Hurts So Good

Album

American Fool

Label

Riva Records

Genre

Heartland rock

Composer(s)

George Green;John Mellencamp

Entered Chart

Apr 24, 1982

Peak Date

Aug 7, 1982

Released

April 1982

Recorded

Cherokee, Los Angeles

Catalog #

Riva 209

B-Side

Close Enough

Mellencamp claims he wrote this song as "a goof." In a 1982 interview with The L.A. Herald Examiner, he explained: "My friend George said, why didn't I write a song with the title 'Hurt So Good'? We thought of it as like a Shel Silverstein thing. I wrote it in three minutes, scrawled the first line in soap on the glass door in the shower. It was really just a joke. I think all good things probably started as jokes. Wasn't God having a laugh when he made this whole place?" Mellencamp's friend was George Green, who received a composer credit on this song and went on to co-write many of Mellencamp's hits, including "Human Wheels," "Crumblin' Down" and "Rain On The Scarecrow." On his 2018 Plain Spoken DVD, Mellencamp talked about what inspired this song: "When I first started playing in rock bands, I didn't realize how crude and mean other fellas could be. How crude they were with women and how crude women were. That led me to write a song called 'Hurts So Good' because I was playing in these bars and I just could not believe the lows people would go to with each other. The thing that surprised me is that it fit my personality perfectly. I fit right in with all that." Mellencamp was raised in the small town of Seymour, Indiana, where he played in bands and planned his escape. At 21, he took a trip to New York City to check out art school (he is a talented painter) and drop off some demos. Before the trip was over, he got an offer from a management company willing to push him as a recording artist. He took the offer (it was money coming in, rather than going out), setting him on an awkward path to stardom. He got a record deal with MCA but clashed with the label, refusing to mingle with tastemakers or participate in any industry pomp. But he did let his manager change his name to "Johnny Cougar," which he used for his first two albums, the second of which, A Biography (1978), became a surprise hit in Australia thanks to the single "I Need A Lover." Going to that country and seeing how fans react to a pop star made him determined to create more hits - not for the adulation, but for the creative freedom. If he was on the radio, critics and record companies wouldn't matter, and he could call the shots. For his next two albums, he became "John Cougar" and did everything he could to generate hits, with modest success ("Ain't Even Done with the Night" reached #17 in 1981). But it was "Hurts So Good," the first single from his fifth album, American Fool, that gave him the breakthrough he was looking for. Two albums later, he started using his real last name and writing songs like "Pink Houses" and "Rain On The Scarecrow" that reflected more of his true self. The hits kept coming until the '90s, when his music fell out of fashion in favor of hip-hop and grunge. He stayed the course, making music that fed his artistic appetite and performing to smaller but very enthusiastic audiences. Mellencamp once owned a tattoo parlor. This led to many family members getting tattoos they wouldn't have otherwise asked for, like the "Hurts So Good" tattoo on his aunt. Mellencamp won his first Grammy with this song: Best Male Rock Vocal Performance of 1982. In his acceptance speech he said, "I don't know what to say, I'm just an idiot." This is a popular song among masochists. It is not truly about S&M, but probably as close as any popular song has gotten. MTV played a big part in this song's success. Before the network launched in 1981, few American acts made videos because there was nowhere to show them in the US. But Mellencamp had been making videos since 1978 with director Bruce Gowers because he was promoted in Europe and Australia, where many outlets broadcast them. These were just performance clips, but for "Hurts So Good" they boosted the budget and did a shoot with bikers, playing up the S&M interpretation of the song with shots of ladies wearing leather and chains. It was exactly what MTV was looking for: a swaggering American rock star in a video with motorcycles and girls. They put the video in hot rotation, giving the song a huge boost. It also helped that MTV reached a huge rural audience (Mellencamp's stronghold) because cable television was very popular in areas outside of broadcast signals. Back when he was a rapper known as Marky Mark, Mark Wahlberg wanted to turn this into a rap song, but Mellencamp would not allow it.

When I was a young boy
Said put away those young boy ways
Now that I'm gettin' older, so much older
I long for those young boy days
With a girl like you
With a girl like you
Lord knows there are things we can do, baby
Just me and you
Come on and make it a

Hurt so good
Come on baby, make it hurt so good
Sometimes love don't feel like it should
You make it hurt so good

Don't have to be so exciting
Just trying to give myself a little bit of fun, yeah
You always look so inviting
You ain't as green as you are young
Hey baby, it's you
Come on girl, now it's you
Sink your teeth right through my bones, baby
Let's see what we can do
Come on and make it a

Hurt so good
Come on baby, make it hurt so good
Sometimes love don't feel like it should
You make it hurt so good

I ain't talking no big deals
I ain't made no plans myself
I ain't talking no high heels
Maybe we could walk around, all day long
Walk around, all day long

Hurt so good
Come on baby, make it hurt so good
Sometimes love don't feel like it should
You make it hurt so good
Hurt so good
Come on baby, now
Come on baby, make it hurt so good
Sometimes love don't feel like it should
You make it hurt so good

Hey, hey