Lend Me Your Love

Pop Song Anatomy™ Part of the JC’s pop songs and the law™ series →Go uptown Mr. Slim, yesterday Lend Me Your Love by Memphis Slim (Enjoy the lyrics, at your own risk, here) Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Pop song Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

Memphis Slim’s Lend Me Your Love is, like Billy Idol’s Rebel Yell a fine example of a lyric that correctly, if metaphorically, employes technical legal terminology. Mr. Slim was evidently often in the business of borrowing, rehypothecating and possibly short-selling, his affection. He sings:

Now lend me your love, little girl, please lend me your love

Lend me your love, baby, please lend me your love

I know you hear me keep moanin’, moanin’ just like Noah’s dove

You got a mortgage on my love, girl, there really is no doubt

You got a mortgage on my love, girl, there really is no doggone doubt

But someday I be lucky enough to find another woman,

Gonna buy your love mortgage out

We quite like how fastidious Mr Slim is in extending the metaphor, even when it has apparently run out of road, talking in terms of refinancing a love mortgage with another, er “lender”. We wonder, vaguely, whether one is able to repay a maturing love loan in kind?

Transaction analysis

The transaction seems to be this:

• Baby agrees to lend a quantity (unspecified) of love to Memphis Slim.
• As collateral security for his obligation to return her love, Mr. Slim grants Ms. Baby a mortgage over his own love, which for the time being, he is holding on his own balance sheet.
• We surmise that Mr Slim is intending to take Baby’s love and reuse it (or “rehypothecate” it, as our American friends might say) elsewhere.
• Seeing as he has at least an equivalent amount of his own love which he is holding subject to a fixed charge, we deduce that Baby’s love and Memphis Slim’s love cannot be fungible (otherwise this would be a transaction without any economic substance. Which would get Memphis Slim’s tax attorneys in a lather.)
• While their respective loves might not be fungible, Mr Slim contemplates buying out his obligations under the love mortgage, perhaps with love received from this other woman, raising the prospect that the love of one woman might (in Mr Slim’s opinion, at any rate) be freely exchangeable, strongly correlated mark-to-market values, if not outright fungible with the love of another. The JC prefers not to speculate. This sounds less than ideal — sub-prime, so to speak.

See also

• Pop songs and the law
• Rebel Yell
• Mortgage and the special variety, the love mortgage