpus we aim to show how songs from different genres of musical production manifest the same norms of discourse regarding romantic love. We have selected two 'pop' songs from the United States which have global youth as their target audience; two 'cuarteto' songs which have the general public of Argentina as their target audience (even though they have very little international distribution, they are enjoyed by audiences of all ages throughout our country, including many young people); and finally, two Kpop songs which, despite having been produced in South Korea, were designed -with the American pop format in mind- to have a global reach and mainly focus on the youth as target audience.