Credit: Salt N Pepa / Universal Music

Thanks, in large part, to their classic hit ‘Push It’, Salt-N-Pepa are pop cultural icons. That song is a true era-defining classic, but the New York group also released some other smashes in their time, none more impressive than the track ‘Shoop’.

Lifted from their fourth album, 1993’s Very Necessary, ‘Shoop’, in many ways, is a track that sums up what made Salt-N-Pepa so exciting in their day. Upbeat and funky, witty and sexy, the song is a flirtatious number that seeks to playfully invert the male gaze that the group perceived to be so prevalent within hip-hop and pop music more generally at the time. 

Reflecting on the classic track in a video for Vevo, group members Sandi ‘Pepa’ Denton and Cheryl ‘Salt’ James explained that the specific inspiration for the song was something that had actually happened in Pepa’s life. She’d seen someone she liked, and, rather than hiding away from that fact, she did something about it.

“The concept for ‘Shoop’,” Pepa said, “started with me chillin’ in Queens, riding around in the car and I’m telling the story of how ‘I saw a brother, I had to kick it to, I’m not shy so I asked for the digits and that does not make me a hoe.’ This story became the song and the inspiration for the first verse.”

Salt elaborated on the deeper drive of the track. “The objective was to turn the tables on men—make them the objects,” she said. “When writing my verses, I was thinking of tongue-in-cheek ways to objectify men. When you really like a song, it’s easy to record.”

Salt-N-Pepa also spoke about ‘Shoop’ in a conversation with Interview, with Salt noting how the song was released shortly after each member had become a parent. “When we came out with our song, ‘Shoop’, which was the first song we released after we all had kids, we were all a little overweight,” she noted. “We’re still not model size. You know, we look like real women. And in that song, we were talking about our sexuality and how we like men. That was different for us, and I think that’s when people started looking at us differently.”

Salt acknowledged that the group was sometimes subject to criticism because of the ways in which they expressed their sexuality in their art, but she maintained that they knew what they were doing.

“I feel like as long as you’re letting the world know that you’re intelligent and you’re to be respected and you have a mind of your own and you’re taking care of business,” she said, “ain’t nothing wrong with showing off what you got, especially when you work out almost every day to get it. Of course, you have to show it with taste and with class. It’s about having an attitude of your own.”

‘Shoop’ became one of Salt-N-Pepa’s biggest ever songs, and it remains popular to this day. It even received a little boost when it featured in Deadpool in 2016, with a whole new generation of listeners suddenly turning towards the long-lasting group.