The Supremes, You Can't Hurry Love

Back in college, my friend Jenny and I had an ongoing debate over the Supremes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love”: is its central message fundamentally optimistic, or melancholic? And I think ultimately it depends on the listener and how comfortable one is about having things beyond your control. If you can’t hurry love and you just have to wait - should that cause one to be upset at the vagaries of fate? Or does that mean that, well, love will happen anyway, and your present lovelorn state is just a blip of unhappiness?

Me, I’m quite accepting of things beyond my control, I think, so I think of the song in an optimistic way. All I know is, when that bassline kicks in, it makes me happy.