“Crushin’ Round the Clock”: Love, Limerence, and Our Cultural Obsession with the Crush

Photo by Leonardo Sanches on Unsplash

With the year ending, there are many holiday parties and gatherings afoot. For some, it’s also the last chance to find a special someone to kiss as the clock strikes twelve on New Year’s Eve. For me, the end of the year is a time to revisit old memories and creative projects. Therefore, I have been reflecting on the lyrics in popular music and mixtapes from my youth.

From Mac Miller’s iconic The High Life (2009) mixtape and the Weeknd’s House of Balloons (2011) to J.Coles trilogy of tapes from The Come Up (2007) to The Warm Up (2009) and Friday Night Lights (2010), I have been enjoying all of the sounds of that particular era of hip-hop and R&B. At the same time, I am still an ethnographer, so I noticed that each mixtape engages with a set of emergent themes and narrative codes that repeat across these genres. One code that stands out is that as each artist focuses on chasing dreams, they also pursue the fantasy of a crush.

And this theme is not just unique to mixtapes. One of my favorite songs at the…