Music

Top 10 Anti-Valentine's Jams

by John Semley

Fuck Valentine’s Day. Just another Hallmark holiday cooked up to sell cards, right? Right! And how about those disgusting in-love types jamming their happiness in your cranky mug as they jam their gross, wet tongues into each others’ gaping maws? Puke!

Well don’t let all those idiots cranking “Friday I’m In Love” and “La La Love You” and whatever-the-hell else have all the fun. Whether you’re hopelessly single, freshly dumped, or trapped in a cold, loveless relationship you’re too terrified to try and get out of, you can take solace in knowing that loads of people suffered through the same experiences. In fact, as these songs illustrate, it’s way more universal than Eskimo kisses and inside jokes and signing greeting cards with “XOXOXO.”

10. Del Shannon – Hats Off to Larry

Contrary to popular myths disseminated via Robert Mithchum’s hand tattoos in Night of the Hunter, the opposite of LOVE isn’t HATE. It’s schadenfreude—the uniquely German-sounding pleasure of revelling in others misfortunes. And Del Shannon’s celebratory ode to the guy who broke the heart of the girl that broke his heart revels in it. Beneath the deceptively sweet hook (“Hats off to Larry/ He broke your heart/ Just like you broke mine/ When you said we must part”) bubbles pain and cynicism worthy of a Phil Spector song. And worse yet, not only does Del want to raise a glass to ol’ Larry, but he begs his nameless girl to come back. He’s mean and pathetic. A potent V-Day combo.

9. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – From Her to Eternity

There are plenty of Nick Cave songs about sour romance; like the one where he beats Kyle Minogue to death with a rock (“Where the Wild Roses Grow”) or the one about how arrogance and narcissism and vanity will ruin anything (“There She Goes My Beautiful World” and basically every other Nick Cave song). But this title track from the first Bad Seeds record is like the Rosetta Stone for understanding all of them. In fact the lyric: “I know that to possess her is therefore not to desire her” is pretty much thesis of every Nick Cave song, and every song by every grumpy lonely-hearted bastard. Best song to listen to when you’re home alone in your apartment on Valentine’s Day and you want to imagine the fat old man shuffling around in the unit upstairs is some delicate, unattainable beauty born into this world for the express purpose of torturing you.

8. The Carpenters – Your Baby Doesn’t Love You Anymore

Loads of Carpenters songs are all kinds of depressing for all kinds of reasons. Like monsters, the Carpenters wrap up despair in the sickliest, sweetest pop melodies, without being all winky and ironic about it. None of their songs do this better (uh, is better the right word?) than “Your Baby Doesn’t Love You Anymore.” From the get-go, Karen Carpenter croons out a recipe for broken-hearted solitude (“Just take some loneliness/ Add a tear or two/ Throw in some emptiness/ Till you’re bluer than blue”) and then proceeds to tell the listener that, a) your baby doesn’t love you anymore and b) there’s nothing you can do. Happy Valentine’s Day.

7. Ghost Dance – Grip of Love

This is like the Blue Valentine of love songs. “Grip of Love” takes the set-up of a love song and flips it all topsy-turvy: two lovers staring deep into each other’s eyes, only to realize that there’s nothing there. Love, though, has other designs; it’s fierce grip trapping our lovers in some loveless tango of resentment, bitterness, and emptiness. Awesome.

6. Gloria Jones – Tainted Love

So this has been emerging as a theme, but it kind of goes without saying that anti-love songs are wrapped up in the trappings of a straight-up love song. This is what makes Gloria Jones’ original version of “Tainted Love” (from 1964) more haunting than Soft Cell’s rearranged 1981 cover (or the Marilyn Manson cover from the Not Another Teen Movie soundtrack, which was even more popular than that). It’s also more empowering in an “I Will Survive” type of way, with Jones having the wherewithal to pack her shit and high tail it out of her toxic relationship. Then again, the fade-out refrain of “Touch me baby, tainted love,” seems to signal a waft of romantic recidivism. Misery, after all, love company.

5. Meat Loaf – Paradise By the Dashboard Lights

This one serves a number of different functions. First, as an epic anthem of teenage romance, it can’t be beat. But more importantly, if you can rope someone into singing this with you as a duet at one of the loner Valentine’s singles karaoke nights, you’re well on your way to rounding a few bases yourself. And if you rope a third party in for the whole baseball play-by-play part, well, who knows what’ll happen?!

4. Guns ‘N’ Roses – Back Off Bitch

Okay so this song is for sure misogynistic and everything but, aw fuck, we’re not going to defend it. Other than to say that some days there’s nothing more soothing than a reliable Slash guitar solo and Axl Rose barking like a total asshole. We call those days, weekdays.

3. Depeche Mode – Shake the Disease

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDIm8K2Kie0

In a perfect world, if you needed to break up with someone, you could just put this song on and leave the room and both parties would share this kind of compassionate shared understanding of what was going on and just go about their respective lives at peace with it.

2. Alanis Morissette-You Oughta Know

Forget being lonely or depressed or self-loathing. Be angry. Love is for idiots anyways. Especially when heartache can inspire such potent vitriol. The fact that this song was written about Uncle Joey (so the story goes) only makes it better.

1. Leonard Cohen – Death of a Ladies Man

A sure fire sign you want to break up with your girlfriend (or, sure, boyfriend) is when you’re listening to this song and “From Her to Eternity” on repeat, trying to shore your confidence in the face of the reality that, hey, it’s sorrow that’s real and you’re better off alone, anyhow. A sure fire sign you’ve just been broken up with by your girlfriend (or boyfriend) is when you’re listening to this song and “From Her to Eternity” (and maybe “Last Year’s Man”) on repeat in the dark for a week until your roommate convinces you to start getting drunk again because a billion beers will serve to shore your confidence in the face of the reality that, hey, it’s sorrow that’s real and you’re better off alone, anyhow.