Songfacts®:

• With few exceptions, you can't say "F-You" in a song without cloaking it somehow. That's what the disco group Chic did with their hit "Le Freak," where "freak out!" is substituted.
  
  In this Helix song, "Rock You" is the proxy for "F-You," serving as a message to the band's detractors. Bob Halligan, Jr., who wrote the song, told Songfacts: "That was the idea I was playing off of. Like, if you can't get with our program, then rock you baby. Sort of the guitarists' middle finger."
• "Rock You" is the most popular song by Helix, a Canadian rock band that had three albums under their studded belts before releasing it on their fourth album, Walkin' The Razor's Edge, in 1984. In Canada, it endured as a rock classic after peaking at #27; in America, it bubbled under at #101, their only chart entry there.
• MuchMusic, Canada's answer to MTV, launched in 1984, the same year this song was released. The video got plenty of airplay on the channel; it shows the band as part of a chain gang pounding away at rocks in a quarry - quite the literal approach. The uncensored version has some nudity.
• The song shows up in a 2015 episode of the Canadian TV series Trailer Park Boys in a scene where the character Ricky plays it to annoy an adversary. He ends up in a loudness war when the guy pulls out a siren.
• The song's writer, Bob Halligan, Jr., ended up writing songs for far more mellow artists like Kathy Mattea and Cher, but in the mid-'80s he was a top hard rock songwriter thanks to two songs of his that Judas Priest recorded: "(Take These) Chains" and "Some Heads Are Gonna Roll." He wrote many songs in the Kix catalog and teamed up with Paul Stanley to write the Kiss hit "Rise To It."
• Sum 41 recorded this song for Fubar: The Album, a collection of covers songs originally by Canadian rock bands.