- The Origin of Love
Infobox Song
Name = The Origin of Love
Artist =John Cameron Mitchell
Album = Hedwig and the Angry Inch Original Cast Album
Released = 1999
track_no = 2
Recorded =
Genre = RockCast recording
Length = 5:27
Writer =Stephen Trask
Label = Atlantic
Producer =
prev = "Tear Me Down "
prev_no = 1
next = "Random Number Generation"
next_no = 3"The Origin of Love" is a song from the stage show "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" and subsequent film written by
John Cameron Mitchell . Stephen Trask wrote the soundtrack for the film in collaboration with Mitchell. The song is based on a story fromPlato 's "Symposium".Origins
In the "Symposium", a party is being held in which a series of speeches are given paying homage to Eros, the Greek god of love. "The Origin of Love" is taken from the speech given by the playwright
Aristophanes .According to the speech, long ago,
human s were composed of two people stuck back-to-back, with two faces and eight limbs. Male-male humans came from theSun , female-female humans from theEarth and male-female humans from theMoon . The gods, out of jealousy, split them in half. Now, throughout our lives, we are always trying to find our "other half", andsexual intercourse is the only means we have to put the two halves back together; this desire to be one person again is what we call "love ". However, it is impossible to fully rejoin two people because it is oursoul s and not our bodies that most desire to be reunited.The song
The song was originally Mitchell's idea, and Trask approached it with ambivalence. Trask says of the song's form: "When I started writing that song, the only way I could think to write it was as a picture book. So I wrote it, all the images in it, and the way the story gets told, as the language of, like, a
Dr. Seuss picture book. If you read the lyrics out loud, they read like a picture book." [ [http://www.movieweb.com/news/95/2395.php Agent Orange: Stephen Trask On Hedwig & The Angry Inch! ] ]While taken from the story within the story in the Symposium, the song deliberately jumbles characters from different cultures (for instance,
Zeus appears alongsideOsiris .) It also features some eccentric grammar, with lines like, "You was looking at me, I was looking at you." It puts forward Hedwig's idea that humans have pre-destined soul mates, and that she is seeking hers, Tommy Gnosis. At the end of the film Tommy addresses this idea in the reprise of the songWicked Little Town , arguing that no cosmic force controls our destiny ("And there's no mystical design, no cosmic lover preassigned.") and suggesting that she needs to move on.The song was performed in the film by the band Cheater, made up of Stephen Trask, Theodore Liscinski, Rob Campbell, and Michael Aronov, with vocals by
John Cameron Mitchell andMiriam Shor . According to theInternet Movie Database , the vocals for this song as it appears in the film were recorded live. [ [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0248845/trivia Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) - Trivia ] ]The
animation that accompanies the song in the film version was drawn byEmily Hubley .Covers
*On the album "
Wig in a Box " (a charity cover of the "Hedwig" soundtrack), "The Origin of Love" is covered separately byRufus Wainwright andJonathan Richman .
*The song has been covered byBonnie Pink .References
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