Bad Girl Song

♫ Just call me Mary "Wanna"
And Mary's got some scary little games to play! ♫

"So come on, baby, let down your guard.
When your date's in the bathroom,
I'll slip you my card!
I can tell just by looking
That you've got it hard—
For ME!"

— "Special", Lucy the Slut from Avenue Q.

A subtrope of the "I Am" Song, in which a female character establishes her character... and her character is all about living freely, especially sexually. How explicitly that sexuality is addressed mostly depends on how old the musical is.

In musicals, usually sung by the secondary female character (soubrette). She might be anything from a prostitute to a Good Bad Girl. Not to be confused with a Villain Song by a female villain, though the two may overlap if she's The Vamp.

See also Intercourse with You, where a song is about sleeping with someone. This may double as a Seduction Lyric, if the Bad Girl is currently engaged in exerting her badness on a potential partner; her line may well be "I'm good at being bad and you'll enjoy it".

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Examples:

Films — Animation

• Subverted in All Dogs Go to Heaven 2. During the talent contest, Sasha la Fleur is introduced with howling and whistling from the male dogs in the audience. She then proceeds to sing a song about how she's not interested in a relationship, appropriately called "Count Me Out". Despite this, Charlie is immediately taken to her.
• "Let Me Be Good To You" from The Great Mouse Detective. Miss Kitty is brought on by the Rat Trap's pianist to calm the crowd with her song "Let Me Be Good to You" when they prepare to riot. She starts off by singing softly, calming them, and even Dawson is attracted to her act. Miss Kitty's song rapidly degenerates into a burlesque act with backup dancers while patrons grab fruitlessly at her.
• Villain song from The Little Mermaid (1989) "Poor Unfortunate Souls" is somewhat of a play on this. While mostly a song of a villain pretending to be good, her side comments to her eel henchmen show Ursula's real colors - bad, and lovin' it.
• "Perfect Isn't Easy" from Oliver & Company.

Films — Live-Action

• "Naughty But Nice" from The Belle Of New York.
• "My Name is Tallulah" from Bugsy Malone.
• Cabaret memorably has "Mein Herr", establishing Sally as a Good Bad Girl. It's her first song of the film.
  "You have to understand the way I am, Mein Herr."
• Chicago:
  • "When You're Good To Mama", though the subject is a little older than most examples. It establishes Mama Morton as the dirty prison warden, and the film version shows her taking all sorts of bribes. The number is shot and framed in a very sexual way.
    "You put in for Mama, she'll put out for you..."
  • "The Cell Block Tango" is this and a Villain Song, since Velma is a Villain Protagonist. Each of the inmates get a solo detailing what they did to their lyr to get into prison, reiterating that "he had it coming". They perform the number in Stripperiffic costumes and suggestive dance moves.
• "Sooner Or Later" as performed by Breathless Mahoney in Dick Tracy.
• "Your Goodwill Ambassador" from Darling Lili.
• "Cause I'm a Blonde" from Earth Girls Are Easy (sung by Julie Brown) Also, "Brand New Girl" (also sung by Julie Brown), which is about a Good Bad Girl teaching the Good Girl heroine how to act bad to get her boyfriend's attention. ("Your beauty's fresh and wholesome, but science has a cure!")
• "I Wanna be Evil" from Kinky Boots. Sung by Lola (despite being a drag queen). And the original "I want to Be Evil", as sung by Eartha Kitt.
• "Little Mary Sunshine" from Reefer Madness: The Musical, in which the innocent Mary Lane turns into an evil dominatrix after smoking a single joint.
• Walking on Sunshine has two: "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" and "The Wild Boys", a male version.
• Although a preexisting song, "Why Don't You Do Right?" serves as this for Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, in spite of her not actually being bad, just drawn that way.

Music

• Christina Aguilera's "Dirrty", which opens with the words "too dirty to clean my act up!"
• Pretty much any song by Beyoncé after her split from Destiny's Child. Girl Power attached to a danceable beat and long legs.
• "Call Me" by Blondie. The singer is a girl, and she's asking for a call. Get the picture?
• A lot of Marina Diamandis's songs, particularly from the concept album Electra Heart, but Bubblegum Bitch and Homewrecker deserve special mention.
  "I'm only happy when I'm on the run
  I broke a million hearts just for fun
  I'm the image of deception."
• Many Missy Elliot songs, but mostly "Pass That Dutch".
• "Bad Woman Blues," by blues singer Beth Hart. Enjoy.
• Eartha Kitt's "I Want to Be Evil" is a variant, describing how tired she is of playing the good girl and how much more fun it will be to be bad in (mostly) Poke the Poodle ways.
  "I wanna be horrid, I wanna drink booze
  (I wanna be horrid, I want to make news)
  And whatever I've got, I'm eager to lose"
• "Shove" by L7 from the Tank Girl soundtrack.
• "Lady Marmalade" by Labelle, as well as the cover version by Christina Aguilera, Pink, Mya and Lil Kim.
  • Really, any Lil Kim song.
  • Also basically any Azaelia Banks, though the crown definitively goes to 212, where she basically tells any girl who thinks she is hotter than her to go down on her.
• "Bad Girl" by Madonna from Erotica, as evidenced in the lyrics:
  Bad girl, drunk by six
  kissing someone else's lips,
  I smoked too many cigarettes a day
  Not happy when I feel this way...
• Lots of The Millionaires songs. Their remix of My Chick Bad might be the best example.
• Dolly Parton's version of "The House of the Rising Sun" is about a prostitute and the titular brothel that's "been the ruin of many a good girl".
• The Pussycat Dolls "Don't Cha"
• "None Of Your Business" by Salt N Pepa.
  If I wanna take a guy home with me tonight, it's none of your business
  And if she wanna be a freak and sell it on the weekend, it's none of your business
• Britney Spears' gender-flipped cover to Bobby Brown's "My Prerogative" definitely fits, while the original didn't make much of a stir back in the day. Double Standard anyone?
• "Bad Girls" by Donna Summer, anyone?
  • Also MIA's "Bad Girls"
• "Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay":
  Ere my verses I conclude
  I'd like it known and understood
  Though free as air, I'm never rude
  I'm not too bad and not too good!
• "Private Dancer" by Tina Turner.
• The Lady In Red by Allie Wrubel:
  "The fellows are crazy for the lady in red
  The lady in red is fresh as a daisy
  When the town is in bed."
• Tata Young's "Sexy, Naughty, Bitchy"

Professional Wrestling

• GLOW's set of bad girls had a Crowd Song called "Nasty & Mean", which was them revelling in their bad girl ways.
• Sometimes if a female wrestler makes a Face–Heel Turn, she'll get a brand new theme song to emphasise this:
  • Naomi originally had a fun dance tune to fit with her 'Funkadactyl' gimmick. When she turned heel, she adopted a Bragging Theme Tune called "I'm Amazing".
  • Torrie Wilson replaced her "I Need A Little Time" theme - which was a smooth ballad - with "Not Enough For Me", sung from the perspective of The Tease. The theme would eventually become this for Michelle McCool and later Layla.
  • One without lyrics but Alexa Bliss had a sparkly theme called "Blissful" to represent her 'fairy princess' gimmick. After a heel turn, the theme got a remix to now be called "Spiteful".

Theatre

• "Raunchy" from 110 in the Shade. Although it is sung by the main character, who is DEFINITELY not a bad girl, she sings it while flirting with the idea of being one for a while.
• "Nonono" from the Slovak musical Adam šangala.
• "A Lady Must Live" from America's Sweetheart.
• "Special," from Avenue Q.
• "Shady Lady Bird" from Best Foot Forward.
• "The Real Love of My Life" from Brigadoon.
• "You Can Always Count on Me" from City of Angels.
• "A Little Brains, A Little Talent" from Damn Yankees.
  • "Whatever Lola Wants"
• "Nur kein genieren" (Don't Be Embarrassed) from Elisabeth has Madame Wolf and Lucheni presenting the prostitutes and their specialties, and promising a great time with the ladies.
• "Please Don't Make Me Be Good" from Fifty Million Frenchmen.
• "I Want To Be Bad" from Follow Thru. The song was also sung by Helen Kane.
• "The Girl Gets Around" from Footloose.
• "Turn Back O Man" from Godspell is traditionally performed this way.
• "My Picture in the Papers" from The Golden Apple, where Helen celebrates with the men about town her transformation into an "ultra-physical and slightly aphrodisical" Hard-Drinking Party Girl.
• "There Are Worse Things I Could Do" from Grease.
• "Our Lady of the Underground" is this for Persephone in Hadestown.
• "Laura de Maupassant" from Hazel Flagg.
• "Candy Store" from Heathers is one for all three of the Heathers, though it best applies to Heather Chandler.
• "Bring On The Men" from Jekyll & Hyde. Also "The Girls of the Night," which is a lament sung by prostitutes about their circumstances.
• In "Always True to You (In My Fashion)" from Kiss Me, Kate, Lois sings that even though she's sleeping around, she's still true to Bill somehow.
• "My Body, My Business" from The Life.
• "Twice in Love Every Day" from The Likes of Us.
• "I Wanna Be Good 'N' Bad" from Make A Wish.
• "Does Your Mother Know?" in Mamma Mia!- almost a subversion of the trope, since it's more of a "you're not going to get it from me" song even though Tanya spends the scene teasing the male characters.
• "It's All the Same" and "Aldonza" from Man of La Mancha. However, these songs are not really celebrations of her being 'bad', but lamentations that life has left her with no choice but to be a 'bad girl', so are really a Deconstruction.
• "Lovely Ladies" from Les Misérables, which is literally about prostitutes.
  • Deconstructed in the final verse with Fantine, who sings about how awful sex work makes her feel.
    Don't they know they're making love to one already dead?
• "The Heat is on in Saigon" from Miss Saigon has a few verses sung by the prostitutes, along with the soldiers.
• "Charming" from Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 has Hélène flatter the innocent, engaged Natasha into going to a ball without her betrothed, in order to push her towards her lustful brother. It's sung as if Hélène herself was flirting with Natasha (especially since she is labeled "a slut" in the opening number). Doubles as Villain Song.
• Natalie's section of "Wish I Were Here" in Next to Normal; she's gone from a stressed student to an even more stressed club-goer who routinely steals medication from her bipolar mother.
• "I Cain't Say No" from Oklahoma!.
• "The Lorelei" from Pardon My English, except in the original production, which made the ill-advised decision to change it into a more generic comic duet. No wonder it flopped.
• "I'll Show Him" from Plain and Fancy, in which an Amish maiden vows to do "sinful" things to get her man.
• "Out Tonight" and Maureen's half of "Take Me Or Leave Me" in RENT.
• "Noel's Lament" from Ride the Cyclone is a parody of the genre sung by the character Noel Gruber — the only out gay teen in the entire town of Uranium, Saskatchewan, who has just died in a tragic roller coaster derailment with the rest of his high school choir. His "lament" is a cabaret-inspired number where he fantasizes about living as a "hooker with a heart of black charcoal" in post-war France. He describes his ideal life as a troubled but beautiful lady of the night: murdering Johns who mess with him, drinking himself into oblivion, "writing poems to burn by moonlight," getting addicted to opium, catching typhoid, and dying in an alley.
  For I sing songs until the break of day,
  I embrace a new man every night!
  My life's a never ending carnival,
  A whirl of boozy-floozy-flashing lights!
  I want to be that Fucked. Up. Girl.
• Variation (and/or possible subversion)- The song "Toucha Toucha Toucha Touch Me" in The Rocky Horror Picture Show is sung by Janet "SLUT!" Weiss who is both the main female character and a pretty innocent girl... until Frank gets to her, that is.
• "Reciprocity" from Seventeen, a Good Bad Girl's interpretation of The Golden Rule.
• Six: The Musical has two.
  • First, "Don't Lose Ur Head" for Anne Boleyn, in which she playfully and proudly boasts about her beauty, and her affair (and eventually marriage) to Henry. Her flirtatiousness and hot temper eventually lead to her execution, but she still seems to think it was Worth It.
  • Then we get "All You Wanna Do" for Katherine Howard, and it's a complete deconstruction. Katherine starts out enjoying her flings, completely oblivious to how bad it is that adult men are willing to sleep with her when she's thirteen. She genuinely believes each of the men love her, and that "this guy is different," only to be proven wrong. By the end, she's utterly broken by the realization that men just see her a sex object, not a real person, especially when she realizes that Thomas, who she thought of as a best friend, was only trying to get in her pants.
• "Any Kind Of Man" from Sometime. (Mae West was singing this number in 1918.)
• Depending on the version of the musical, "A Lotta Locomotion" from Starlight Express has elements of this: except for Dinah, who establishes herself as a wholesome, hardworking waitress, the coaches characterize themselves in terms of the vices they enjoy. ("A Whole Lotta Locomotion," however, is a Chorus Girls song.)
• "Hey, Big Spender" from Sweet Charity. About dancers (including those of the lap variety), not prostitutes, but certainly about the fun, laughs and good times that you can have with said dancers.
  • Though it is a bit of a subversion in that none of the girls singing are happy about it - the song is traditionally performed with very deadpan, bored faces and singing styles, despite the bouncy, seductive song.
• "Good Little Girls" from the revue Two's Company, a song about all the exciting places "smart little girls" would rather go to than Heaven.
• "Tire Tracks and Broken Hearts" from Whistle Down the Wind: "Those good girls never know what they're missing / But us bad girls almost always do." (What exactly it is they're missing ranges from peroxide hair to "some real good times.")
• "Queenie Was A Blonde" for Queenie and "Look At Me Now" for Kate, from Andrew Lippa's The Wild Party.

Video Games

• "Pleather For Breakfast" from the No More Heroes soundtrack.

Web Video

• The Batterys Down has "Takin' Off," which is sung by a group of strippers.

Western Animation

• From Batman: The Brave and the Bold, No one does it better than the Birds of Prey.
• The song "I'm Me" from Phineas and Ferb, sung by Vanessa, can be seen in this light, but only if you use the Double Entendre interpretation of the apparently meaningless lyrics.

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