Songfacts®:

• A band composition, the lyric was written by Stabbing Westward frontman Christopher Hall, and it's a personal one, expressing his anguish over his marriage falling about while he was on the road touring.
  
  "It's a song of frustration," he said in a Songfacts interview. "Just the willingness to do anything to try and make somebody love you again after they've fallen out of love with you. And I think I can tell you with great certainty that there's nothing you can do! I think Lyle Lovett said it best in a song: 'She's Already Made Up Her Mind'... and there's nothing you can do to change that."
• A track from Stabbing Westward's second major-label album, Wither Blister Burn & Peel, "What Do I Have to Do?" was their first song to get much airplay and their first to crack the Billboard charts, reaching #7 on the Modern Rock tally. Their brand of industrial music was having a moment in 1996, led by Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson.
• The music video did well on MTV2, which launched in 1996 as a more adventurous alternative to the original and a commitment to music videos. The video takes place in a desert with lots of saturation and fish-eye. We see the band performing (where do they plug in?) amidst shot of Hall and a brooding love interest. At the end of the video, it appears he has killed her by running her over in a car.
• Many songs in the industrial genre kick in right away, but this on builds very slowly, with Hall singing the first few lines almost under his breath. The hook is the gang chorus of "What Do I Have to Do?," which is set up by Hall's line, "Tell me."