Lollipop Lover

With mother’s day so recently behind us, MIKA’s song “Lollipop” has been on the mind, with its repeated referral to “mama” who gives the speaker advice on love—“Suck too hard on your lollipop/ Love’s gonna get you down.” This mimics the theme of Housman’s more somber “When I was one-and-twenty” in which a man describes how he ignored a wise-man’s warning, “not [to give] your heart away,” and a year later realizes how wise this wise-man was. Where Housman’s poem itself is proof the speaker has learned from the advice and decided to share it; Mika’s speaker gives advice to his little sister and directly to the audience, within the course of the song though, he too, initially neglected to heed his counsel.

Though MIKA’s chorus seems simple and repetitive, the phrasing of “Say love/Say Love/ Love’s gonna get you down” carries a lot of weight when analyzed in conjunction with “She[ my mama] warned me what people say”. Mika’s speaker is not advising against love itself, but against being so eager for love that one ignores their own happiness and livelihood. Much like the child in “Araby...