Great sports moments in 80’s music videos: Joan Jett and the Blackhearts

At the height of her musical success, lesbian icon Joan Jett wasn’t so much sexy as she was, how should I say this, “aggressively attractive.”  She wasn’t the Indigo Girls type of gay, not by a long shot.  Instead, she was the type of lesbo who looked like she was just itching for an excuse to punch a dude right in the mouth.

This quality was on full display in the video for her band’s cover of Gary Glitter’s “Do You Wanna Touch Me,” which came out in 1982. The director tries to get her to sexy things up by making her fling open her robe for a few shots. But in the very same video, they took her to the beach and put her in boxing gloves:

This was still the infancy of the music video phenomenon, when cheap production values and a mish mash of nonsensical images were par for the course.  By that standard, this video was no different.  One moment, Joan’s on stage with the Blackhearts, the next she’s at Coney Island knocking out Dwight Muhammad Qawi with an uppercut.

Christ, you couldn’t ask for a dykier image than that, I can’t tell if they were catering to that demographic or just totally oblivious to the fact that Joan would never, ever be caught on a tour bus making out with one of the Blackhearts.

The chorus of the song went, “Do you wanna touch?  Do you wanna touch?  Do you wanna touch me there?”  But with Joan belting out those lines in boxing gloves, it should have been, “Honey, you had better touch me right now, or I will wail on your ass, I will make you BLEED.  Touch me right the hell now, bitch!”

So here’s to Joan Jett for providing one of the great sports moments in 80’s music videos.  Damn, how sweet would it have been if she had walked out and just knocked Ellen the F out in this clip?: