Lend Me Your Love

Pop Song Anatomy™
Part of the JC’s pop songs and the law™ series

Mr. Slim, yesterday

Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Pop song

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Lend Me Your Love by Memphis Slim
(Enjoy the lyrics, at your own risk, 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. Memphis seems to be in the business of borrowing and rehypothecating, or possibly short-selling, love. 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^[1]

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

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 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.

References

↑ A bird released by Noah after the flood in order to find land; it eventually came back carrying a freshly plucked olive leaf (Gen 8, 11). It seems to have been a rather patient dove: stoic, even. There is no mention of it “moaning” or registering any particular complaint, though it did bugger off at the first opportunity it got.