Songfacts®:

• This was written by Holly Knight along with Nick Gilder of "Hot Child In The City" fame. With the battle/love theme, the song is similar to Pat Benatar's "Love Is A Battlefield," which Knight also wrote. She told Songfacts: "Rather than a love song or a fighting song, it was more empowerment. I never realized before I wrote that song how much the warrior spirit is inside of me, and it means a lot to me - which I'm writing about in my memoirs - to stand up for the things that you believe in and to follow through believing that those dreams can come true. Basically not taking s--t from people but still trying to have some class and be open-minded and listen. It's all part and parcel for me."
• This was the biggest hit for Scandal, whose lead singer Patty Smyth had a #2 US hit in 1992 with "Sometimes Love Just Ain't Enough," a duet with Don Henley. Smyth married tennis star John McEnroe in 1997.
• This song deals with the animal energy that both fuels and destroys so many relationships. Co-writer Holly Knight told Songfacts: "There's a fine line that you walk between trying to get somebody to behave and tame them for the right things, and not breaking their wild spirit. So 'I don't wanna tame your animal style,' when you're young and you're innocent you don't really have any regard for rules, but it's a double-edged sword. You want to retain that, but once you lose innocence, it's a fine line that you walk."
• There are some intriguing lines in this song that don't necessarily make sense, notably, "Follow me stereo jungle child." Chock full of vowels, these are great lines to sing, which is why they're there.
• By 1984, some record companies, including Scandal's label, Columbia, had departments dedicated to music videos, since MTV was such a powerful promotional tool. The clip was deliriously bizarre. Instead of the band, we see a guy who looks like one of the Thundercats dance-fighting around various other costumed creatures. Smyth appears in body paint and a short haircut, making the appropriately cheesy finger pistol gestures during the "bang bang" parts, a bit that Scandal's concert goers would imitate whenever they played the song live.
  
  "When I saw the video, I was crestfallen," Smyth said in the book I Want My MTV. "I had no idea it would look like an off-Broadway production of Cats."
• The song had staying power - it appears in the video game Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the '80s, and it was the theme song for the Wigan Warriors, a popular British rugby team. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Mike - Santa Barbara, CA
• This is the theme song for the Netflix series GLOW, a fictional rendering of a real TV show about female professional wrestlers set in 1985. Patty Smyth told Spin that she didn't get notice that it was being used for the show because she didn't write the song - she heard about it through friends.
  
  Holly Knight told Songfacts why it's such a good fit: "That show was literally about fighting, but also fighting for identity. It is also about individuality, because all the girls had to take on an alter ego persona and dress a certain way, and they all picked people that to them were empowering."