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

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@Agogday

you're not first on this thread. Someone higher up in the thread also referenced the "Songfacts" site article, and covered the same ground.

But it is nice that you linked to it for us all to read.


But again its a problematic song from the get-go.

Its about a certain issue in life in general. Confidence, and taking on whatever life throws at you. Which is fine. But social commentary songs like that tend to follow the songwriting convention - of forcing the theme into the pigeonhole of - boy meets girl. Pop songs are supposed about relationships. So even a song that is not about relationships has to use romance as a metaphor. Joni Mitchel's "Big Yellow Taxi" does it to great effect- she sings about how she ' heard the screen door slam...my old man left in a big yellow taxi... you dont know what have till its gone..." in order to talk about the environment and deforestation (they took all of the trees and put them in a tree museum...they paved paradise in turned it into a parking lot).

"Hit Me" tries to do the same thing. But even in its original male pov form it didnt work quite as well as "Big Yellow Taxi". And when you switch the gender of the singer it gets even more problematic. The song was already a confusing mess when Benatar first sang it decades ago.

Its probably time to put the song out of its misery.

Never cared much for pop music from the eighties.No big loss.I didn’t like most of it then ,and I hate most of it now.
I wish they wouldn’t play it on the radio station, I’d rather hear something new.
Why is it when some people age all they listen to is music from their teen years?
Top hits of the eighties,ugh.

because I superficially thought she was really sexy (yeah I know, I was being the person who I preach against as an old man)

That sounds like perfectly normal heterosexual male "reasoning" to me. They were selling a sex fantasy and you bought it. Fantasy is the operative word it does not mean we approve of misogyny in real life. The music industry is part of the entertainment industry, after all, that is what they do.

She is not my favorite artist but I like her music and the hard rock genre in general although at the time I was totally into New wave.

My first three albums I purchased with my own money were all 80s bands
ELO
Alan Parsons
Pet Benatar

I'll be honest while I liked the music of ELO and Alan Parsons, the main reason I purchased her album was because I superficially thought she was really sexy (yeah I know, I was being the person who I preach against as an old man) . I kind of lukewarm like her music now but quite honestly I wouldn't buy it.

There is some irony in her not choosing to perform the song in that in 1983 my younger sister took it upon herself to get me in trouble by showing my mother the song "Hit me with you best shot" and some other songs claiming to mom that the lyrics were dirty (rather than domestic violence she claimed the connotation of the song was sexual). She must have guessed I had the hots for Pat

Fortunately my parents had zero interest in what I did with my pocket money so long I wasn't buying alcohol or porn

So your sister thought that Pat Benatar was a forunner of Britney Spears? "Baby Hit Me One More Time"?

Yet another possible interpretation of the word "hit".

I wonder if Britney will ever stop performing her signature song?

Apparently even 'the Queen Bee" herself has joined the woke wagon, and is canceling herself. She just announced that she is somehow deleting a particular 'ableist' word from her latest album. The word is 'spaz'.

All of these artists ...trying to be non offensive...just OFFENDS me ...offends me so much that I just cant take it.

SO... lets throw wokeness to the wind with a selection of songs that...are non woke. And PROMOTE domestic violence!


Florence


Louis Jordan

Neither of the above two (one from now, and the other from circa 1950) are quite as bad as they seem at first glance.

But THIS song (from the early Sixties) just gives me the Willies:

Perhaps the first "feminist" pop song, from about 1963-1964, was "You Don't Own Me," sung by Leslie Gore.

The Homecoming Queen's Got a Gun" is a song by American singer–comedian Julie Brown. It appeared as the B-side to her 1983 single "I Like 'em Big and Stupid". Brown's satire of valley girl culture also parodies 1950s-1960s "teen tragedy" songs

The song first appeared as a B-side to Brown's 1983 self-released single "I Like 'em Big and Stupid", and took off after frequent play on The Dr. Demento Show led to radio airplay around the US. It would become what music critic Jonathan Taylor called "one of the most delightfully silly singles and videos of the past few years."

The song was ranked No. 488 in the KROQ Flashback 500 of 1988 and No. 324 in the KROQ-FM Flashback 500 of 1996. It was included in a special by the Australian national radio station Triple J on school songs in 2001.

Brown admitted in a July 2000 interview that after the Columbine High School massacre she no longer felt comfortable performing "Homecoming Queen", even though the circumstances of the song were quite different from the real-life events, and it had been comic at the time of its debut. "I can be very sensitive about whether I am doing something that will hurt people," Brown said. "So you are always drawing the comedy line of what you will or won't do."

In October 2008, Brown released a re-written version, "The Ex-Beauty Queen's Got a Gun," parodying Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin during Palin's bid for election with John McCain. Available digitally only, the low-budget recording has Brown singing new lyrics over a previously released karaoke version of the original song. As such, the prerecorded backing vocals sing words that do not match the new lyrics.