If you find yourself in a happy relationship, do what you’d do if you spotted a glow-in-the-dark three-headed mule on a commuter-train platform: keep your mouth shut. All healthy relationships are alike in that no one wants to hear about them. You’ll get more mileage from stories of conflict, betrayal, and the awful, irretractable things people say to each other in the depths of a fight or the verge of a breakup, perhaps the third one that month, which isn’t quite half over.

If love and hate are close companions on the opposite pole from apathy, it’s not hard to understand, yet still informative to observe, how a recently estranged ex-partner’s quirks, odd opinions, and stock catchphrases can turn quickly from medicine into poison. 

According to Bob Gendron’s raucous and entertaining 33 ⅓ book about the eclectic Cincinnati rock band The Afghan Whigs’ breakout 1993 LP Gentlemen, the catchphrase “be sweet” was a verbal tic of the ex-girlfriend whose fling with bandleader Greg Dulli loosely inspired the album, and it’s not hard to imagine how smarmy and condescending that could sound in a combative context.

I’ve written at length about why I believe Gentlemen to be the most brutal breakup album of all time. Briefly, it’s a song cycle about the decline of a mutually sadomasochistic relationship drenched in depression, addiction, and extreme self-loathing.

“Be Sweet” is track three, side one. Sandwiched between two grimy, angsty rockers, it’s a pitch-dark dirge with a scalding guitar solo that clearly articulates the feckless, miserable narrator’s approach to dating. It supplies the most oft-quoted lines on the album: “Ladies let me tell you about myself / I’ve got a dick for a brain / and my brain / is gonna sell my ass to you” (Personally, I’m partial to “Now that I’m ashamed / it burns / but the weight is off / now that you’re out of the way,” which just murders me every time. But, you know, whatever you’re into…).

The Whigs were stark misfits on the ‘90s post-Nevermind rock landscape. They were distinguished from the anemic “heroin chic” of the time by their swagger and libido. While all these bands were forced to reckon in some way with the legacy of misogyny they received from the Sunset Strip hair metal acts they replaced, Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder positioned themselves above it, while Dulli created a character who embodied its long-term toll on the psyche and plunged him deep into a hell of his own creation.

With their ominous spartan accompaniment, the lyrics for “Be Sweet” are presented without apology in a context designed to be unsettling. It’s the most stark example of the sort of joyless sexual thrill-seeking Gentlemen plays through to its inevitable, wretched conclusion. It’s a hard song to listen to, but it’s also hard to see how it could be more explicitly damning of its narrator. It’s no secret that his charms carry the seeds of his destruction and his every seduction is doomed from its first advance.

Nevertheless, some critics were eager to assume the worst, failing or refusing to distinguish between persona and autobiography and jumping to the conclusion that Gentlemen was an instruction manual for domestic abuse. In a Rolling Stone interview, Dull said, “If you’re hearing misogyny on this record, you have missed the fucking point. I’m the problem.” For their 1996 follow-up Black Love, the Whigs reinvented themselves as gangsters.

Michelle Zauner, d/b/a Japanese Breakfast, may cultivate a different sort of mystique from Greg Dulli’s, but she also found herself eager to transcend an artistic reputation born of bad vibes. A multimedia sensation, her acclaimed 2016 LP Psychopomp and bestselling memoir Crying in H Mart were both soaked in the grief that followed her mother’s death from pancreatic cancer. While the Whig’s “Be Sweet” was their dry-dive into the psychic abyss, Japanese Breakfast’s is clearly intended as a ticket out of it.

It, too, is a song about two wounded souls and their badly damaged sexual-romantic relationship (If there are other kinds, I don’t want to hear about them and will assume you’re making them up to make me feel bad.). In this one, Zauner’s character is the subject of the betrayal, which remains unspecified, and the callous dishonesty used to protect it that really did most of the harm. And yet, she remains defiantly optimistic, willing to walk her partner through the steps of a meaningful apology and begin the hard labor of reconciliation. 

In a cutthroat world, a slight attitude shift can be all it takes to make a relationship feel like a safe container again, even if that sense of safety is illusory and almost certainly temporary. “Be sweet to me, baby / I want to believe in you / I want to believe in something.”

The cynics among us might wonder if she’s setting herself for worse future disappointment, but the exuberant retro-’80s synth-pop of “Be Sweet” easily overrides its background bitterness and launches its romantic longing into the stratosphere of transcendent ear candy.

Other questions and quibbles remain. If this is the future of pop, why does it sound like a really good remaster of “Borderline?” Nevertheless, JBreakkie wins the sweet-off in a forfeit, as, much like R.E.M., Dulli would be unlikely to show up and participate. Despite his defense of Gentlemen’s artistic motives, he’s essentially disowned the song, never playing it live and ridiculing fans who request it. 

The best outcome for this battle would be for the Whigs to start covering Zauner’s “Be Sweet” in concert, which I can already hear in my head and which absolutely needs to happen.

Interestingly, both songs provide more nuanced narratives on “toxic” relationships than one is likely to find in the straight-ahead discourse. In 1993, they weren’t discussed as much. Thirty years later, they’re often framed in stark, incurious terms, with clear villains and victims, in therapy-speak gleaned from the University of TikTok. What remains taboo is any frank discussion of the hazards and limitations of human nature that make us prone to such blatantly destructive life choices, and why freeing ourselves from histories of romantic mistreatment and self-sabotage can feel so counterintuitive. If you get there, make sure you don’t write a song about it.

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