This was originally performed by The Young Rascals in 1966, and was written by group members Felix Cavaliere and Eddie Brigati. It's a kiss-off song to a girl that did him wrong, and it worked well for Benatar with the gender reversed.
Imagine it's 1981 and you're trying to figure out what videos to show when MTV launches on August 1. The first one is obvious: Video Killed The Radio Star. But after that, what have you got? Lots of Rod Stewart and some obscure European stuff like Haircut 100 are available, but American acts weren't making videos yet because there was nowhere to show them. You could go with Devo, who made some slick videos because they thought they could sell them on Laser Disc, but showing a guy whipping the clothes off his wife 5 minutes after you sign on might not be a good idea. Ah! Pat Benatar. An up-and-coming American who can really sing and is fun to look at. She's on the charts with "Fire And Ice," and she made a real video for "You Better Run," which was her first single from Crimes Of Passion. Sure, it's a year old, but a lot of people know the song and we need to get a guitar solo on the air soon. Be it said that Pat Benatar will be the first woman, the first American, and the first rocker on MTV. In a 2012 Songfacts interview with Benatar's guitarist/producer/husband Neil Giraldo, he explained, "I didn't think it would revolutionize the music industry, so to speak. First of all, I couldn't imagine a TV channel that was going to be with no commercials for 24 hours. And the other thing, I didn't realize that they were going to play those five videos over and over again for 24 hours. So if you do that for five days and you've got all those people looking at it, it went from somebody maybe knowing what you look like to where you couldn't walk the street anymore, because everybody around is going to be, 'Holy, cripe, I just saw you on MTV.' So it's like, how did that happen so fast?"
Benatar recorded this song for the 1980 movie Roadie, which starred Meat Loaf and featured appearances by Roy Orbison and Blondie.
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