"With the coming of rock in the '60s, Bob Dylan and the Beatles dramatically widened the range of subjects open to pop-song lyricists, just as Stephen Sondheim (who goes completely unmentioned in Love Songs) taught a generation of theatrical songwriters that it was possible to write about romantic love with unsettling ambivalence. To be sure, the wider significance of these developments was initially overstated by the critics of the day. As Dave Hickey has tartly observed, 'ninety percent of the pop songs ever written were love songs, while ninety percent of rock criticism was written about the other ten percent.' Still, they were at the very least a crack in the façade, and in the '90s that crack widened into a yawning gap."
Terry Teachout in Commentary discusses Ted Gioia's Love Songs: The Hidden History.
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