Only Fools Rush In

may part 3 (on Elvis, on catharsis)

At Triple Canopy’s 2024 Symposium Farah Al Qasimi debuted her performance of Mother ending in a rendition of Elvis’ “Can’t Help Falling in Love”. Two days prior, Poison Girlfriend performed the same ballad on the stage of Elsewhere NYC. On March 9, 2025 Vida Vojić performed the song in an event organized by Brooklyn-based experimental artist Austin Sley-Julian at the Artist’s Space which also served to raise funds for their friend Láwû (Mango) Makuriye’nte’s loved ones and memorial service.

“Grief was very much in my heart at that moment. It was a very recent loss for a lot of the community,” Sley-Julian says of their performance with Julia Santoli and the curation of the night. “I think we are all dealing with an overall grief of decency and respect and humanity that is being chipped away at.”

Al Qasir’s performance responded directly to the question: what happens when ancestors inhabit the living? In reply, she created a hauntological feedback loop of personal lore and identity.

Poison Girlfriend’s cover, in a lineup with computer wife and Patch+, traced an ancestry of post-humanist hopeless romantics. But on March 9th, the same day, Mahmoud Khalil was arrested by ICE, as Vida Vojić’s drum lilted into “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” the song’s ironic optimism rang more like a warning.

Wise men say…

At the end of 2023, New York City Journalist and Political Commentator Ross Barkan warned of a “strange romantic backlash” against the Tech Boom to parallel revolutionary France’s move from the cultural ideals of rationalism to the passions and madness. Now, as political pundits call for a “Big Tech Reformation,” Yanis Varoufakis’ theory of techno feudalism sweeps through TikTok, and Luigi Mangione and Luddite-era Anti-Tesla campaigns form a new class of disenfranchised proletariat, Barkan’s prophecy has come to pass, but the question of how this upheaval might sound hangs in the air.

Elvis Presley’s sweet, simple love song, “Can’t Help Falling in Love” comes directly from the Romantic period of pre-revolutionary France that Barkan forecasted to–a time dominated by political unrest and gothic tragedy, where love and grief were not just linked but self-fulfilling.

Released in 1961 on the soundtrack for Blue Hawaii, Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling In Love” was first composed as “Plaisir d’Amour,” by Jean-Paul-Egide Martini in the 1784 French court, and takes its text from a poem by Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian, which takes its plot from the Spanish Tragi-comedy of Calisto and Melibea, known colloquially as La Celestina. As in any folk tradition, Presley’s lover is haunted by its past versions. Other interpretations of “Plaisir d’Amour” include Rina Ketty, Joan Baez, Nana Mouskouri, and Charlotte Church to scratch the surface. But only Presley’s version has reached Bono falsetto levels of notoriety.

Presley’s is a distinct departure from de Florian’s poem, replacing the opening couplet, “The pleasure of love lasts only a moment/The grief of love lasts a lifetime” with “Wise men say, only fools rush in.” Equally historied, Presley’s opening comes from a line from Alexander Pope’s “An Essay on Criticism” first set to music by Bob Crosby Orchestra’s “Fools Rush In (Where Angels Fear to Tread), which Presley also covered in 1972. But in swapping the opening of “Plaisir d’Amour,” Presley situates his lover before an unrealized love, a dramatic irony, only the audience knows Presley’s to be doomed.

But in Vojić's performance, the audience is removed from the position of “wise” observer. She opens with a verbal count in on the drums while increasing tempo and varying patterns to include the listener in the rhythm-making of the performance. “There is no actual difference between you and the audience and what you're experiencing and what the audience is experiencing,” Vojić explains.So by the time she reaches her final line, stretched as long as breath will allow, the audience, too, has been held in a love as strong “as the river flows/ surely to the sea”--an eerie parallel to the Palestinian protest call, pulled from The Righteous Brother’s version of Unchained Melody.

Facilitating enactments of grief and love is a crucial piece music can play in the unraveling present, says Sley-Julian. “Meaning set outside of capitalistic outcomes and actors is super important for grief and processing,”

While Presley’s love song is no Eroica, his lover’s foolhardy pursuit is a welcome invitation in practicing love with a dangerous optimism in the face of its inextricable tragedy.

“I think of that moment more as a catharsis,” says Vojic. “I scream it, but it's very strong. It's not a desperate scream. It's just a very solid scream.”

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sometimes the string in things is really strong like i had never really thought much about can’t help falling in love or even know it was originally an elvis song until i read this piece and then i was at my friends house the next day and her roommate just came back from a wedding where someone’s daughter sang it beautifully

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