Def Leppard: Charming Ladies Out of Their Pants Since 1983

Listening to Pyromania, and I've made a discovery: I'm pretty sure "Action! Not Words" is about homemade porn, which means one important thing: Def Leppard managed to write a song about doing it for the love of the game and getting it on film and still managed to appear absolutely irresistible to a good portion of the female population. Props to them, I guess, because I'm pretty sure that's something the average male musician couldn't pull off. I was originally going to mark this down as an example of Def Leppard being Dave Matthews before there was a Dave Matthews (with a higher rock quotient, of course), what with the whole "Crash Into Me" thing Matthews pulled in the late 90s, which proved inconclusively that women are far more obsessed with sex than men, but will only reveal this obsession if crooned to properly. Or at least that was my experience at the time - here was a guy singing about some sort of fetish wet dream thing he had going on with a picture of a fashion model, and any girl who didn't already dislike Dave Matthews thought it was the most wonderful thing on the radio.

Anyway, I quickly revised this conclusion. Def Leppard gets the edge on subtlety, treating this difficult topic with the sensitivity it deserve: There's not a single mention of the song's narrator selling the video to his local porn producer after he and the video's "star" break up. That's the kind of treatment that wins hearts and minds, folks.