E minor · Camelot 9A · 99 BPM
Do You Really Want to Hurt Me
by Culture Club
- 99
- BPM
- E minor
- Key
- 9A
- Camelot
- 75
- Danceability
- 9
- Acousticness
Within days of its release in 1982, David Hamilton on BBC Radio 2 picked "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me" as his record of the week, an early sign that Culture Club had a hit on their hands. The band were asked to appear on Top of the Pops only the night before the show, after Shakin' Stevens pulled out. Their performance sent the single climbing rapidly up the UK chart, and Boy George's androgynous style of dress and sexual ambiguity made newspaper headlines. The song spent three weeks at number one in Britain from October 1982 and became the fifth best-selling single of the year there, moving 882,440 copies.
Written and performed by the London band, the ballad appeared on their platinum-selling debut album Kissing to Be Clever and was their third European single, though their first release in the United States and Canada. It followed two Virgin Records singles, "White Boy" and "I'm Afraid of Me", which had charted at numbers 114 and 100 in the UK. Producer Steve Levine later said the band and Virgin both felt strongly that they had a great track.
The single reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100 for three weeks in March and April 1983, topped the Cash Box chart, and hit number one in Canada and Australia. Boy George said in 2007 that the song was about all the men he dated at the time, not only drummer Jon Moss.
Do You Really Want to Hurt Me runs at 99 BPM, the tempo of hip-hop, R&B and reggaeton. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.42 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 606 ms. It is in E minor, Camelot 9A, which shares its notes with G major and mixes cleanly with A minor and B minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.