I Want a Woman

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“I Want a Woman”

Single by Ratt
from the album Reach for the Sky

Released

1988

Format

Vinyl LP, Cassette, CD

Recorded

1988

Genre

Glam metal

Length

3:58

Ratt singles chronology

"Body Talk"
(1986)

"I Want a Woman"
(1988)

"Way Cool Jr."
(1989)

"I Want a Woman" is a song by glam metal band Ratt. It is the second track on their fourth album Reach for the Sky and the first single released by Atlantic Records to promote the album. The song is also on their greatest hits album, Ratt & Roll 81-91.

The song's somewhat derisive lyrical focus is directed at the materialistic, self-minded, and mostly teenaged groupies the band had encountered throughout the years in which they enjoyed chart success. Paradoxically, the entirety of the music video produced for the song features a seemingly endless stream of young groupies at a Ratt concert. Many within the fanbase of the group posit that this was yet another display of Ratt's infamously ironic sense of humor.^{[citation needed]} Detractors, however, point to the band's decadent history as indicative of the song's hypocritical (and the band's underlyingly misogynistic) nature.^{[citation needed]}

There was certainly a vocal sector of the public that felt cheated and lied to by Stephen Pearcy's lyrics.^{[citation needed]} This would precipitate the band's detachment from its fans, as well as the record buying public's disillusion with glam metal in general.^{[citation needed]} These factors proved vital in the success of the grunge and alternative genres a few years later, as those genres espoused decidedly more low-key and even defeatist worldviews diametric to the flamboyant and self-assured glam metal of the 1980s.^{[citation needed]}

Over the years, the song has featured prominently on the band's set list and was featured in television series Beavis and Butthead in 1995. The song has proven itself to be of continuous cultural relevance as it is still heavily debated over in music and pop-culture circles.^{[citation needed]} It is also cited as a sterling example of how deep-grooved blues and hard rock can coexist harmoniously within the parameters of a song.^{[citation needed]}