Rock and roll rhetoric: Searching for a Heart
“They say love conquers all
You can’t start it like a car
You can’t stop it with a gun.”
Searching for a Heart (Zevon), Warren Zevon
What a great line. Everyone, since the Roman poet Virgil, knows that love conquers all, but no-one elaborates… until Zevon states the obvious, timeless truth in his perfect, film-noir, rock and roll vernacular: you can’t start it like a car, you can’t stop it with a gun.
Most obviously, it’s a beautiful example of simile; an explicit (as opposed to the less direct metaphor) comparison between two things: love and a car.
Simile is common enough and sits at the heart of so many great lyrics. Think of:
- “like a bridge over troubled water”
- “You are like a hurricane”
- “We move like tigers on Vaseline”
and many more. The best, like Zevon’s, bring new insight.
The couplet is also an example of isocolon: two (or more) clauses with grammatically similar structure:
You can’t start it like a car
You can’t stop it with a gun.
The song was originally written for a film by Alan Rudolph, called Love at Large.
From the 1991 album, Mr. Bad Example:
