By the summer of 1984, Cyndi Lauper was the most unlikely censor’s nightmare in pop. She had orange hair, thrift-store clothes, a Queens squeak that could strip paint, and two enormous hits — Girls Just Want to Have Fun and Time After Time — that made her sound like everybody’s mischievous kid sister. Then, on July 2, 1984, Portrait Records released the third single from her debut album She’s So Unusual, a galloping new wave track built around a chant of cheerful nonsense syllables. It was called She Bop, it shot to number three in America, and it was, from its first verse to its last giggle, a song about masturbation. Almost nobody in a position of authority noticed — at first.
That double life is the whole story of She Bop. It is a record that smuggled one of pop’s taboo subjects onto daytime radio inside a melody so bouncy that programmers hummed along without reading the lyric sheet. And when the guardians of public morality finally did read the lyric sheet, the song helped change the way every record in America was labelled.
A Magazine Lying Around the Studio
Lauper has always been cheerfully frank about where the song came from. During the sessions for She’s So Unusual, she found a copy of Blueboy — a gay men’s magazine — lying around the recording studio, and it set her thinking. The magazine is name-checked in the song’s first verse, folded into a lyric that otherwise hides behind dance-craze slang: she bops, he bops, they bop, in the tradition of a hundred innocent rock and roll songs, except that the bopping here requires no partner at all.
The writing credit tells you how collaborative the album was. She Bop is credited to Lauper with Stephen Broughton Lunt, Gary Corbett and Rick Chertoff, the last of whom also produced the record. Corbett and Lunt were part of the Philadelphia-rooted musical circle around Chertoff that gave She’s So Unusual its bones, and the song they built is a deliberate piece of misdirection: a be-bop beat, a nursery-rhyme chorus, and a lyric that only confesses itself if you are listening for it. Lauper later explained that she expected listeners to find their own meaning in it, and for a while, most of them found nothing but a dance record.
Cut at the Record Plant
The track was recorded in 1983 at the Record Plant in New York City, the same studio where much of She’s So Unusual took shape. It moves at a brisk 137 beats per minute, all elbows and momentum, with Lauper’s vocal popping and chirping across the top. Billboard, reviewing the single, called it “hard rock bordering on metal, with a nonsense chorus to lighten the tone,” while Cash Box praised the way she “takes a be-bop back beat and sparks it with an inspired vocal that pops and chirps with rhythmic intensity.”
Lauper, characteristically, added her own footnote to the session lore: in an interview on The Howard Stern Show, she said she recorded the vocal naked. Whether or not the detail survives strict fact-checking, it fits the record’s spirit — this was a singer having enormous fun with a subject that pop, and especially female pop, was not supposed to touch. A remix by Arthur Baker for the twelve-inch single pushed the song further toward the clubs, and Billboard described his rework as “radical,” full of “new, rhythmic crosscurrents.”
A Number Three Hit in Plain Sight
Released on July 2, 1984, with Witness on the B-side, She Bop debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at number 52 in the issue dated July 21. It climbed for seven weeks and peaked at number three on September 8, 1984, spending eighteen weeks on the chart in total. That made it the third top ten single from She’s So Unusual, and it put Lauper in the record books: she became the first female artist to reach the top three of the Hot 100 with her first three chart entries, and She’s So Unusual became the first debut album by a female artist ever to produce three top ten hits.
The song travelled well, up to a point. It reached number three in Canada, number six in Australia and New Zealand, number five in Austria, number ten in Switzerland and number one in Israel, and it climbed to number ten on Billboard’s dance chart. In Britain, though, it stalled at number 46 — a flop the record’s chroniclers blame on a near-total lack of promotion rather than any official squeamishness. The single was eventually certified gold by the RIAA in April 1989, for shipments of half a million copies in the United States. In the longer view, She Bop was the third leg of an unprecedented run: when the next single, All Through the Night, reached number five that autumn, She’s So Unusual became the first debut album by a female artist to place four singles in the Hot 100’s top five, and the following February Lauper carried off the Grammy Award for Best New Artist. The filth, by any commercial measure, was doing extremely well.
The Video That Winked
If radio missed the joke, the video told it — in code. Directed by Edd Griles, with animated sequences designed by Mark Marek and produced by Jerry Lieberman’s studio, the She Bop clip is a masterpiece of the innuendo that dares you to object. Wrestler Wendi Richter lip-syncs the opening line, and Captain Lou Albano — Lauper’s on-screen “father” from the Girls Just Want to Have Fun video — turns up again. Around them, the camera keeps finding physical puns: a bottle spurting mayonnaise, a gas station sign reading “GIT OFF HERE,” pumps labelled “good,” “better” and “nirvana,” a big sign advertising “Self Service.”
The slyest gag arrives in the animated break, where Lauper dances as a blind woman with a cane and wins a game called “Masterbingo” — a two-step reference to the old myth that the song’s subject makes you blind. None of it was explicit enough to ban, and all of it was obvious once you saw it. The video earned a nomination for Best Female Video at the 1985 MTV Video Music Awards, losing to Tina Turner’s What’s Love Got to Do with It, and Melody Maker praised its “superb bits of animation” and Lauper’s “Boop-cheeked charm.”
The Filthy Fifteen and the Sticker
The reckoning came in 1985, when the Parents Music Resource Center — the Washington organisation co-founded by Tipper Gore, the wife of then-Senator Al Gore — published its “Filthy Fifteen,” a list of the songs it considered the worst offenders in pop: profane, sexually explicit, or both. She Bop made the list, in the company of Prince’s Darling Nikki, Madonna’s Dress You Up, Sheena Easton’s Sugar Walls, Judas Priest and Mötley Crüe. The PMRC’s campaign forced a Senate hearing in September 1985, at which rock stars including Frank Zappa, John Denver and Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider testified against the group, and it ended with the record industry agreeing to the generic black-and-white “Parental Advisory” label — a compromise that satisfied almost nobody and soon became so familiar that teenagers treated the sticker as a recommendation.
There is a rich irony in the timing. By the time the PMRC caught up with She Bop, the song had already been a top three hit for a year, played thousands of times on stations whose listeners included the very children the group said it was protecting. The lyric had not changed; only the country’s willingness to read it had. Lauper, who had written the song as a wink, found herself an exhibit in a national argument about free expression — and, typically, she treated the whole episode as comedy rather than shame. The BMI songwriting awards, at least, saw nothing to apologise for: She Bop took home a BMI Pop Award in 1985.
Still Bopping
She Bop never really went away. It closed 1984 at number 34 on Billboard’s year-end Hot 100 and also reached number three on the Cash Box chart, number 27 on Billboard’s mainstream rock listing, number six in South Africa and number nineteen in West Germany — proof that the wink translated. Other singers kept finding it: a version by Howie Beno and Cruella DeVille turned up in the 1999 film Jawbreaker, the Japanese singer Nana Kitade recorded it for the 2008 tribute album We Love Cyndi, and the South Korean star Wax remade it as Oppa. Lauper herself re-recorded it in a quieter arrangement for her 2005 album The Body Acoustic, where the joke lands differently — less playground chant, more sly confession. Heavy metal clowns GWAR performed it for The A.V. Club‘s Undercover series in 2015, mashing it into the Ramones’ Blitzkrieg Bop, and it remains a fixture of her concerts. More importantly, it set a template: the female pop star singing about her own pleasure, in her own language, and letting the audience catch up at its own speed. In 1984 that was radical enough to require a disguise. She Bop wore the disguise so well that America danced first and blushed later.