Songfacts®:

• Miami Sound Machine was fronted by Gloria Estefan, who married the group's leader, Emilio Estefan, in 1978 a year after permanently joining. In this song, she plays the part of a woman who loves a bad boy - he makes her feel so good. The song isn't about Emilio, who is the sensible, stable type - he handled most of the business with the group and in 1986 stopped performing with them to focus on their management.
  
  Estefan delivers the song in a lighthearted way, making her sound like a character from an '80s sitcom who gets into sticky situations because she likes boys who cause trouble.
• "Bad Boy" plays in the opening credits of the 1987 movie Three Men And A Baby, the #1 film at the box office that year (yeah, we were surprised by that too). The movie stars Tom Selleck, Ted Danson and Steve Guttenberg as bachelor friends whose lives are changed when they become guardians of a baby girl. They're "bad" in the sense that they're womanizers and like to have a good time, but of course they're really good guys, and the baby brings out their best. The song sets the tone as we get to know these endearingly "bad" boys.
• Miami Sound Machine broke big in 1985 with the song "Conga," the first single from their album Primitive Love. The group formed in 1977 and released mostly Spanish-language songs in the early '80s, earning them a huge following in the Miami area. They pushed into the English-language music scene with the 1984 single "Dr. Beat," a hit in Europe. "Conga" broke ground by bringing drum machines and Cuban rhythms together into an irresistible party song. "Bad Boy" was the second single; the Latin flavor is scaled back with an emphasis on Estefan's vocals, but the LinnDrum drum machine is still there. The next single was the ballad "Words Get In The Way," which showed yet another side of the group.
• Gloria Estefan didn't write this song. It was written by the songwriting trio of Joe Galdo, Rafael Vigil and Lawrence Dermer, who jokingly called themselves "The Three Jerks." They wrote seven of the 10 songs on the Primitive Love album."
  
  They were part of Miami Sound Machine's studio operation, doing arrangements and production work in addition to songwriting. A separate set up musicians toured as the group.
• Two different music videos were made for "Bad Boy," both playful and fun. One of them finds Estefan pursing a movie star in Miami, ignoring the advances of a geeky guy in the mold of Steve Urkel.
  
  The other video finds her cavorting with guys costumed like the cast of the musical Cats, which was huge at the time.