Love is many things in pop music. Like oxygen. Thicker than water. All around. Will tear us apart. A tender trap. A battlefield. A mystery. A dog from hell. A bitch. A mix tape. A drug. But it was Roy Orbison who nailed it better than everyone else: love hurts. Regardless of permutation but maybe not so much hip-hop or death metal or hardcore punk, romantic misery is pop music’s main product line. For every love song flush with ardor and giddy with devotion, there are at least ten stewing in the many-flavored soup of what happens when all that flitty tatty gooey goes achy-breaky, that whole nosebleed of contrarian emotions from pining to pissed-off. Anti-love songs are really love songs turned on its head and painted black by heartbreak, the anguished dispatches of the walking wounded - the oldest, sturdiest, commonest form of pop song.

Despite having long outed myself as a hopeless romantic, I’ve had no use for love songs for the last five years, except as wishful thinking and misdirection, and there’s one time of the year that it becomes a bit of a chore to indulge. Just to offset the high glucose content of the air, I cram my playlist instead with songs that break the mold, holding back on the country, the blues, and the pre-rehab Whitney because these tend

to get a little too intense. The back catalog is still vast without these, making the picking of just five a bit insane - but then that’s sort of like love, eh?

When he boiled down the one he loves but left behind to a simple prop for occupying his time, Michael Stipe might have not only midwifed a kiss-off with more venom in its spit than Dylan’s ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ or Marshall Crenshaw’s ‘I’m Sorry (But So Is Brenda Lee),’ but quite possibly the ultimate anti-love song into the world as well, with a mean streak made even meaner by the way it verges on nonchalance. I’m not sure if any of these come close, but I picked them partly for the way each zeroes in on a specific mode of hurt feeling, and partly for being the ones I reach for to commemorate the holiday.

Here, then, my five bloodiest valentines. Have a good one, lovefools. I am one of you, but for today, I am not.

1. 2541 - Grant Hart

Grant’s songs always had more pull for me than Bob Mould’s when they were in Husker Du, but his finest three minutes plus may well be this minor hit from his first post-Husker solo, a breakup song spewing less bile than that Husker song of his I flirted with putting in here first (‘I Don’t Want To Know If You’re Lonely’) but stuck instead with the poignancy ‘2541’ nails in tracking a couple’s moving in and moving out of an apartment, and of each other’s lives.  ‘It was the first place we ever had to ourselves, I didn’t know it would be the last…’ Geographic displacement as post-romantic fallout.

2. I Am Trying To Break Your Heart - Wilco



Not a song about a loveless relationship, but a loveless reconciliation - when all the energy funneled to carrying a torch for a lost love burns itself out in the anticlimax of a reuniting that turns out to be not much, and not necessarily what the lovelorn wanted in the first place.It hurts more out of the way Jeff Tweedy sings it, like the aquarium drunkard he claims to be in the first verse, as if drinking himself blind every night is the only thing that keeps him hanging on.

3. It Wouldn’t Have Made Any Difference - Todd Rundgren



The wistful loveliness of the melody in the verses and the way Todd coos them as if pitching himself to an ex can be a little disarming: ‘Maybe you remember the last time you called me to say we were through, how it took a million tears just to prove they all were for you…’  But just as her reluctance starts to melt ,Todd throws his sucker punch: ‘ …but those days are through…’ Love TKO, baby. Living well is not the best revenge, indifference is.

4. Knowing Me Knowing You - Abba



Hands down the Abba song closest to my heart. ‘No more carefree laughter, silence ever after…’ Harrowing, as breakup songs go, for being so determined in its hopelessness it all but snuffs out what tiny ray of hope the harmonies reach for.

5. When We Two Parted - Afghan Whigs

The unhappiness that goes unspoken, the dying from the inside, the lovers like brothers on a hotel bed. ‘Parted,’ Greg Dulli sings. But by the end of the song, they’re still together in the claustrophobia of something potentially worse than a loveless relationship: a bloodless one. ‘If I inflict the pain, then baby only I can comfort you.’  Corrosive, colossal.