While social and mainstream media often focus on hate and divisiveness, Chris Stapleton’s “Higher” defies both with its magnificent vision of love and intimacy. This song offers a crucial and refreshing alternative to the prevailing narratives of love and intimacy in the popular national and international imagination.
“Higher,” the ninth track on Stapleton’s fifth and latest studio album Higher (2023), has much to teach us about developing endearing visions of intimacy and romantic love intentionally divorced from postmodern challenges and problems with both. Stapleton, Morgane Stapleton (his wife), and Dave Cobb produced the album. Without question, the heartwarming love and intimacy the country music superstar shares with Morgane inspired such a powerful vision of love and intimacy in the dark times we confront globally.
This article explores the significance of the hit in reshaping our conceptions of love and intimacy in the 21st century. The track challenges toxic perspectives on love and intimacy that are too frequently communicated through social and mainstream media, offering hope for a future of more substantive relationships.
Love in Chris Stapleton’s “Higher”
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When one observes the brutal execution of Sonya Massey, the tragic and relentless violence in Gaza, and the many innocent lives lost in Ukraine resulting from Putin’s war in the region, we need artists to sing and write genuine love songs. In “Higher,” Chris Stapleton demonstrates he comprehends the need for a more robust vision of love and intimacy. The song’s first verse says, “I could climb the highest hill/Reach my hands up to the sky/Maybe touch a passing cloud/My heart would know all the while.”
Therefore, the first verse champions love and intimacy with celestial resonances, as evidenced by “Reach my hands up to the sky.” While the statement isn’t grounded in pragmatism, pragmatism’s absence is ironically at the center of the track’s dominant value. “Higher” longs for a love and intimacy that transcends existing limitations. We can never possess love and intimacy that literally reaches the sky. However, in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson posited that we must imagine alternatives to our present realities.
The chorus suggests Stapleton imagines and advocates for an alternative love and intimacy: “That you take me higher/So much higher.” For Fredric Jameson, capitalism engenders tremendous barriers to developing and maintaining healthy relationships. Therefore, for the “So much higher” to materialize in the natural world, anti-capitalist practices based on an anti-capitalist vision are necessary.
“The Waning of Affect” in Relationships
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The country music superstar claims to have arrived at these “higher” spaces of love and intimacy that allow him and his lover to surpass capitalism’s limitations. Unfortunately, capitalism remains dominant globally, which doesn’t permit such novel spaces devoid of its effects to emerge and flourish. His vision is still potent, though. He refuses to let what Jameson refers to as “the waning of affect,” a postmodern flattening of emotion, to stop him from offering this vision.
Jameson argued that postmodernism creates conditions where people exhibit a general proclivity to resist tenderness and generosity, given that the cultural logic of late capitalism tries to compel postmodern people to center their lives on money. When money becomes one’s central focus, love and intimacy are often viewed as useless, considering they’re antithetical to the cultural logic of late capitalism.
The hit’s bridge reveals that the artist refuses to allow “the waning of affect” to crush and imprison his ideas about love and intimacy: “Your love’s the sunrise that turns my night into day/It gives me wings and lets me fly away.” Beautifully expressed, Stapleton possesses a restorative love because it is rooted in anti-capitalist values, for no hint of materialistic values is connected to it.
Conclusion
Chris Stapleton’s “Higher” can help us recognize how fundamental the economic system is to our intimate relationships. While one might find it challenging to discern all that has been proffered above about this song, she must admit that money influences the love shared with a significant other. By relying heavily on Fredric Jameson’s Marxist theoretical construct, readers are invited to investigate money’s deleterious effects on love and intimacy.
Although many will contend that this track’s love and intimacy vision is detached from our capitalist realities, such a reading is myopic. How much resistance have you waged against capitalism’s demands? How much thought have you invested in interrogating money’s role in generating tension in your intimate relationship? The hit supplies a remedy in the third verse: “But with you, I’d have to say/My heaven’s never quite that far.”
The country music superstar views his lover as “heaven,” the highest vision of Utopia, which he waits to communicate in the final verse. If we apply the song to our romantic relationships, our love and intimacy for our partners can strengthen. According to verse, though, we must regard our partners as our “heaven” to see this come to fruition. For religious folks who find this notion of “heaven” problematical, please embrace a more pragmatic theology that offers liberation from such antiquated thinking. Fight your relationship’s real enemy: capitalism.
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