It took 20 years for Scorpions to find any success on a mass scale, but once they did, they took off like a rocket.
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Despite forming in 1965 in Germany, the band started to make waves in the ’80s with metal songs like “No One Like You” and “Can’t Live Without You.” While those songs got the ball rolling in the early ’80s, they reached international levels of fame with their 1984 album, Love at First Sting.
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Among the track list for that record was the wildly popular “Rock You Like A Hurricane.” Potentially the first song that comes to mind when you think of Scorpions, the song has endured as a staple of the ’80s metal scene.
Find out the meaning behind the suggestive hit, below.
Behind the Meaning
My body is burning, it starts to shout
Desire is coming, it breaks out loud
Lust is in cages ’til storm breaks loose
Just have to make it with someone I choose
The night is calling, I have to go
The wolf is hungry, he runs the show
He’s licking his lips, he’s ready to win
On the hunt tonight for love at first sting
The lyrics are as sultry as the music sounds. With a hammering guitar line and panning vocals from frontman Klaus Meine, “Rock You Like A Hurricane” sounds like seduction incarnate.
As one could glean from the fairly transparent lyrics, this song uses animalistic language to represent the group’s most base desires. Meine let lust guide his pen, resulting in four minutes of pure sex.
“I think ‘Rock You Like A Hurricane’ is a perfect rock anthem, which talks about attitude and sexuality,” Scorpians guitarist Rudolf Schenker told Songfacts. “It’s very important to recognize the tension between the verses and the chorus. I think Klaus (Meine) went over the lyrics around eight or nine times because the first lyrics of the song went something like ‘blah blah blah blah.’ And we said, ‘No! The song is not feeling right.’ But at the ninth or tenth time, it came.
“The lyric goes: The bitch is hungry, she needs to tell, so give her inches and feed her well,” he continued. “This was the tension between the ‘Rock You Like A Hurricane’ chorus, and the words to the verses. This is what makes the song great.”
Here I am
Rock you like a hurricane
Here I am
Rock you like a hurricane
The PMRC
The song’s sexual nature was one of many catalysts in Tipper Gore’s charge to brand popular media with warning labels with The Parents Music Resource Center.
The PMRC was founded in 1985 by Gore and other wives of political men. The goal of the committee was to ensure sexually explicit, violent, or suggestive material didn’t get into the hands of young people. Those against The PMRC argued that the branding was censorship. Nevertheless, the Recording Industry Association of America decided to put warning labels on sensitive material and continues to do so today.
Many metal songs made Gore’s list of what songs should not be for little ears. “At that time, there was Van Halen’s ‘Hot For Teacher,’ Motley Crue’s ‘Looks That Kill,’ The Scorpions’ ‘Rock You Like A Hurricane,'” Gore once said (per Songfacts). “I mean, there were some very violent images. Through the eyes of a 6 or 8-year-old, when they see these scantily clad women kind of rounded up by the band members and put in cages, and there’s whips, and there’s a sort of menace and there’s a sort of sexuality, they pick up on that.”
Photo by Richard E. Aaron/Redferns
