Gioia has constructed a mind-expanding, deep-focus piece of scholarship here, certainly the first book to relate, longitudinally as it were, the West African Wolof people’s “dance of the amorous mallard, in which a couple emulate the mating of ducks to the accompaniment of a song with explicit lyrics,” to Gang of Four’s “Love Like Anthrax.” A joke in Chapter 1 nearly derailed me: “Mick Jagger has allegedly slept with more than 4,000 women. So much for getting no satisfaction!” (Which is not just feeble but wrong, surely, the point of the song being that you can sleep with 40,000 women, or 400,000, and still not be satisfied. See above: fizzing, unappeasable need.)

But I pressed on, and I was rewarded. The genesis of the love song would seem to lie somewhere in the fertility rites of the ancient world: the Sumerians, for example, had a number of hymns/love songs to celebrate the sacred marriage of the king (human) to the goddess (immortal), these nuptials being conducive to a rich harvest, cultural plenitude, satellite dishes for everyone, and so on. It doesn’t take long, however, for the songwriters to start sounding like people we know. A very handsome gentleman / Waited for me in the lane; I am sorry I did not go with him. This early draft of The Smiths’ “This Charming Man” (When in this charming car / This charming man / Why pamper life’s complexities / When the leather runs smooth on the passenger seat?) was apparently composed in China somewhere between 1000 and 600 B.C.

Gioia touches in passing upon the love song’s evolutionary brief—that is, to encourage men and women down the ages to have sex with each other. (Even today, he suggests, when I’m listening to “Love Me Harder” in the car, I am being “enticed into vulnerability for the good of the species.”) But he’s more interested in the evolution of the love song itself—or rather its sinuous passage through time, because one of his arguments is that the basic elements have been there from the beginning. It’s hard not to agree with him, really, when Egyptologists are finding amid the pottery shards and crumbling papyri lines like If only I were the laundryman … / Then I’d rub my body with her cast-off garments. Gioia credits women with the greatest breakthroughs in love-song self-expression: “Women were the innovators and men the disseminators”— which sounds anatomically correct, at least. Love shook my senses, / Like wind crashing on the mountain oaks. That’s Sappho, or the composite forensic entity known as Sappho, sounding like Kelly Clarkson.

Fear of the love song, of its emotional extremity, has been a historical constant, Gioia says. The Romans defended themselves with jadedness and sex-obsession: their love songs were rather trivial. The early medieval Christians were nearly phobic: the very presence of love songs in their culture has to be inferred from the amount of denunciations such songs received from the pulpit. But as the priests volleyed and thundered, the love song was approaching one of its great flowerings, in the upward-flying utterances of those strolling love-loonies, the troubadours. Lean out the window, golden hair; my heart is in bondage and my lute is on fire.