How Ronnie Spector and 'Be My Baby' became a pop-culture sound of sex in 1987
Twice in the same year, the song "Be My Baby" — featuring the voice of Ronnie Spector, who died this week — became the sound that signaled something memorably, indelibly sexy.
Dunk, da-dunk, chh. Dunk, da-dunk, chh. NANANANANANA...
It was August 1987, and a potential moral panic over suggestive gyrating proved unnecessary when Dirty Dancing turned out to be a coming-of-age romance where the dancing was not, in fact, all that dirty. It was, however, about a young single woman having sex she enjoyed (and did not come to regret) with a man who was powerfully hot. As such, while it's not a dirty movie, it is a pretty sexy movie — particularly if you were 16 when it came out. Which, as it happens, I was.
It started with a credits sequence in which images of people dancing ... well,
