666

Consider the first verse of the song, in which an embittered loner strives pitifully towards a stoical perspective on matters of the heart:

I thought love was only true in fairy tales
Meant for someone else, but not for me
Love was out to get me; that’s the way it seemed
Disappointment haunted all my dreams.

The final line of this delivers packs an especially devastating gut punch—this is pretty dark stuff indeed for radio-friendly pop music. The second verse of Believer isn’t nearly so poetically resonant, but it still has the virtue of containing the line, “What’s the point of trying? All you get is pain.” Clearly, an uncompromisingly pessimistic perspective is being unleashed upon the listener here… Perhaps we are being taught the need for self-sufficiency in a world that can be cold and unsympathetic? Maybe through the speaker’s travails, we are meant to learn that we won’t all find love; that, just as Tyler Durden lectured his followers that they resolutely wouldn’t become “millionaires and movie gods and rock stars,” regardless of what their television told them, so would we likely not meet and marry our perfect soulmate, that instead we would very likely wind up alone, however much the endlessly sunny strains of radio-friendly pop music promised us otherwise.

Ouch! In fact, to up the ante, I’ll  (ironically, given the context) quote the groovy love guru Austin Powers, “Very ouch, baby.”

It’s all just a bit too „ouchy,“ in fact, which must be the reason why our intrepid songster Mister Diamond finally got cold feet, and felt the need to create an “out” from the distressing web of truth he’d spun in the verses of his little ditty. Thus, we are subjected to the depressingly trite and groan-inducingly shallow words of the (admittedly catchy) chorus:

Then I saw her face!
Now I’m a believer
Not a trace of doubt in my mind!
I’m in love; I’m a believer; I couldn’t leave her if I tried,

Seeing her face was all it took to make our feckless speaker a “believer” in the possibility—nay, the surety—of love for himself? Admittedly, there are some lovely faces out there, but he must have known that before. How did another pretty face convince him that his entire perspective was off kilter, to the point of eliminating every last vestige of doubt from his consciousness? How did it erase the disappointment which had heretofore thoroughly “haunted” his slumbering hours?

The listener will be forgiven for feeling a bit of doubt himself concerning the veracity of the speaker’s sudden claim to harboring a full, abundant, and abiding happiness, all from seeing a beautiful girl’s face. Such a scenario is just idiotic, intelligence-insulting, and uninteresting…. In short, premature. In fine, untrue.