So amazing to be loved. But is it though?

Luther Vandross sings, “It’s so amazing to be loved, I’d follow you to the moon and skies above.” This R&B icon for sure graced our screens and even as a Gen Z, I had the honor of listening to some of his greatest hits like So Amazing, Ballerina Girl, Hallo, Here and Now, and so on, thanks to Classic 105 and my millennial elder sisters who introduced us to the prospects of R&B. But while Luther Vandross sung about love and romance, it emerged that he did not quite yet on a personal level experience the love he was admittedly singing about—which is highly paradoxical if you imagine his smile, tenderness, and the passion with which he sung.

In a YouTube video, one of the commentators explained that he experienced what seemed like unrequited love, and owing to the politics surrounding the demands of his record label vis-à-vis the societal expectations at the time, he just had to sing in fantasy, yet fail to experience himself what love meant. Perhaps that is the whole point of singing about love and romance. Perhaps his authenticity was motivated by the emptiness and need to quench that thirst within himself.