As anyone who has had the severe displeasure of being on the receiving end of unsolicited, sexually inappropriate comments can attest, those slimy verbal assaults can stick with you forever. Fortunately, when you also happen to be the frontwoman of a fast-rising 1970 rock band, Heart, you can turn those unsettling turns of phrase into a massive hit called “Barracuda.”
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Generally speaking, “Barracuda” is Heart’s response to rampant misogyny against and hyper-sexualization of women in the music industry as a whole. But according to songwriter Ann Wilson, she wrote the song after hearing one particularly sleazy comment that she still remembers decades later.
The Sleazy Comment That Inspired Heart To Write “Barracuda”
Heart released “Barracuda” on their third studio album, Little Queen, in 1977. The track quickly became one of the band’s most popular, cementing its place as a defining rock track of the decade. The song’s success was a tremendous win for the band. But for the man that the song was actually about, we don’t doubt (or, at the very least, we hope) that the hit single provided some much-deserved embarrassment and remorse. According to Heart vocalist Ann Wilson, the comments that inspired “Barracuda” came after a show.
“Some really sleazy guy came up to me and implied to me that he was really turned on by the fact that me and Nance [Nancy Wilson, sister and bandmate] were lesbian ancestral lovers,” Ann explained in an interview with Dan Rather. “That just really got him going in his fantasy, yeah. That made me so mad because I love my sister. Suddenly, my mother’s face, you know, came right up saying, ‘Don’t get into show business. It’s so tacky, full of sleazy people that are going to misunderstand you.’”
In that moment, Ann thought her mother was right. “It made me really angry, especially because I felt that they had attacked [Nancy’s] honor,” Ann continued. (Spoken like a true older sister.) “So, I went and wrote the words to “Barracuda.” I just think, if I would have had a gun, I might have reacted differently to the guy. But thank goodness I didn’t.”
How A Rumor Ruined Their ‘Rolling Stone’ Debut
Accounts vary as to who, exactly, made the comments about Ann and Nancy Wilson’s wildly untrue and equally inappropriate “incestuous lesbian affair.” Most retellings attribute the post-show verbal accosting to an anonymous, sleazy radio promoter. But the idea itself—the one the promoter was merely repeating what he had read—can largely be traced back to Mushroom Records. As a publicity stunt, the label placed an ad in Rolling Stone for Heart that hinted at the sibling rock ‘n’ roll duo being sexual lovers.
“It went against everything we were trying to initiate,” Ann Wilson told the magazine decades later. “And the fact that our first time in [Rolling Stone] had that lascivious implication…for [this promoter] to imagine us together in an incestuous lesbian relationship…the sleaze factor really dawned on me in that moment. Those lyrics were written by my true nature in true rage. It went on in 1977, and it still goes on now. That whole idea of two sisters, young, still nubile, being together in a frame being sexual is a really big diversion. It’s a way of taking emphasis off of our music and our message.”
Photo by Gary Gershoff/Getty Images
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