"She Bop" by Cyndi Lauper

Top 10 Alert!

Gold Record Alert!

Song#:  1987
Date:  07/21/1984
Debut:  52
Peak:  3
Weeks:  18
Genre:  Synthpop



Pop Bits:  Lauper's star was solidly high in the sky thanks to two big hits ("Girls Just Want to Have Fun" and "Time After Time") from her debut album She's So Unusual. This next single would make it three in a row when it spent three weeks at #3 and went gold. But it wasn't without a bit of controversy. The song's subject matter, female masturbation, rankled a few people. Although Lauper's lyrics are not explicit in any way, there were folks who thought the tune's meaning was way too much for radio and young pop music listeners. One such person was Tipper Gore who later in 1985 put the song on the Parents Music Resource Center's "Filthy Fifteen" list. That organization would successfully lobby for record companies to label music products that contained explicit and/or offensive content. Luckily for Lauper, her album came out prior to all the hubbub. Had this album been assembled a year later, this song most likely would not have made the cut. Inclusion of the song would have gotten the album a parental advisory sticker and that would have directly affected a big chunk of Lauper's target audience. Lauper and her she-boppin' made it in under the wire.

ReduxReview:  Lauper's hit streak continued with this crunchy paean to gettin' it on wit yo bad self. It's almost like a twisted type of rockabilly or early rock song with the "be-bop-a-lu" and Lauper's quirky delivery. It more than hits all the marks and deservedly made the Top 10. Although the instrumentation keeps it stuck in the 80s, it still sounds awesome thanks to top-notch production and engineering. It didn't sound wimpy like a lot of 80s synthpop. The thing had muscle and it still flexes quite well today.

ReduxRating:  8/10

Trivia:  Lauper co-wrote this song with Rick Chertoff, Gary Corbett, and Stephen Broughton Lunt. Lauper's intention was to write the song in a way that a younger audience would think the lyrics were about dancing. As they got older, they would then later understand the song's more adult-oriented meaning. That ploy worked as the song's indirect lyrics allowed it to be played on the radio and its associated video got put into heavy rotation at MTV. However, the cheeky wink-wink lyrics didn't go unnoticed by the Tipper and the song would end up being tagged as filthy by the PMRC.

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