How great is this song? Production is so simple and spare, it’s almost lo-fi! But then those drums really kick in, oh yeah and the choir too. It sounds kind of like a demo but in a very cool way.
I was thinking back to when I first became aware of Pat Benatar, which, man, I guess I was there right at the beginning, because I definitely remember when “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” was huge on the radio, and that was her second album in 1980, and I remember the big singles from the 1979 debut when they were singles too. In any event, from those years through the earlier days on MTV, during which she was a massive star, I remember having no sense at all of how she was categorized. She seemed kind of hard rock but also new wave, almost “underground” in the way that a lot of British new wave was in the early days of MTV. It was a testament, I suppose, to those early days of music fandom when notions of underground or cool don’t enter into it at all because you don’t really know what those things mean (willing to bet this period of ignorance lasted longer before the internet). But to me, in the early 80s, Pat Benatar seemed underground and kind of “arty” somehow, can’t quite put my finger on it.
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