Carmen McRae / Great Women Of Song: Carmen McRae / 1995
Whatever Lola Wants
sly, commanding, teasingly menacing
Video: Carmen McRae - Topic on YouTube
A theatrical seduction number sung from the perspective of a woman who treats conquest as an inevitability rather than a possibility. Carmen McRae takes a Broadway showstopper written for a cartoonish temptress and turns it into a study in vocal control, using her famously dry, behind-the-beat phrasing to make the song's bravado sound almost amused rather than desperate.
seduction as power inevitability and fate female agency and control performance of desire persuasion versus coercion
Who's speaking
The narrator is Lola herself, addressing a male target directly in second person; she is entirely self-assured and the song never allows him a voice, making her an unreliable narrator only in the sense that her total confidence may be performance rather than fact.
What happens
The song opens with a flat declaration of a rule — Lola always gets what she wants — before narrowing to this specific target. It moves through stages of a seduction staged almost like a boxing match: first the warning to accept defeat, then the command to physically disarm (removing a coat), then outright taunting of his resistance, ending in a repeated, almost hypnotic command to surrender. There's no plot development beyond this escalating pressure; the 'story' is the tightening of a single rhetorical vice.
How it's built
Built on a simple verse-refrain structure with the title phrase functioning as both hook and thesis, restated at the top of each section. The song's repetition is its argument: the title line and the closing demand are stated, varied slightly, and restated, mimicking the relentlessness the lyric describes. The ending abandons narrative content entirely, collapsing into a bare repeated command, a structural enactment of overpowering.
Section by section
Opening declaration
“Lola wants you”
The song begins not with seduction but with a verdict already rendered. By stating desire as settled fact rather than invitation, the character establishes a worldview where attraction is simply something that happens to people, not something negotiated.
First verse
The command to accept the situation without protest frames resistance as pointless from the outset. McRae's phrasing here tends to linger behind the beat, giving the line a lazy, cat-with-a-mouse quality rather than urgency.
Pre-chorus boast
The speaker explicitly names her aim as emotional and total possession, not simple romance, raising the stakes from flirtation to conquest.
Taunting bridge
“you can't win”
Here the metaphor shifts openly into a contest or fight, reinforcing that this is less courtship than domination, with victory as the explicit goal.
Closing repetition
The dissolution of the lyric into a single repeated command strips away all pretense of dialogue. The target's voice, already absent, is now fully erased by sheer insistence, and the song ends on pressure rather than resolution.
Craft
- epithet/aphorism
- The title phrase functions like a proverb, stated flatly as an unbreakable law of nature rather than a personal preference, which gives the character's confidence an almost mythic, inarguable quality.
- direct address
- The constant second-person commands collapse distance between singer and listener, making the audience complicit in the position of the target being persuaded.
- imperative mood
- Nearly every line is a command — recline, give in, make up your mind — which removes the addressee's agency from the grammar of the song itself before any seduction even occurs.
- repetition/incantation
- The closing string of 'give in' drained of any other lyric content works almost like a chant or spell, dramatizing surrender through sheer repetitive pressure rather than persuasion.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as camp — an exaggerated, theatrical performance of female dominance originally built for comic effect within its stage context, and McRae leans into that irony with cool, almost deadpan delivery rather than melodrama. An alternative reading takes the lyric more seriously as an uncomfortable celebration of coercive seduction, since the addressee's consent is never actually granted, only assumed and demanded; this tension is likely intentional, since the humor of the original depends on the audience recognizing the absurdity of such total confidence.
Context
The song originates from the 1955 musical 'Damn Yankees,' where it's sung by the devil's temptress character Lola to seduce the protagonist; it was popularized in multiple arrangements and has long been a jazz and cabaret standard. McRae's version, recorded decades later as part of a tribute collection to great female vocalists, reframes a show tune written for a specific theatrical villainess into a vehicle for her trademark ironic, conversational jazz phrasing.
Listen for
- How McRae stretches or delays phrases just behind the beat to create a knowing, unhurried menace
- The shift in tone between the declarative opening lines and the more playful taunts later on
- The way repeated words like the closing demand are used almost rhythmically, more as groove than lyric
- Any vocal inflection suggesting irony or self-amusement rather than earnest pleading
- The contrast between the song's theatrical origins and McRae's cooler, more restrained jazz interpretation
About Carmen McRae
Carmen Mercedes McRae was an American jazz singer. She is considered one of the most influential jazz vocalists of the 20th century and is remembered for her behind-the-beat phrasing and ironic interpretation of lyrics.
1920 - 1994 / United States
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