"Do You Really Want to Hurt Me"

"Do You Really Want to Hurt Me"

Culture Club

Featured on At Worst...The Best of Boy George and Culture Club
Virgin
Album released 20 September 1993, song originally released 6 September 1982

New Wave
CD (possibly original copy)

B

This was the song that changed everything.  Take an innocent high school freshman who had known she was bisexual since forever but lived in a conservative Southern California town that pretended there was no greater world.  And plunk THAT VIDEO on the airwaves, where even those of us without cable could see it, and then...Is that a boy or a girl?  And what the heck is going on with FDR and the blackface and everything that will look just as weird almost forty years later?  And it's a good song, even on its own terms, even though I still can't decipher two-thirds of the lyrics.  George, you didn't hurt us, you helped us, by confusing us, and nothing has been the same since.