Songfacts®:

• Mary Jane Girls were a group assembled by Rick James, who wrote and produced this song. James released a song in 1978 called "Mary Jane," which is about his love for marijuana, so the group name is rather obvious (although one of the four members, JoJo McDuffie, claimed it could be a term for femininity, or possibly the shoes little girls wore).
  
  The song finds the girls inviting a guy over for some good loving anytime he's up for it. It's an inviting offer, as they promise to satisfy his every need. McDuffie claimed it was an answer to all the songs where guys lure women to their houses. "How many women have dreamt of doing the same thing?" she said.
  
  Rick James, though, had something different in mind. "I was actually talking about a vagina," he admitted in the Billboard Book Of #1 R&B Hits.
• This song got the attention of the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), which put it on their list of 15 songs they found patently offensive, in this case, for sexual content. The group formed in May 1985, shortly after this song peaked on the charts. Founded by four wives of prominent politicians (including Tipper Gore, wife of then-Senator Al Gore), they succeeded in getting warning stickers placed on albums with objectionable content.
  
  "I remember being really, really irritated, because there was nothing in the song that would suggest anything inappropriate," JoJo McDuffie told Newsweek. "Was the song about sex? Of course it was. But lyrically, it was very tastefully done."
• MTV aired the video, something they didn't do for Rick James clips, and a big reason his other projects (including Eddie Murphy's "Party All the Time") charted higher than his solo material.
  
  The "In My House" video was directed by Mark Rezyka, who was one of the most prolific directors of the era. It shows the girls doing some light dancing in a very nice house.
• This song climbed to #3 on the R&B chart and made #1 on the Dance chart.
• The Mary Jane Girls released their debut album in 1983, which contained four songs that bubbled under on the Hot 100 (charting between #101 and #106), which must me some kind of record. Only Four You was their second and final album; the follow-up single to "In My House" was "Wild and Crazy Love," which reached #42. In 1986, their cover of the Four Seasons song "Walk Like a Man" was used in the Ted Danson movie A Fine Mess and reached #41. The group split up soon after.
• One of the other songs on the PMRC "Filthy 15" was "Sugar Walls" by Sheena Easton, which is very similar in subject matter to "In My House" but a little more obvious. That song was written by Prince, who had a longstanding rivalry with Rick James and also loaded his lyrics with sexual innuendo.