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[1990-1994 Best Songs]
Billboard Top 100 1994, #14
By formula, this song should suck.
Take a female hip-hop trio, vocals from a female R&B quartet. Add a guitar track to the background, and rap about sexy men with good manners. Hmmm...
So why is it so good?
Well, for starters, If you are going to make a hip-hop R&B song, you could do worse than En Vogue as your back-up singers. Next that guitar track works wonders. It would have been easy to add some drum machine and pop-synth sounds, but somebody remembered that R&B actually does stand for Rhythm and Blues.
But there's an even more important facet to this song: the message. At that time, it was very popular to glamorize the demeaning of women, and to even imply that women were property (see NWA's Eazy E singing "you may have a lot of bitches, but I got much more). But here were seven beautiful, strong, talented women basically saying to men "if you really want any of this, you better step up, with decency, respect, thoughtfulness, and attention (also, we would like you to have a body like Arnold with a Denzel face)."
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