Pat Benatar won't preform 'Hit Me With Your Best Shot'

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Singer Pat Benatar said she will stop performing her song Hit Me With Your Best Shot in light of recent mass shootings in the US.

Benatar told USA Today that she has decided to stop playing the song “in deference to the victims [and] the families of these mass shootings”.

“Fans are having a heart attack and I’m like, I’m sorry,” Benatar, who is in the middle of a US summer tour, said. “I tell them, if you want to hear the song, go home and listen to it. [The title] is tongue-in-cheek, but you have to draw the line.”

The song was released in 1980 and was one of the top songs of the year, reaching the Top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100. The song’s chorus is a repetition of its title, along with the phrase “fire away”.

“I can’t say those words out loud with a smile on my face, I just can’t. I’m not going to go on stage and soapbox – I go to my legislators – but that’s my small contribution to protesting,” Benatar said. “I’m not going to sing it. Tough.”

I always thought it was punching someone and never about shooting.
It won’t matter to me, her music doesn’t interest me.I hear it played on the local station occasionally ,not by choice.

I think it was about emotional violence, not physical violence.

Sometimes if we're feeling particularly confident or have nothing to lose, we feel we can take anything life throws at us. That's the sentiment in "Hit Me With Your Best Shot," written by Eddie Schwartz, a struggling guitarist living in Toronto. He told Songfacts the story behind the song: "I was in a kind of weird therapy when I was in my mid-20s, it was called bio-energetics, I believe. One of the things we did was punch pillows, I guess it had something to do with getting out hostility. I went to a session where we punched the pillows for a while. It all seemed kind of strange, but I remember walking outside of this therapy session and standing on the doorstep of the building I'd been in, this small house in Toronto, and the title just came to me, 'Hit Me With Your Best Shot.' I haven't been to therapy before or since. Maybe I should go back."

The song was written from a male standpoint, with the lyric "Before I put another notch in your lipstick case." When male bands cover it, they sometimes sing the line as "Put another notch in my guitar case." This was the only line Benatar changed when she recorded it, changing your to my.

"Hit Me With Your Best Shot" can be interpreted as a song about a one-night-stand, but that's not what its writer had in mind. Eddie Schwartz told Songfacts: "The song is laden with sexual innuendo, but at the core is a song about self confidence. It's a song saying 'no matter what you throw at me, I can handle it, I can play in your league.'"

In 1984, Benatar had an interesting exchange with Songwriter Connection magazine regarding this song. Responding to a question about standing behind what she sings, Benatar said: "There's very few songs where I let lyrics go. I mean, there's times when I let lyrics go because the rest of the song is fine. But, most of the time, I'm real meticulous with the lyrics because I gotta sing them. There were certain parts of that song ('Hit Me With Your Best Shot') that I liked, but most of it that I've sort of outgrown. I mean, it's so hard to sing, 'you're a real tough cookie.'

One night, you know sometimes you announce people's names, this is by so-and-so? When I said 'Eddie Schwartz,' I swear to God, the room - it wasn't very big, then, it was about 1500 people - it just went dead - silence, like, Eddie Schwartz?"
The lyrics are suggestive, but most people didn't consider the song offensive. There was some politically correct commentary in newspapers at the time about it being sexist and about encouraging violence against women. Says Eddie: "This shocked me because it was written from a man's standpoint at the beginning and it was always meant metaphorically - no punches are actually thrown in the song."

I think that hearing the chorus could be triggering for some people. Often, people don’t hear/listen to/understand the words in the other parts of songs.

Even though the overall meaning is harmless, it could still be triggering. I respect her decision here. I really do.

People should be more discerning about these things. While obviously, I do not know her personally, Career-wise she has more than earned respect.

Maybe she's just not comfortable performing it right now.

I wouldn't agree that having a great career would mean that she's earned respect. Actors and singers disappoint us on a regular basis, like anyone else. I do respect her decision here, though.