Pretenders – "The Adultress" (1981)

There’s nothing to understand

It’s understood

I’m the adulteress

In “The Adultress,” Chrissie Hynde has created a protagonist who would likely choose “It’s complicated” for her Facebook relationship status because “I’m an adulteress” is not one of the options.

(By the way, the dictionary spelling of the word is “adulteress” – not “adultress.”  Ms. Hynde may have chosen the nonstandard spelling “adultress” because a three-syllable word fits the meter of the song better than a four-syllable word would have.  Or maybe she flunked spelling in school.)

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The Oxford English Dictionary defines adultery as “voluntary sexual intercourse between a married person and someone not his or her spouse.”  That means that lusting in your heart after someone when one or both of you is married, or just kissing someone else’s spouse isn’t technically adultery.  Feel better now?

Technically not adultery

(You lesbians can go a lot farther than kissing – at least in New Hampshire.  In 2003, the New Hampshire Supreme Court held in 2003 that female same-sex sexual relations did not constitute sexual intercourse – meaning that an extramarital affair between two women could not be adultery.)

The protagonist in “The Adultress” isn’t necessarily an adulteress even if she is having sex with a married man.  The Seventh Commandment prohibits adultery – which is punishable by death under Jewish law – but an extramarital affair between a married person and a single person is considered  adultery only if the married party is a woman.  If the woman is unmarried, both participants in the affair are guilty only of fornication regardless of the marital status of the male.  (Assuming incest isn’t involved, of course.)

That’s because intercourse between a wife and a man other than her husband can obviously lead to the impregnation of the wife.  Since Jewish law deemed any child born to a married woman to be the legal child of the husband, this adulteration of the husband’s genetic lineage by the wife's adulterous conception of a child would result in him being legally responsible for that child, which wasn’t fair.  (If the woman had no husband, that wasn’t an issue.)

The legal distinction between adultery and fornication made its way into English common law and the the laws of many other countries because of concerns about paternity.  Given the development of genetic testing, it is now possible to prove paternity with certainty – the husband of an adulterous wife can usually avoid legal responsibility for another’s man child.

But the traditional Seventh Commandment-inspired definition of adultery still applies in some jurisdictions.  For example, a Minnesota statute provides as follows:

When a married woman has sexual intercourse with a man other than her husband, whether married or not, both are guilty of adultery and may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than one year or to payment of a fine of not more than $3,000, or both.

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We know that the woman in “The Adultress” is unmarried because she is described as a “spinster,” a word that refers to any unmarried woman – although it is usually used as a synonym for “old maid” – i.e., a single woman who is unlikely to get hitched because of her advanced age.  (The male equivalent of a “spinster” is a “bachelor,” which doesn’t carry the same negative connotations that “spinster” does for most people.)  

If the woman is a spinster, she’s not an adulteress under the traditional definition of that term.  Rather, she’s a fornicator – or perhaps a “fornicatress”?  (“The Fornicatress” just doesn’t have the same ring as “The Adultress,” does it?)

One final note: “adultery” and “adult” come from two different Latin roots.  “Adultery” and “adulterate” both come from a Latin word meaning “to defile or corrupt,” while “adult” is related to “adolescent” – both are derived from a Latin verb meaning “to grow up or mature.”   

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I’ll forgive Chrissie Hynde for her misuse (and misspelling) of “adulteress” because “The Adultress” is such a well-conceived and well-constructed song.  

I don’t know if Hynde based its lyrics on personal experience or whether the song’s title character is a product wholly of her imagination.  Regardless, Hynde’s lyrics are quite understated – she doesn’t stoop to using histrionics to create pathos – but her depiction of a woman whose unremarkable outward appearance belies the bitterness and self-loathing that are roiling her innermost being may leave you feeling a little shaken.

I don’t remember ever having a harder time choosing two or three lines from the lyrics of a featured song to quote at the beginning of a 2 or 3 lines post.

(Did the penny just drop?  Did it finally hit you what the title of my wildly successful little blog signifies?)

There are some great songs that simply don’t have two or three particularly quotable lines – I’ll go through the lyrics several times, struggling to make a choice because there’s no passage that seems quite right.  

With other songs, it’s easy to choose two or three lines to quote – either because they are particularly clever or poignant, or because they are well-known and iconic.

Occasionally, I find it hard to choose because there are two or even three quotable passages in a song’s lyrics.

But rarely are the lyrics to a song so artfully written that almost any two or three lines from that song  would do. 

“The Adultress” is an example of such a song, which is one reason I've chosen it for the 2 OR 3 LINES “SILVER DECADE” HALL OF FAME.  Click here to listen to it.

At the same time, click here so you can follow the lyrics as you listen.

Click on the link below to buy the record from Amazon:

Pretenders – "Day After Day" (1981)

'Round and 'round and 'round we go

Just like yesterday

The Pretenders’ eponymous debut album was widely praised as one of the very best of its era.  It’s certainly one of the few albums I owned that I was happy to listen to straight through.  

Actually, I always skipped “Stop Your Sobbing” – the one song on that record that Chrissie Hynde didn’t write.  That song was written by the Kinks’ Ray Davies, the father of Hynde’s only child.  (He wrote a lot of great songs, but “Stop Your Sobbing” isn’t one of them.)  

Every other song on that first album was pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good.  But in the course of deciding which Pretenders’ songs deserved to be in the 2 OR 3 LINES “SILVER DECADE” HALL OF FAME, I discovered that the band’s second album – which was titled Pretenders II – was even better: 

I would go so far as to say that Pretenders II is pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty f*ckin’ awesome.

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Chrissie Hynde wrote a lot of great songs, most of which are about what happens when males and females couple.  

“Day After Day” is an exception.  It doesn’t tell the story of un homme et une femme – it’s a song about what it’s like to be a successful rock ’n’ roll band.

A lot of groups have released records about the head-spinning experience of life on the road – “Travelin’ Band” by Creedence, “We’re An American Band” by Grand Funk Railroad, and “Torn and Frayed” by the Stones are just a few examples – but I think “Day After Day” is one of the best.

The promotional video that was made for it shows the group deplaning from a commuter turboprop in Santa Barbara and climbing into limousines for a drive to an outdoor concert venue, where they pretend to rehearse as the cameras roll.  (Hynde is one of the more convincing lip-synchers I’ve ever seen.)

The second half of the video shows them returning to the same venue later that night and taking the stage to perform.  

I don’t know why drummer Martin Chambers is playing while wearing long underwear.  But I do know that his sideburns were m-o-n-e-y!

Click here to watch the “Day After Day” video.  (I don’t know about you, but it looks to me like the band is having a pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good time.)

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I thought I would be able to stop with three Pretenders tracks, but it looks like I’m going to have to feature at least five Chrissie Hynde-penned songs before I can move on.  

No promises that I’ll be able to stop after five – every time I hit Youtube and start listening to Pretenders tracks, my list of potential hall of fame songs grows longer.

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Click here to listen to the album version of “Day After Day.”  (The promotional video mentioned above uses the single version of the song, which ends differently.)

And click below to buy the record from Amazon:

Pretenders – "Up the Neck" (1980)

 

I remember the way he groaned

And moved with an animal skill

I rubbed my face in the sweat

That ran down his chest

It was all very run of the mill

Several of the artists whose records were chosen for the inaugural class of the 2 OR 3 LINES “SILVER DECADE” HALL OF FAME wrote so many great songs that it was difficult for me to choose just one.

That is true – in spades – of Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders.  And since there’s no rule saying that I can only choose one of her songs for that hall of fame, I’m choosing three.

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I’ve been listening to the Pretenders’ first two albums for 40 years, and they are just as powerful today as they were when they were brand new.  Not every song on those albums is great, but enough of them are to put them head and shoulders above nearly every other album from that era.

The Pretenders' eponymous debut album

Of all the great rock songwriters of the sixties, seventies, and eighties, I think Chrissie Hynde is the one I would pick as most likely to have succeeded as an author of fiction or screenwriter.

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You could say Ms. Hynde’s best songs are about couples, but it’s probably more accurate to say they are about couplings.  

The intersections between men and women that she writes about rarely end well – usually because the man is a disappointment in some way.  Hynde can be quite scornful of the males in her songs – she is a master (mistress?) of cutting vain men down to size.

Her description of the male-in-heat in “Up the Neck” – let’s be honest: when is the typical male not in heat? – deftly captures the contrast between how a man in the throes of passion appears to himself and how he appears to his female partner:

I remember the way he groaned

And moved with an animal skill

I rubbed my face in the sweat

That ran down his chest

It was all very run of the mill

The post-coital tristesse that is typically experienced by couples is depicted in very concrete terms in these lines from “Up the Neck”:

Something was sticky

On your shag rug

If that image isn’t enough to burst anyone’s romantic bubble, I don’t know what is.

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While the male in “Up the Neck” may be deserving of scorn, the singer’s not disappointed in him so much as she’s disappointed by the way things turned out.

She acknowledges that she wasn’t entirely in her right mind when she and her partner came together:

Anger and lust

My senses running amok

Bewildered and deluded

Have I been hit by a truck?

When they first kissed, she had a feeling of innocent bliss comparable to “the time in the womb.”  

But the morning after was a different story.  She “woke up with a headache that split [her] skull,” and “alone in the room.”

It’s sad that things turned out that way because she went into things with the best of intentions – and to be fair to the man, so did he.  But good intentions usually aren’t enough:

I was sure his intentions were sweet

And that mine was as well

But a wish is a shot in the dark

When your coin's down the well

**********************

Click here to watch a live performance of “Up the Neck” from March 1980 – just a few months after the song was released on the Pretenders’ eponymous debut album, which the noted novelist Michael Chabon has called “one of the most astonishing debut albums in the history of music.”  (You can say that again.)

I’ve watched this video several dozen times.  Chrissie Hynde is utterly compelling in it – she has me in the palm of her hand from the beginning to the end.  I have never seen a rock performer who is more naturally charismatic.

Chrissie Hynde in 1980

Actually, I’m not sure “performer” is the correct term for Hynde.  She’s not “performing” in the usual sense of the word.  No one is better than Mick Jagger, but you never forget that he’s performing.  By contrast, Chrissie Hynde doesn’t appear to have planned or rehearsed what she does on stage – she just comes out and is herself.

That may be an incredibly naive statement, but I’m sticking with it.  Whatever it is that makes Chrissie Hynde what she is, I think it’s something that comes wholly from within.  

Do me a favor.  Start watching that “Up the Neck” video at the five-minute mark – which is the beginning of a long instrumental break that leads up to the big finish of the song.  Watch Hynde pace back and forth behind guitarist James Honeyman-Scott and bassist Pete Famdon as they do their thing – she doesn’t engage in any kind of histrionics that takes attention away from them or drummer Martin Chambers.  

(Sadly, Honeyman-Scott died in 1982, and Famdon died in 1983 – both deaths were drug-related.) 

At 5:55, she takes a step toward her microphone, turns to the right until her back is to the crowd, and then does a three-quarter turn to the left so her body is perpendicular to her audience when she ends the instrumental break by singing – moaning? – “ooooohhhhh, oohh, oohh, ooooohhhhh.”  (Whoever edited the video cut in the middle of her move – I wish I could see the raw footage without that edit.)

That seems to have spurred the group to shift into a higher gear for thirty seconds or some before ending the song – and the concert.  (I’m assuming that “Up the Neck” was their encore.  If so, it was certainly a good choice.)

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Click here to hear the studio version of “Up the Neck.”

Click below to buy that record from Amazon:

Pretenders – "Pack It Up" (1981)

 

I don't like your trousers

And your appalling taste in women

And what about your mind?

And your insipid record collection

That dumb home video center

The usual pornography

That all you scum lap up

YOU'RE THE PITS OF THE WORLD!

They say that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.  

You best believe I would never, ever scorn Chrissie Hynde – the lead singer and chief songwriter of the Pretenders, who she founded in 1978.  You would have to be out of your f*cking mind to scorn her.

I have no doubt that Ms. Hynde is the one who does the scorning, not the one who is scorned – in other words, she’s the scorner, not the scornee.

Chrissie Hynde

I doubt that I will ever meet Chrissie Hynde, and that’s probably just as well.  She intimidates the hell out of me.  I’m quite sure that if I ever had to opportunity to interview her or even have a casual conversation – say we were seated next to each other on an airplane – I would be so scared that I would make a fool of myself.

You may have noticed that I quoted eight lines from today's featured song at the beginning of this post.  That's because I'm not man enough to tell Hynde that she only gets two or three.

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If you can find a more scornful song than “Pack It Up,” I’d like to hear it.  (Or maybe I wouldn’t.  I’m a pretty sensitive dude.)

Hynde’s scorn is directed at the vanity of men.  Her target in “Pack It Up” no doubt thinks that he has good taste in clothes and music – but she sets him straight.  (She even dismisses the prosaic pornography he favors.) 

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Speaking of male vanity, do you remember Tom Wolfe’s brilliant novel, Bonfire of the Vanities?  One of the major characters in that book is a thirty-something assistant district attorney who is extremely proud of his muscular physique – in particular, his "massive sternocleidomastoid muscles" (i.e., neck muscles), which he constantly flexes for the benefit of every comely young female he encounters. 

He laters sees a videotape of the very comeliest of those females making fun of his weird neck moves – he’s mortified, of course.

I guarantee you that if Chrissie Hynde had seen this preening prosecutor flexing his sternocleidomastoids. she wouldn’t have made fun of him behind his back like the woman in the Wolfe book – she would have cut him down to size by saying something snarky to his face.

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I had planned to induct twelve songs into the 2 OR 3 LINES “SILVER DECADE” HALL OF FAME this year, but I’m afraid there’s going to have to be a change in those plans.

I simply can’t pick one and only one Pretenders song for that honor – Chrissie Hynde deserves better than that.

The Pretenders in 1980

I’ve got my eye on three tracks from the first two Pretenders albums.  But it’s possible I won’t be able to stop there.  (Stay tuned . . . )

Click here to listen to “Pack It Up,” which was released in 1981 on the Pretenders II album.

Click on the link below to buy “Pack It Up” from Amazon:

X – "The Have Nots" (1982)

Here we sit

A shot and a beer

After another hard-earned day

NOTE:  Unlike the singer of today’s featured song – which is the 11th and next-to-last song I’ve chosen to include in the inaugural class of the 2 OR 3 LINES “SILVER DECADE” HALL OF FAME – I was never a shot-and-a-beer kind of guy.  I was more of a beer-and-another-beer-and-yet-another-beer-or-two kind of a guy.  But a lot of my misspent youth was misspent in dive bars like those listed in “The Have Nots.”  The bars I hung out in were great places to get drunk cheap.  They were not, however, good places to meet women.  (No place is perfect, I guess.) 

The following post is a slightly edited version of a post that originally appeared on my wildly popular little blog on April 30, 2019.

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The first line of the chorus of today’s featured song is “Dawn comes soon enough for the working class.”  Ain’t that the truth, bub!

Dawn came soon enough for me when I was a college student and had a succession of summer jobs that started at seven o’clock every morning – unloading trucks, unloading rail cars, driving a water truck on a road construction job . . . you get the picture.

Dawn comes even sooner if you’ve been up until all hours the night before drinking beer at Nina’s Green Parrot in, Galena, Kansas – where it was legal for 18-year-olds to imbibe 3.2% beer.  

The late lamented Nina’s Green Parrot bar

Legally, 3.2% beer was considered to be a non-intoxicating beverage, but let me assure you that if you drink enough – I usually drank two quarts in the bar, and got a tallboy can to go for the drive back home – it does the job.

*     *     *     *     *

I didn’t grow up poor, but almost.  My family had enough to take care of the necessities, but there was no money for luxuries like fancy restaurant meals or vacation trips.  

My parents grew up during the Great Depression, and their families were poor – especially my father’s family.  (My father’s father died in 1934, when he was only 38 years old.  He left behind a widow and eight children – they were aged 15, 14, 12, 11, 9, 6, 3, and 6 months. )

I don’t think my mother – whose family lived on a farm in northwest Arkansas – had it quite as bad.  But the early part of her life was difficult.  (Her mother got pregnant when she was only 16.  She and my mother’s father were married a few months before my mother was born in 1926, but he died in an influenza epidemic before her first birthday.)

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I’ve always been fascinated by books about people living on the margins of homelessness and hunger.  George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London is one such book.

Orwell moved to from London to Paris in 1928, when he was 25.  His economic situation started to become difficult when became seriously ill the next year and couldn’t work.  Then a young woman he picked up and brought back to his lodgings stole his money. 

To get through periods of unemployment, Orwell had to pawn his clothes.  For example, he would pawn his overcoat for a few francs when spring arrived, hoping that he would be able to accumulate enough money to redeem the coat before cold weather returned.

He eventually got a job in a restaurant, working almost eighteen hours a day, seven days a week to earn a pittance of a salary.

Orwell was so poor that he only owned one pair of black socks.  He applied black shoe polish to his feet so the bare skin wouldn’t show through the holes.

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“The Have Nots,” which was released on X’s third studio album (Under the Big Black Sun) in 1982, is about blue-collar types – perhaps unemployed, or perhaps making just enough to get by on – who spend too much time and money in bars.

We’re talking about the kind of regulars who spend so much time drinking that they not only know the barmaids by name, but who play cards with them when the bar isn’t busy.  

(Come to think of it, a friend and I used to play cards at the house where the two cousins – one male, one female – who were bartenders at our regular Kansas bar lived after that bar closed at midnight.  But I was a college student, and the dead-end summer jobs I had would last only a couple of months before it was time to go back to school.  My life was nothing like George Orwell’s.) 

“The Have Nots” is notable for its recitation of the names of a number of dive bars in Los Angeles and elsewhere – most of which have been closed for years.

For example, there’s the One-Eyed Jack, and the Hi-D-Hi, G. G.’s Cozy Corner, the Stop & Drink, the Get Down Lounge, and a Detroit joint called The Aorta Bar – which called itself “Detroit’s Main Vein.”

One final note about “The Have Nots.”  The last line of the song’s chorus – “This is the game that moves as you play” – is the epigraph to the precocious Bret Easton Ellis’s first novel, Less Than Zero.  (Ellis was a 21-year-old college student when his novel was published in 1985.)   

The title of Less Than Zero was taken from Elvis Costello’s famous 1977 song. 

Click here to listen to the “The Have Nots,” which I usually listen to several times in succession when it comes up on my iPod.  It’s just that good, boys and girls.

And click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: 

Soft Cell – "Tainted Love/Where Did Our Love Go?" (1982)

Once I ran to you

Now I run from you

[NOTE: There were a lot of great one-hit wonders released in the "Silver Decade" (1974-1984) of pop music – "Come On Eileen" by Dexys Midnight Runners and "Video Killed the Radio Star" by the Buggles are two of the most memorable.  But Soft Cell's "Tainted Love/Where Did Our Love Go?" is the "Silver Decade" one-hit wonder that you have to have if you're having only one.  What follows is a severely edited version of the original 2 or 3 lines post about that record, which was originally published on March 13, 2011.]

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Shakespeare's tragic hero, King Lear, knew what he was talking about when he said:

How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is

To have a thankless child!

I might revise the immortal bard's words slightly, and say instead how sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless Chief Executive Senior Contributing Editor!

(Look closely)

That job title is very complicated, so we'll need to pick a nickname that's a little less clumsy.  Hmmm . . . let me think . . .  

I suppose we could call her "Linda," since that is her name.  But I think I will call her "Super Bitch From Hell" since that's what she is acting like.

(It's tempting to call her "Hillary," but that would be hitting below the belt – although that expression doesn't really apply when you're talking about women . . . does it?  Not that you should hit a woman above or below the belt!)

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Recently, Super Bitch From Hell (or "SBFH" for short) and I were discussing Scala & Kolacny Brothers, the wonderful Belgian girls' choir that does lovely, ethereal choral versions of pop songs.  I found a Youtube video of them performing a cover of the old Soft Cell hit from 1982, "Tainted Love," in Montreal, and mentioned what a guilty pleasure that song was.

OMG, that set SBFH off on such a rant that you wouldn't believe it:

Don't even get me started on "Tainted Love." One of the worst songs in the history of songdom, IMO. Can't really even put my finger on why I hate it, I just do.  

Very persuasive logic, eh?

Being the a**hole that I am, I couldn't resist egging her on.  I sent SBFH this message:

The Soft Cell "Tainted Love/Where Did Our Love Go?" medley is probably one of the 10 greatest accomplishments of Western culture to date – will have to write a "2 or 3 lines" post praising it just to annoy you.

To quote David Bowie, I knew I was putting out the fire with gasoline with those words.  And, sure enough, SBFH rose to the bait:

I may have to have a "Soft Cell Sucks" t-shirt made up & post a pic of it right under the announcement of your Soft Cell post. Controversy = more readers, right?

SBFH wasn't done taunting me.  I had told her that Scala & Kolacny Brothers was performing in Washington next month, and that I really wanted to see them but didn't want to go alone.  So she had to taunt me about that: 

You should get [your 16-year-old son] to go to the concert with you.  

Oh sure, like that's happening.  My son's a good kid, but he would rather cut off an arm than go to a concert with his father.  And how pathetic would it be for me to take a 16-year-old to an edgy downtown club because I couldn't find a date? 

 Just tell him it's a bunch of hot Belgian chicks singing rock songs. No need to elaborate on what they actually sound like. Or, why don't you take your hot French g/f?  

I don't think SCFH – oops, I meant to type SBFH – really believes that I have a hot (age-adjusted) French girlfriend.

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I left it at that, figuring that would be the end of it.  But n-o-o-o-o-o-o . . . within hours, SBFH sent me a very intemperate attack on "Tainted Love," which you would think was Hitler's favorite record or something, and dared me to post it.

What could I do?  I couldn't just ignore her -- although I knew the folks in the marketing department would soil their drawers if I told them I was tearing up the FY 2011 2nd quarter posting schedule and inserting an unplanned post on the spur of the moment.  

You would think that SBFH might have a little more concern for the good of 2 or 3 lines – after all, it is the only wildly popular little blog I'm aware of that has given her carte blanche to ramble on about her glory days.

We even let her get away with that disturbing little story about relieving herself in a coffee mug in her minivan.  (Goodness gracious, "Linda," have you no shame?  Wouldn't that story have better been kept to yourself rather than splashed all over the pages of my blog?)

But no, it's a-l-l-l-l about her.  So rather than just deep six her contribution, which would no doubt precipitate a major hissy fit by Ms. SBFH – I so hate it when I'm forced to call Ted, our chief of security, to escort an employee who has misbehaved out of the building – I've decided to turn the other cheek and accede to her desire to unload on "Tainted Love" in 2 or 3 lines. 

*     *     *     *     *

My non-italic comments are interspersed throughout her italicized screed, which begins with the following sortie: 

One of the many benefits of my lofty position with 2 or 3 lines is occasional permission to voice a dissenting opinion.

Am I imagining things, or is there the tiniest hint of sarcasm here?  

Disagreement with upper management, while tolerated, is not necessarily appreciated.  Shameless toadying is the preferred modus operandi for underlings.

I'm pretty sure now that I wasn't imagining that sarcasm.

My hot (age-adjusted) French g/f

In this case, though, I feel compelled to express my complete distaste for “Tainted Love.”  I have a sneaking suspicion that the hot (age-adjusted) French girlfriend must have somehow influenced our fearless leader in his adoration of this song.  How else does one explain such an obvious lapse in judgment?  

Hold it right there, sister.  I've liked this song since it was released in 1982.  (It helped that I didn't own the record and heard it only infrequently on the radio, so I didn't wear it out for myself.)  The French g/f had nothing to do with it.

The squiggly synths and mechanized drum loops, coupled with the whiny vocals, are just completely unappealing to me. I don’t have a problem with synthesizers and drum machines, in principle. A lot of early eighties bands used them and produced great music. The Eurythmics come to mind, as well as Blondie, Devo and Depeche Mode.  

(Depeche Mode produced "great music"?  ARE YOU FRIGGING KIDDING ME?)  

“Tainted Love” just sounds way too sterile and mechanical to me. The accompanying video, a mishmash of togas, tennis outfits (or maybe cricket), and children, is vaguely homoerotic but mostly just silly and not very entertaining. 

Click here to watch that video.  (The guy in the video who's not wearing a toga is wearing a cricket outfit, not a tennis outfit – the fact that he's holding a CRICKET BAT instead of a tennis racket was a dead giveaway, I thought.)  The video is very creepy – but I believe we were talking about the song.  Attacking the video is attacking a straw man.

(By the way, calling this video "VAGUELY HOMOEROTIC" is akin to saying that Sarah Jessica Parker has a vaguely equine appearance.)  

  

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Back to SBFH's philippic against "Soft Cell":

Neither Marilyn Manson nor the Pussycat Dolls, who both covered the song, could make it palatable, either. 

Click here to watch the Marilyn Manson video.  (Watch the hot-tub scenes and tell me they aren't highly palatable!)

Click here for the Pussycat Dolls cover.  (Nothing "vaguely homoerotic" here.)

The Pussycat Dolls

Coil’s version is the most unusual and interesting of the covers. An industrial music band formed in the early eighties, Coil released “Tainted Love”  in 1984. It was the first musical release to have all of its profits donated to a foundation dedicated to AIDS education and prevention. Coil’s video of the song is on permanent display in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

That's all well and good, but one might ask how truly noble it was for a band no one has ever heard of to donate the non-existent profits from a record that nobody bought to a good cause.

Coil's version of "Tainted Love" reminds me of what a 45 rpm record sounded like on my parents' stereo when I accidentally played it at 33 rpm.  And as for the video, my advice is not to view it after a big meal unless you're a bulimic . . . in which case it's perfect.

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I think SBFH may have confused New York City's Museum of Modern Art ("MOMA") with the Museum of Bad Art ("MOBA") in suburban Boston.  MOBA's permanent collection includes 500 pieces of art "too bad to be ignored," according to one critic.

From MOBA's permanent collection, here is an anonymous tribute to the famous pointillist artist Georges Seurat, which the anonymous artist titled "Sunday On The Pot With George":

And here is one more piece from MOBA's collection for those of you who prefer artworks that present the lovely female form rather than anything "vaguely homoerotic."  This painting (also anonymous, not surprisingly) is called "The Itch."  Whether "the itch" is under her right armpit or it is her back that itches isn't clear.

Everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion.  Far be it from me to try to take on the title of arbiter of musical taste.  But, Gary, I’m sorry – “Tainted Love” is just . . . wrong!
 

There certainly is something that's just wrong here, but it ain't "Tainted Love."

(I know, that was kind of a weak ending, but the lawyers wouldn't let me talk about taint.)

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Soft Cell's version of "Tainted Love" ranked #2 on VH1's 100 Greatest One-Hit Wonders, but #5 on VH1's 100 Greatest One-Hit Wonders of the Eighties.  Obviously VH1 doesn't take as much care with its lists as it might.  ("Tainted Love" ranks ahead of "Come On Eileen" by Dexys Midnight Runners on the first list, but behind it on the latter list.)

Click here to hear the radio edit of "Tainted Love"/"Where Did Our Love Go?".

Click here to listen to a much longer version that was very popular in the clubs back in the day.

Click below to buy that extended mix on Amazon: