You Riding The Love Rollercoaster?

There’s something about the raw, sweating swagger of the Ohio Players’ 1975 hit Love Rollercoaster that has haunted me since I was a kid growing up in the Buckeye State.

It’s more than a funk anthem. It’s more than a wild ride through falsetto screams and wah-wah pedals. It’s a parable disguised as dancefloor gold. Strip away the bell bottoms and body oil, and you’ll find something ancient pulsing through that groove: a philosophy of impermanence, chaos, and ecstatic surrender.

“Your love is like a rollercoaster, baby, baby / I wanna ride.”

The lyrics hit differently when you’ve been tossed around by life, when you’ve loved someone who wrecked you or worshiped a dream that betrayed you.

And yet, what fascinates me more now isn’t the heartbreak but the choice to continue to ride. Like seriously, why do we keep getting on this rollercoaster of love, desire, attachment, and risk?

Zhuangzi, the Chinese Taoist wisdom deliverer, might grin at the Ohio Players’ metaphor. He would likely say: Of course it’s a rollercoaster. What did you expect—stability?

In Zhuangzi’s world, life is in flux. Control is an illusion. One moment you’re screaming with delight, the next you’re dangling upside down, unsure if the harness will hold.

And that’s the point. He’d remind us that the more we try to secure life—especially love—the more we strangle its spontaneity.

Zhuangzi once wrote of a man dreaming he was a butterfly, only to awaken unsure if he was a man dreaming of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of being a man.

That’s the essence of Love Rollercoaster: when we’re in it, we forget who we are. Love sweeps us up in a fantasy—intoxicating, dizzying, disorienting. And yet, it’s in that loss of ego, that raw ride, that we sometimes glimpse truth.

Mencius, the Confucian idealist, would have a more tender take. To him, love isn’t something to avoid or outwit, it’s the expression of our innate ren, our humanity. He’d see the highs and lows of the rollercoaster as evidence that we care, that we feel.

The suffering of love, while painful, is also proof of moral growth. We get hurt not because we’re fools, but because we dare to be vulnerable. The rollercoaster builds character, not just chaos.

But Xunzi, the Confucian cynic, would be less romantic. He’d warn us not to be seduced by the thrill. He believed human nature was chaotic, selfish, unruly—something that needed discipline and structure to be made good.

He might look at Love Rollercoaster as a cautionary tale: a reminder of what happens when we chase pleasure and passion without wisdom. To Xunzi, the scream in the song is not just funk, it’s the voice of a person being undone by impulse.

Yet I find myself drawn not to one of these perspectives, but to their dance. The rollercoaster of love is the Tao—wild, weaving, and unpredictable. It contains joy and heartbreak, awakening and delusion.

What matters is how we ride. Do we grip the rails, cursing the drop, or do we throw our hands up, laughing through the descent?

That’s the wisdom I find in funk. The Ohio Players weren’t just laying down tracks—they were channeling something eternal. Black soul meeting ancient Tao. A groove that says, feel it all. Sweat it out. Don’t run from the ride.

Get on, even if you know the fall is coming. Because in that drop, in that scream, you’re alive. And maybe, just maybe, you come out the other side freer, funkier, and less afraid.

So, I still ride. But now, I ride with Zhuangzi in one ear, Mencius in my heart, and Xunzi in the m rearview, reminding me that the funk is real, and the wisdom is in not flinching from the ride.

Love Rollercoaster isn’t just a song. It’s a sutra set to bass.

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Diamond Michael Scott

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