Who's That Girl?

The guitars arrive first — choppy, angular, almost confrontational — before the synths spread underneath like a cold fog rolling in. Eurythmics build a sound that is simultaneously danceable and unsettling, the rhythm section locking into a groove while Annie Lennox's vocal tears the roof off every assumption you brought into the room. She does not sing this song so much as interrogate it, her voice moving between a smoky purr and something approaching a controlled howl, always hovering at the edge of emotion without spilling over into sentimentality. The lyrical premise is deceptively simple — a question about identity, about who gets to define femininity, about the performance of self — but Lennox delivers it with such layered ambiguity that the question keeps turning over long after the song ends. Is she admiring? Suspicious? Jealous? All three simultaneously? This ambiguity is the point. The mid-1980s produced few artists willing to make pop music that was this genuinely unsettling in its gender politics, and Eurythmics navigated that territory with more precision than almost anyone. Play this at the beginning of a night when you're not yet sure what kind of night it will be.