Peak
5
Weeks
22
Score
3,644
Chart Year
1983
The Bob Giraldi-directed music video[12] features Benatar playing a rebellious teenage girl getting kicked out of her home. Her father (played by actor Trey Wilson) berates her as her mother watches helplessly. Benatar waves goodbye to her brother (played by actor Philip Cruise), who watches sadly from an upstairs window. She later becomes a taxi dancer at a seedy club in the city. She writes letters to her brother, who is reassured that she is okay, as her father begins to regret kicking her out. When she witnesses the club owner (played by actor Gary Chryst) harassing another dancer, Benatar rounds up her fellow dancers and leads a rebellion against him. The dancers get the upper hand on the club owner and escape from the club, dancing off as the sun rises. After thanking Benatar for helping liberate them, the dancers bid each other goodbye and all go their separate ways. The final scene shows Benatar sitting in the back of a bus headed for parts unknown. The video was choreographed by Michael Peters,[13] who appears briefly in the video. A special dance club remix of the song was created by Jellybean Benitez. Benitez also created an edited version of his mix specifically for the video. It differs slightly in structure and instrumentation, and aside from appearing in the video, has never been commercially released. The video was one of the first ever to feature the use of dialogue - Philip Bailey's "I Know" was the first but Benatar's got more exposure.[14] The scenes featuring dialogue include the opening scene when Benatar’s father shouts, "If you leave this house now, you can just forget about coming back!" and the scene when the club owner harasses the taxi dancer, causing her to scream "Leave me alone!" at him. The video was nominated for an MTV Video Music Award for Best Female Vide
While the 1982 Gap Band hit "You Dropped A Bomb On Me" comes close, no song uses wartime imagery to describe heartbreak quite like "Love Is A Battlefield." The song was written by Mike Chapman and Holly Knight. Chapman was an established songwriter and producer, while Knight was a former member of the band Spider and was just starting to write songs, something she proved very good at. In a Songfacts interview with Holly Knight, she told the story: "I was at his house, I was just starting to write with him, and Pat Benatar called up and said, 'Mike, I would love for you to write me a song. I'm doing an album, will you write me a hit, please?' And he goes, 'Well, I'm here with one of my writers, Holly Knight, and we were just going to sit down and write. So we'll write something for you.' So he hung up, and I started playing the chords to 'Love Is A Battlefield.' He said, 'That's so great, I love that, keep doing that.' He says, 'Now, what we really need' – and this is something I learned from him - 'This song is very catchy, very commercial, let's write something really, really weird on top of it. That'll make it special. And it'll be that much better.' I said, 'Oh, I like it.' He says, 'We're going to write something really sick, like…' and he just spit out 'Love is a battlefield,' as an example. I said, 'Well, that works for me.' And we wrote that song. It was just like free association." Knight and Chapman wrote this song as more of a ballad, and they were surprised to hear what Benatar did with it. Says Knight: "When Mike and I first heard it we were horrified, we hated it, because it was so different. But then it became such a huge hit, and we had to step out and say, You know, they did a very good rendering of it, and that's how it was meant to be. There's lots of ways you can hear that song, and they're all good." Pat Benatar married her guitarist Neil Giraldo in 1982, and he has been her producer ever since. It was Giraldo who decided to make this an uptempo song. He told Songfacts: "If I hear a song, whether we write it or somebody else did, as soon as I hear it, I hear it finished, the way I hear it in the studio. I hear from beginning to end - I know exactly what it's going to be. And the best example of that probably is 'Love Is a Battlefield.' That was a song written very slow, very methodical, boring, like 'We... are... young... heartache... to... heartache...' I mean, it was really slow. (Laughing) As soon as I heard it, I went, 'I don't understand why this song would be so slow.' I just heard it done in the uptempo thing. When I did it, and Mike (Chapman) heard it - and I love Mike, he's done so much for me in my life. He's one of the people that I owe everything to, because he's the guy that put all this stuff together for me - but when he heard it, he just went crazy. He goes, 'I don't want you to have the song anymore. I hate it. I hate what you've done. It's horrible. I can't listen to it. It's horrible.' And then it went to #5, and he goes, 'I think it's great!' (Laughs). It was difficult for the record company to hear it, too. Because when they heard it, they went, 'What are you doing? What is this drum machine thing you did? Why did you create this weird loop? Why did you do this? It's horrible. What are you doing? I'm not going to release it. It's wrong.' I go, 'No, it ain't wrong. Song's a hit, I'm telling you. Leave it the way it is.' I battled with them and battled with them, and eventually they said yes. And they came around to it, too. But think of it if it was me, where I wrote the song and I gave it to somebody, and I had a vision of what it was and they totally destroyed that thing. I would have said the same thing Mike did. I would have went, 'What the hell are you doing? You ruined my song. What would you do that for?' But it's one of those things. When you have a great song or a great arrangement that all works, sometimes it takes a little time to kind of grow on you. And then when it does, you don't get bored. You listen and you go, 'Wow, this is great. I'm really happy I did.'" The music video got a great deal of airplay on MTV at a time when all they did was show videos. It contains some very '80s fashion and was one of the first videos to incorporate dialogue into the song to progress the storyline, which was Benatar running away from home and trying to make it on her own (strange that she was still living with her parents at age 30, but she did look young for her age). The video, which was directed by Bob Giraldi, also contained a group dance sequence, predating Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video, which emerged later in 1983. Benatar was out of her element, as dancing is not her thing, but she pulled off the moves admirably and helped create a very memorable scene. Check out the bass line on this track. Benatar's bass player, Roger Capps, says it's his favorite. Capps, who co-wrote "Hell Is For Children," played on the album, but left the band before it was released. Neil Giraldo got the drum sound on this track with a LinnDrum machine, which was one of the first units that used real drum samples rather than synthesized sounds. He had just gotten the unit and was playing around with it when he came up with the sound. In 2009, Jordin Sparks paid a certain homage to this song on her track "Battlefield," where she sings: "Why does love always feel like a battlefield." This song plays a big role in the 2004 movie 13 Going on 30, where "love is a battlefield" is Jennifer Garner's mantra. Garner, who becomes a 13-year-old from the '80s transformed into a 30-year-old, sings it with some young girls she is helping to learn about love. Brooke White sang this on American Idol in 2008 in a slow version that was a big hit with the judges. Says Knight: "The way she did it is really how it was originally done. It's not that she changed it, she just tapped into the vibe that it was supposed to be. The song was never meant to be a fast upbeat shuffle. And I'm not knocking what Benatar did, because she did a classic version, which I ended up loving." This was used on the season 2 finale of Stranger Things, "The Gate," when Steve drops Dustin off at the Snow Ball.
(We are young) (We are young) We are young (Heartache to heartache) Heartache to heartache (We stand) We stand (No promises) No promises (No demands) No demands (Love is a battlefield) Love is a battlefield Whoa We are strong No one can tell us we're wrong Searching our hearts for so long Both of us knowing Love is a battlefield You're making me go Then making me stay Why do you hurt me so bad? It would help me to know Do I stand in your way Or am I the best thing you've had? Believe me, believe me I can't tell you why But I'm trapped by your love And I'm chained to your side We are young Heartache to heartache We stand No promises No demands Love is a battlefield We are strong No one can tell us we're wrong Searching our hearts for so long Both of us knowing Love is a battlefield When I'm losing control Will you turn me away Or touch me deep inside? And when all this gets old Will it still feel the same There's no way this will die But if we get much closer I could lose control And if your heart surrenders You'll need me to hold We are young Heartache to heartache We stand No promises No demands Love is a battlefield We are strong No one can tell us we're wrong Searching our hearts for so long Both of us knowing Love is a battlefield
| Week | Chart Date | Position | Points |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sep 24, 1983 | 78 | 48 |
| 2 | Oct 1, 1983 | 62 | 64 |
| 3 | Oct 8, 1983 | 48 | 78 |
| 4 | Oct 15, 1983 | 35 | 91 |
| 5 | Oct 22, 1983 | 26 | 100 |
| 6 | Oct 29, 1983 | 20 | 106 |
| 7 | Nov 5, 1983 | 17 | 109 |
| 8 | Nov 12, 1983 | 13 | 113 |
| 9 | Nov 19, 1983 | 7 | 119 |
| 10 | Nov 26, 1983 | 6 | 120 |
| 11 | Dec 3, 1983 | 6 | 120 |
| 12 | Dec 10, 1983 | 5 | 121 |
| 13 | Dec 17, 1983 | 6 | 120 |
| 14 | Dec 24, 1983 | 7 | 119 |
| 15 | Dec 31, 1983 | 7 | 119 |
| 16 | Jan 7, 1984 | 12 | 114 |
| 17 | Jan 14, 1984 | 15 | 111 |
| 18 | Jan 21, 1984 | 42 | 84 |
| 19 | Jan 28, 1984 | 54 | 72 |
| 20 | Feb 4, 1984 | 62 | 64 |