One person’s view: “Well, this song is a Hindenburg-level disaster on all fronts. ... The percussion sounds like it’s at war with itself, the bass has no presence, and there’s variant sounds that can’t decide on being either the melody or the rhythm.” – Nerd with an Afro
The public’s view: 2.58 / 5.00
British women were simply not very sexy in the 1980s. I know this sounds like a bigoted stereotype, but you’d agree if you saw the female idols that the U.K. was spewing out into the world. The most famous Englishwoman of the era was, of course, the beloved humanitarian Princess Di. She was never the subject of erotic fantasies, unless those fantasies somehow involved a ribbon-cutting ceremony at a hospital for landmine victims. Scotland was represented by Sheena Easton, who tried way too hard to be a sex symbol but would always be known for her erection-killing duets with Kenny Rogers and Kermit the Frog. Then there was Margaret Thatcher. Hardly any teen boys were caught hiding lingerie photos of her between the pages of their math books. Glamour, intelligence, and Tory grit were in great abundance in the Isles, but sex appeal was in short supply.
That finally changed when Samantha Fox arrived on the music scene in 1987. Not only was she blatantly sexy, she was almost defiantly British. Her working-class Cockney accent was what you would expect to hear from a lorry driver hauling crumpets and black pudding on the left side of a motorway in a steady rain. Even her origin story was uniquely British. At age 16, the scrappy young Samantha was invited to provide content to a London newspaper. Her contributions were so relevant and insightful that they appeared all the way up on page 3. That’s quite an achievement for someone so young.
Maybe I should clarify, though, that British newspapers aren’t known for their high-quality journalism. One time when I was on a trip to the Kingdom, a paper’s lead story screamed at me in 250-point font that a certain soccer player had cheated on a girlfriend. It wasn’t even one of the three soccer players who I have heard of: Lionel Messi, Pelé, or that sporty-looking woman who was in our faces constantly a few years ago. (I think her name might have been Caitlin?) The headline was something like “FLAKEY FRANKIE FINDS FLOOZY FOLLOWING FOOTY FLOP”. A much smaller headline noted that hundreds of people had died in an aviation disaster, with details to be found on page 11. From this I can deduce that Samantha Fox’s page 3 editorials focused on matters that were more important than mass tragedies but less so than the carousing of athletes. I’m guessing that she wrote about defiantly British issues like whether her MP should support a council tax on cottaging, or whether the Crown should end the annual stipend of eight sheep to the Earl of Worcestershire that was instituted in 1252. We’ll never know for sure, because her newspaper ponderings have been lost to the bird cage of time.
Her single “Naughty Girls (Need Love Too)” hasn’t fared much better. It is considered inferior to her first hit “Touch Me (I Want Your Body)”, and it almost never makes it onto playlists of classic ‘80s songs. “Naughty Girls” was written and produced by the Full Force studio team, who critics previously blamed for the inadequacies of Lisa Lisa’s “All Cried Out”. Full Force members Bowlegged Lou and Paul Anthony also made a return appearance on the backing vocals, once again demonstrating that bowlegged people sing exactly like straight-legged people and thus there is no need for both on the same record. Thankfully, neither Kenny Rogers nor Kermit the Frog was present to interfere with Samantha’s seductive chants.
Fox’s musical persona was that of a woman enthusiastically pursuing her carnal desires without shame. That may have been a slight step forward for gender equality in the 1980s, but her three big hits “Touch Me”, “Naughty Girls”, and “I Wanna Have Some Fun” are not anthems of female empowerment. They are mostly just songs about how she completely loses control of herself in the presence of men. (This is not true at all of the real Samantha Fox, who is married to a woman.) Not surprisingly, all three tracks were the product of male songwriters.
Although Samantha did a reasonably good job of tickling my teenage hormones back in 1988, her brand of soft-core stimulation now feels as dated as Full Force’s brand of freestyle. We’re living in the age of Cardi B, Latto, and other confident women whose explicit raps send middle-aged Fox News hosts into shrill tizzy fits. It’s difficult to be wowed by the male fantasies embodied in “Naughty Girls (Need Love Too)”, even when they are relayed to us by the sexiest woman north of the Chunnel.
My rating: 5 / 10
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