ABSTRACT
The lyrics of the song "Love Detective" from the album The Red Thread contains a range of Lacanian concepts, including lack, unattainable desire, and an objet petit a which activates an unconscious economy of desire. The groove patterns of the "Love Detective" create a cyclic form, depicting a drive which remains active even as the song ends—an unresolved conclusion. This chapter considers the twentieth century's most influential theories of desire as alternative ways of engaging with groove-based music. As a test case, the project provides two competing readings of selected songs by the Scottish band Arab Strap. A preliminary observation is that, like many of Arab Strap's songs, "Love Detective" is groove-based. Replacing or at least minimizing the strain of musical desire, "Love Detective" offers a seemingly simple texture in which added and subtracted instrumental layers intensify or relax the energies of the groove.
