THE LEG UP / Stephen M. Deusner

THE PLIGHT OF THE NAUGHTY GIRL

Samantha Fox blazed a trail for skanks’ rights in “Naughty Girls (Need Love Too).”

Every once in a while, I have to dig my way out of the avalanche of promos and find the oldies but goodies that remind me why I’m in this racket in the first place. This week, revisiting one of the most respected songs of the 1980s has thoroughly reinvigorated me and renewed my faith in music as a means of social change: Samantha Fox’s “Naughty Girls (Need Love Too).”

Up until the late 1980s, it had been long understood that much like camels in the desert, naughty girls could go for long periods of time without love. But in 1987, twenty-one-year-old Samantha Fox, a successful model and aspiring actress from London, exploded that misconception with her hit single “Naughty Girls (Need Love Too),” in which she admitted that while it’s fun not being on Santa’s nice list, she and others like her in fact do need love too. It’s difficult to overestimate the impact these new findings had on society, and the controversy was immediate and intense. The Catholic Church reasserted its ban on naughtiness before marriage, parent-teacher organizations across the country decried the song as anti-nice propaganda, and many critics accused her of inflating anecdotal evidence to try to speak for all naughty girls.

Unbowed by the new pressures facing her, the young Fox confronted her opponents in a startling video that at the time was panned as overly conceptual. Now, however, it is regarded as one of the most influential clips of that decade, alongside Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” and Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror.” Having dyed her hair pink for the shoot—an unmistakable sign of outrage and dissent—Fox dances in a poor urban neighborhood, clearly conveying the idea that the plight of naughty girls is as crucial an issue as poverty, racism, and bared midriffs. What remains especially disarming about this protest song, however, is Fox’s naked vulnerability: “Please don’t tease,” she sings, her despair increasingly palpable, “if you lie my heart will freeze.”

Twenty-one years later, it seems hard to believe there was ever a time when naughty girls were systemically denied the love they need, but the success of artists as diverse as Beyonce, Rihanna, and Joanna Newsom shows just how far we have come in acknowledging the needs of naughty girls. And we all have Samantha Fox—singer, model, activist, naughty girl—to thank for it.

Stephen M. Deusner is a freelance music journalist based in Washington , DC. Don't ask him about Norwegian pop or house rabbits, unless you have a few hours.