SHE BOP
“She Bop” is a song by American singer-songwriter Cyndi Lauper, released as the third single from her debut studio album She’s So Unusual. It reached number three on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart in September 1984. Worldwide, the song is her most commercially successful single after “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” and “Time After Time”, and reached number 46 on the UK Singles Chart and number 6 on the ARIA Singles Chart. “She Bop” was her third consecutive Top 5 on the Hot 100. The song is also featured in the film Never Been Kissed. (More from Wikipedia)
The only song on the Filthy Fifteen that I think deserves special attention is Cyndi Lauper’s “She Bop”; the song is on her major hit album, She’s So Unusual. It really is a clever take on masturbation that got past a lot of people – in fact, the music video of the song that featured a judge and a tunnel and all the rest of it provided a lot of clues that the song didn’t.
The opening verse refers to Blueboy, a gay pornographic magazine; the lyric sheet put the name in lower case though:
We-hell – I see them every night in tight blue jeans – In the pages of a blue boy magazine
The next verse is a little more explicit:
Do I wanna go out with a lion’s roar Or do I wanna go south ’n get me some more . . . They say I better stop – or I’ll go blind
The final verse winds it up nicely:
Hey, hey – they say I better get a chaperone Because I can’t stop messin’ with the danger zone No, I won’t worry, and I won’t fret Ain’t no law against it yet
The conjugation of the made-up verb “bop” that forms most of the chorus is just another way of saying, “everybody’s doing it”; it also includes a reference to the 1957 Gene Vincent hit “Be-Bop-A-Lula”, presumably where the songwriters borrowed the word:
She bop – he bop – a-we bop I bop – you bop – a-they bop Be bop – be bop-a-lu bop, I hope He ↑ will understand
That last line in the chorus is the real coup de grace for this song. There is an up arrow in the lyric sheet in the album, making this an unmistakable reference to God; this line is even performed in a different tempo from the rest of the song. The first time it is sung, one of the characters in the video does an exaggerated double-take.
(June 2016)
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Items: She Bop
