Before we had the seriousness and defeatism of Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me” or the playful, I won’t give up stylings of Charli XCX’s “Need Ur Love,” we had the hopeless “fuck everything” vibes of J. Geils Band’s 1980 single, “Love Stinks,” from the album of the same name. The band’s lead singer, Peter Wolf (yes, it was one of those rare anomalies where the band was named in honor of a member who was not the frontman), had finalized his divorce with Faye Dunaway the year before after a five-year marriage that Dunaway was likely more keen to end. Why? Call it the Lyle Lovett/Julia Roberts epiphany.
Whether or not this is what spurred the lyrical content behind their most popular song of the 80s apart from “Centerfold” is irrelevant (though that blonde bride wearing a gas mask could easily pass for a Dunaway body double). It’s the emotion–or, more accurately, resignation to feeling nothing after a particular threshold–behind it that makes the track forever resonant, even when you’re ashamed to admit it (because usually the only time you have to is in public when the song inevitably comes on at some manufactured dive bar…unless, of course, you’re not afraid to admit that you seek out the song in the privacy of your own environs). Intended as part acquiescence to being fate’s plaything/part mockery of conventional power ballads about love (e.g. Nazareth’s “Love Hurts”), Wolf seethingly warns, “And so it goes until the day you die/This thing they call love it’s gonna make you cry.”
The question is, do you reach a certain point…a certain “at capacity-ness” for heartbreak before you finally say enough, and disengage from the “game” altogether? If you have any shred of your sanity left, then the answer should be yes. Of course, one could argue that if you’ve found true love, it shouldn’t have to feel like a game. And that’s precisely how one ends up getting cheated on and/or broken up with/divorced. Stop treating it like a game, and the game gon’ fuckin’ play you.
And yet, even the most hardened heart, the one that’s endured all the negative experiences and the broken promises, Wolf argues, cannot avoid falling prey to the vicious cycle once more, cautioning, “Two by two and side by side/Love’s gonna find you yes it is/You just can’t hide/You’ll hear it call/Your heart will fall/Then love will fly”–ultimately, yet again, out the window. For Cupid will have expended another wasted arrow on you and in so doing failed to have accounted for the necessary permutation for love to work: two people both in love with one another. That a song can be a successful sendup of itself is rare (just ask Vanilla Ice or Right Said Fred), but “Love Stinks” manages to be both trashy rock song with all the quintessential guitar riffs and keyboard arrangements of the 80s while also doing Kierkegaard and Nietzsche proud in its clipped and minimal explanation of skepticism of one of the most revered institutions in existence. Even still: monogamous l’amour. For it is an institution, one built up by the very songs that J. Geils Band is railing against.
To that end, the video is both cheesy and depressing (presenting us with inexplicable scenes that could only happen in the 80s, like a man playing two trumpets while jumping on a pogo stick or a greaseball taking pictures by himself in a photo booth that Allen Covert in The Wedding Singer clearly re-created for his character of Sammy). In between non sequitur moments like Wolf clutching to a mannequin (what the fuck was it with the 80s and mannequins?), the band finds a way to drive home the point of toxicity and putridity in love when you’re the odd person out. The one unaccommodated by the ratio that works for some people but is left with no choice but to leave others outside of it.
Vacillating between the overly literal (waking up next to a giant fish that, yes, stinks–though is probably preferable to a severed horse’s head) to the overly abstract (why are the multiple closeups of someone cutting a tomato?), the most disturbing visual from “Love Stinks” is an old man (though it could be a woman, it’s almost always impossible to tell with old people) wearing heart-shaped sunglasses and puckering his lips at random–at anything or anyone. A means to infer how desperate he is to get that taste of love, forever within his grasp but always fleeting. Especially since his kind is doomed to waste emotions on a person that doesn’t care either way.
And then, as if portending that the song would become a classic on the karaoke circuit, the video concludes with subtitles of the lyrics and a bouncing heart that urges you to sing along. Or you can just pucker your lips creepily at the end of the bar, hoping someone will reciprocate your mouth signals.
