"Meeting in the Ladies Room" Klymaxx (1985)

This song will improve your vocabulary!

Peak: #4 on the R&B chart; #59 on the Hot 100
Streams: 6.9 million

If there were anything like justice in this cold, dark world, then we’d be all be quoting “Meeting in the Ladies Room” the way we quote Bob Dylan.

In the spoken word intro to Klymaxx’s song of rebuke, we learn that our lead singer is frustrated. She’s had to leave her condo and come all the way down to the club for… something. (We’ll get to that.) She’s brought her man with her, but now there are women trying to grind up on him like they have a chance. She says, “I’d hate to come down to their level and become a BW, a basic woman, but if they don’t stop, it’s gonna get scandalous.”

The term “BW” is poetry, yet it’s also practical. It helps to call BWs by their name.

Now… about this thing our singer has to deal with. I’m not sure what it is! Yes, she’s got a meeting in the ladies room, but what’s on the meeting’s agenda?

Like… are they talking about how everyone needs to stay away from her man? If so, then why did she bring him to the club? We learn from context clues that she didn’t have him with her before, when the original problem began, so what was happening the first time around? Were the BWs talking about her man when he wasn’t there? And if so, why did she go home, get him, bring him back, and then watch various ladies touch his fancy sweater?

I suspect there’s something else on her mind, and the way these BWs flirt is just a secondary irritant.

Meanwhile, once she gets to the ladies room, our heroine notices people smoking pot (or “funny cigarettes”), and when she asks someone to hurry up and pass her a mirror, she’s either using it to fix her make-up or snort a line of coke. But this isn’t the meeting, is it? Can’t we assume she had drugs back home in her cozy condo? The drugs in this ladies room are like the plate of bagels they have at meetings in your office. They’re a nice distraction, but they’re not the meeting itself.

Whatever its purpose, I don’t think the meeting goes well. At the end of the song, our singer keeps saying, “Don’t slap me, ‘cause I’m not in the mood.”

I feel one of two things is happening: Either the people at the meeting turned against her with violence, or she’s at the club on slapping night. However we interpret this, we should certainly be saying, “Don’t slap me, ‘cause I’m not in the mood” to every BW that we see.

And look… it really doesn’t matter what the meeting is about. What matters is that Klymaxx makes it sound so funky. An all-female R&B band, they are incredibly cool. They have swagger. They have attitude. They have excellent guitar licks, and they can sing the house down. Frankly, we don’t need to know what our protagonist is meeting about, what she’s mad about, and when she might be in the mood for a nice slap to the face. All we need to do is dance.

I want to note: Despite having fewer than 10 million streams — which is the threshold for a song to be considered “lost” around here — “Meeting in the Ladies Room” clearly has fans. Check out this incredible SNL parody of both the music video and the song. This video slaps, and I am definitely in the mood for it.