Readers of a certain vintage might recall the first time they saw the music video for Salt-N-Pepa's breakthrough song Push It.
I know I do.
I was watching Rage or Video Hits on a Saturday morning, transfixed by the women in bright jackets, long red boots and shiny skintight pants jumping around on stage, singing and rapping and dancing.
These women had attitude.
And they had male back-up dancers.
Other songs charting in Australia at the time were Kylie Minogue's I Should Be So Lucky, Belinda Carlisle's Heaven is a Place on Earth, Billy Ocean's Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car, Angry Anderson's Suddenly, and Icehouse's Electric Blue.
Then there was Salt-N-Pepa.
They blazed a trail for women in the music industry, especially women in rap and hip-hop, breaking down barriers along the way. They also championed female sexuality, spoke truth to power, and empowered marginalised groups with their fearless lyrics on previously taboo subjects.
And they sold more than 15 million records along the way.
Salt-N-Pepa's story began in New York City, where Cheryl "Salt" James, from Brooklyn, and Sandra "Pepa" Denton, born in Jamaica and raised in Queens, met while attending Queensborough Community College. They started making music with producer Hurby "Luv Bug" Azor and were joined by Deidra "Spinderella" Roper, a DJ from Brooklyn.
Salt-N-Pepa's 1986 debut album, Hot, Cool & Vicious, introduced the world to Push It. A Salt with a Deadly Pepa (1988) and Blacks' Magic (1990), which delivered songs Expression, Independent and Let's Talk About Sex, followed.
In 1993, Very Necessary became one of the best-selling rap albums of all time by a female group, featuring timeless hits Shoop, Whatta Man (featuring En Vogue), and None of Your Business.
In 1995 Salt-N-Pepa made Grammy history as the first female rap act to win a Grammy Award for None Of Your Business. They received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021 and earned a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and in 2025 were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame's Musical Influence category.
They had four Top 5 singles here and are touring Australia and New Zealand in December with Boyz II Men and Bell Biv DeVoe for A Day On The Green.
Speaking to Weekender from the US, Pepa says she can't wait to join the other artists on tour.
"We grew up in the streets of New York, you know, and there's this music, hip-hop, hooking up the turntables to the streetlights. That's where Salt and I came from. We come from the era of doing the rhymes with cords," she says.
"It was a time when they always said that hip-hop wouldn't last.
"We loved to listen to Run-DMC. We loved LL Cool J, we loved Roxanne Shanté, Grandmaster Flash, all of that. MC Shan, Marley Marl, Rob Base. You throw that music on and everyone is jumping up and dancing.
"You cannot stop the '80s, the '90s. It was just such a time and an era and we can't let it go. And I'm happy about that because that's how I get to come to Australia [laughs].
"That's what's so beautiful about our music being timeless.
"It's still so relevant, the music, and someone always calls me, they might be in India, and they're like 'Your song is on the radio'. It's amazing.
"And seeing a young girl or, you know, a mother and daughter in the audience. It's a great feeling. It still gets me."
Even with a hit single to their name, Salt-N-Pepa faced resistance in the music industry, and many DJs refused to play their songs on the radio.
"It was, and still is, a male-dominated field," Pepa says.
"Salt-N-Pepa would be charting, getting global attention, but our DJs back home, they wouldn't give it a thumbs up. Or they put on another song that's not charting just because it was by a male.
"It was frustrating after a while, and then I started realising what it was. I didn't know what 'male chauvinist' meant until then.
"I've had one of those DJs apologise to me since, though."
Did the pushback from the music industry make her even more determined?
"Yes! Yes, it did," she replies.
"We were called 'pop' because our songs were popular, so then we were called 'sellouts' for being popular, which meant we weren't invited to all the real hip-hop barbecues, so to say [laughs].
"But we were really blessed because we always headlined tours, and a lot of time, were the only females, so they had to see that we were a force to be reckoned with.
"They give us our props now.
"Experiencing that, it fueled us even more. It didn't deplete us. All we wanted to do was to spread the music and the culture, you know? People have no idea of the battles we had, what we had to endure, to get that hit record. It makes me really proud of the Hall of Fame stuff."
I ask Pepa about the legacy of Let's Talk About Sex, an empowering song written with a "safe sex" message in mind.
"We knew people were going to have something to say, like, 'Sex? Close your ears!' but what we wanted to do was enlighten people, because people wouldn't talk about it," she explains.
"I'm Jamaican, and my parents didn't talk about it. No one was talking about the do's and the don'ts, and disease, and HIV and AIDS. How do you protect yourself?
"So we were just enlightening people through the song until [news journalist] Peter Jennings came to us. He loved the song, but then he was like, 'Hey, can you flip it and talk even more about HIV?' So we rewrote some of the lyrics and he used the song on a show he was doing [Growing Up in the Age of AIDS] because he got it, you know? He understood what we were trying to say.
"It was good. It got people talking. It did its job."
