Call me pretentious if you like, but I’m starting to wonder if I’m not a deeper thinker than Shania Twain.

Probably the greatest songwriter of her generation (of midriff-baring Canadians with stage names they heard in an incense shop), Twain was an overnight sensation in the year 2000 with an album she’d actually released in 1997.

Things moved slower before the internet.

In the years since her one successful album, the tax-dodging, husband-swapping, faux-country warbler has largely eschewed the limelight, but that hasn’t stopped her songs becoming staples of weddings and Valentines Days for people with no imagination. In the spirit of this, and because my wife wanted to distract me with something so I wasn’t bothering her all day, I’m going to examine some popular love songs for basic bitches at this, the bleakest, rainiest, coldest and allegedly most romantic time of year.

Still The One - Shania Twain

This is a song that results in “Inception” levels of meta-narrative. On the surface a simple love song for a long term partner, a quick scan of the lyrics raises some flags.

“They said,
‘I’ll bet…
They never make it,’
But just look at us holding on…”

This isn’t romance so much as bloody-minded determination to prove that your girlfriends didn’t know what they were talking about when they told you your latest relationship was a bad idea. “Look at us holding on!”, Shania sings, as though “holding on” is a synonym for enjoying yourself and not what you have to do if you slip off a narrow ledge, or what you demand of someone who has lost a lot of blood as they’re being loaded into an ambulance.

So on the surface, “Still The One” is a song about still being happy with someone. Except that the lyrics make it sound like the happiness is a facade and that the relationship has become a chore. The song isn’t clever enough to do this deliberately - it feels more like a Freudian slip. And it’s played by people who presumably don’t see that. Which means they might well think they’re in a happy relationship, but can’t see that the cracks are starting to form. Life, imitating art, imitating life.

It could be incredibly layered.

It isn’t, but if you squint, it kind of could be. Instead it’s really just an insipid ballad, written by an idiot, signifying nothing.

The rest of Twain’s back catalogue isn’t much better. “Any Man Of Mine” makes her sound like a disfigured, demanding harpy…

“Any man of mine better be proud of me
Even when I'm ugly, he still better love me
And I can be late for a date that's fine
But he better be on time.”

…while “From This Moment”, another gratingly popular piece of greeting card sentimentality, is a mixture of love-bombing and desperation.

“From this moment, I have been blessed
I live only for your happiness
And for your love, I'd give my last breath
From this moment on…”

One reason Twain dropped out of sight after the early oughts is that she began suffering throat problems that reportedly made her voice rougher. I desperately hoped that this meant she began to sing like Leonard Cohen or Tom Waits, but recent footage shows that there’s not much difference from her old voice. Which is a shame, as some of these lyrics re-recorded with a dark, gravelly tone would be downright harrowing.

They already are, of course, but most people don’t actually listen to song lyrics, which explains the popularity of…

Every Breath You Take - The Police

Ignoring the fact that, in the forty years since its release, we’ve come to live in the kind of surveillance state where the Police might literally be watching every breath you take, it’s still hard to understand why people ever found this one romantic.

Aside from “people don’t listen”, I can only speculate that Sting was a beneficiary of “pretty privilege” in his heyday - a man so handsome that people found anything he said sexy, even if he was writing a song about stalking, which is what this is.

It’s also probably why Sting, who worked as a teacher before his music career took off, doesn’t get too much scrutiny for writing “Don’t Stand So Close To Me”, a song about a teacher who sleeps with an underage student and… that’s it. His colleagues are judgemental and angry, but it’s not like that song ends with anyone being led away in handcuffs.

If “Every Breath You Take” was meant as a sincere declaration of love rather than a portrait of creepy obsession, then it would still, crucially, be creepy and obsessive. That’s sort of the point. I find Sting’s songwriting annoyingly repetitive for the most part, but if you really want to get technical, “Every Breath” is well written. From the stalker’s perspective, it IS a love song. Someone who has become pathologically obsessed with another person to the point that they are following them - which is what this is about - doesn’t see anything wrong with their behaviour because they are mentally unwell.

That doesn’t mean you should make it the first dance at your wedding. It would, ironically, be more fitting to use Patsy Cline’s “Crazy”, because worrying that you’re crazy is a good way to reassure yourself that you haven’t totally lost your marbles. Whereas thinking that watching every breath someone takes is normal is a definite sign that you might be crazy in a way they can charge you with.

Everything I Do - Bryan Adams

I’m trying not to be too hard on Canada, here, but both Bryan Adams and Shania Twain are on the list. Both were foisted on the world by Mutt Lange, a music producer who now lives in Switzerland, and the fact that he has taken refuge in the most famously neutral country on earth implies that he knows full well what he did.

“Everything I Do” came third in a public vote to find the most popular love songs in Britain, a fact that makes me once again call for the carpet bombing of Britain. The song-from-the-movie for 1991’s “Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves”, Bryan Adams’ “Everything I Do” spent sixteen weeks at number one in the UK chart when it was released.

Sixteen weeks. That’s four months. That’s from now until the middle of June. There is no reason anyone in the UK will EVER need to hear this song again. It has been played to the point of being background noise. It has been played out of existence. People who remember it the first time around shouldn’t even be able to hear this song anymore because the specific cells in their ears that would be able to detect it are already worn to a nub. Declaring this your favourite song would be like saying your favourite colour is clear.

If your significant other puts “Everything I Do” on a romantic playlist, or suggests it for your wedding, the first thing you need to do is think back over the relationship and try to decide whether you need to call for a priest, a Voigt-Kampff test or the Men In Black. One way or another, whatever you’ve gotten involved with doesn’t have a human soul and you need to be very careful not to alert it to the fact that you’ve spotted it.

The only serious contender to the chart run of “Everything I Do” was Wet Wet Wet’s version of “Love Is All Around”, a song that spent fifteen weeks at number one before the band themselves had it pulled because even they were sick of hearing it. It perhaps goes without saying that “Love Is All Around” is also still a popular love song, which might be one of the reasons Wet Wet Wet singer Marty Pellow decided to give up music for the more relaxing pastime of heroin. (You can take the boy out of Glasgow…)

I Will Always Love You - Whitney Houston

The winner of the aforementioned poll to find Britain’s favourite love song was “I Will Always Love You” by Whitney Houston, the song-from-the-movie for 1992’s “The Bodyguard” and proof that Kevin Costner can try all he likes, but his band will never manage to assault as many ears as the soundtracks to his movies.

That might be a little unfair - like “Every Breath You Take”, there’s actually nothing wrong with “I Will Always Love You” as a song. Hell, it’s better than “Every Breath You Take”, which is probably to be expected as it was written by Dolly Parton.

The problem with “I Will Always Love You” winning a love song poll is that it’s very clearly not a love song. Yes, it’s got “I love you” right there in the title, but that’s the whole point - it’s not a song about a relationship succeeding; this is a goodbye song. It’s a lament, not a celebration.

Some of the blame for this confusion can be placed on Whitney Houston, or at least on whoever decided to record Houston’s version in the way it appears on the record. “I Will Always Love You” is written (and was originally recorded by Parton) as a small moment. It’s a song of loss and defeat and regret. It’s an attempt to console someone once you’ve decided you can no longer stay.

None of these are emotions you should be belting at the top of your lungs.

Whitney Houston’s performance is undeniably show-stopping, but it really shouldn’t be, a fact which became doubly problematic as Houston herself spiralled into drug addiction.

They never warn you about this on the label, but smoking crack tends to give you a sore throat. As Houston became increasingly erratic and addicted, the only avenue through which she could make money was performing, and her biggest hit - the one audiences always demanded - was a song that requires a lot of very difficult vocal technique. The kind of technique Houston was no longer capable of because of smoking crack. Crack she could only pay for by singing that one song. Which she couldn’t, leading her to seek refuge in more crack.

I’m not arguing that life would have turned out better for Whitney if she’d had a more logical arrangement of a Dolly Parton tune, but I am going to say that a famous breakup song that contributed to the death of its biggest performer has no business being seen as romantic, let alone winning a poll of love songs.

I could probably go on for quite some time about problematic love songs - I haven’t even touched on the amount of negging that goes on, or on the strange phenomenon of songs by women that celebrate how unappealing their menfolk are - but everyone who reads my stuff is clearly posessed of impeccable taste to begin with, and so won’t need me for guidance.

Happy Valentines Day!