Love Should Be A Crime

Song Meaning

The narrator is fed up with a partner who claims to be a poet and an artist of love, but whose actions are manipulative and hollow. The lyrics paint a picture of someone who uses grand words like "love" and "happiness" but fails to live up to them, treating the relationship like a game. The repeated phrase "play me, play me, play me" highlights the feeling of being manipulated, leading to frustration and a sense of being driven "crazy." The core tension lies in the disconnect between the partner's professed ideals of love and their actual behavior. The narrator questions the authenticity of the partner's claims, asking "Did you read it in a book?" or "Did you see it in a magazine?" This suggests the partner's understanding of love is superficial, learned rather than felt. The narrator's exasperation is palpable as they declare, "You can't play love by numbers babe / You gotta play it all by heart." The most striking aspect is the powerful, albeit hyperbolic, assertion that "love should be a crime." This isn't a literal call for legal action, but a visceral expression of how damaging and deceitful the partner's actions feel. The bridge, with its simple "Love, love, love, love lahaaah" followed by the stark declaration, underscores this contrast between the idealized concept of love and the painful reality. The final lines of the chorus, "all it was / Was a pocket full of nothing / But a suicidal gun," amplify the destructive nature of this false love. Ultimately, these lyrics resonate because they capture the feeling of being emotionally exploited by someone who hides behind romantic rhetoric. The narrator's journey from questioning to outright condemnation, culminating in the demand that such deceitful "love" be criminalized, is a raw and relatable expression of betrayal and disillusionment. The repeated "Baby, baby, baby, baby" becomes less an endearment and more a desperate, almost pleading, acknowledgement of the ongoing cycle of manipulation.