Mardin had also worked on. Asked about the change in musical direction Gartside admitted, "if you'd played me 'Wood Beez' six years ago I think I'd have spat at it or something. But I like change." He described the song as "very complicated, it's the whole question of what pop is; its relationship to language, power and politics. It's also a question of music's transgression and abuse of some of the rules of language. Aretha was singing what are arguably inane pop songs and had left her gospel roots. But she sang them with a fervour, a passion, though I hate to use that word because it's been hideously tarred in recent usage. To a committed materialist whose interest had come round to language again – perhaps because of a bankruptcy in Marxism to deal with ideology or any artistic community – hearing her was as near to a hymn or a prayer as I could get. Obviously I couldn't make that point in a three minute pop song." After releasing "Absolute" and "Hypnotize" as the follow-up singles, there was a gap of six months before "The Word Girl" was released as the fourth single, just ahead of the album. "The Word Girl" was the biggest hit single from the album in the UK and harked back to Scritti Politti's 1981 single "The 'Sweetest Girl'" in its reggae-based rhythm and its attempt to deconstruct the use of the word 'girl' in everyday language and in pop songs. Gartside told Sounds, "I was taking stock of all the lyrics of the songs for the new album and, lo and behold, in every song there was – this girl, or that girl. It seemed a good idea to show awareness of the device being used, to take it out of neutral and show it didn't connote or denote certain things. It was important to admit a consciousness of the materiality of referring to 'girls' in songs." The single's B-side "Flesh and Blood" (which also appeared as one of the four bonus tracks on the cassette and CD versions of Cupid & Psyche 85) was the same musical backing of "The Word Girl" but with a new lyric written and sung by militant south London reggae MC Ranking Ann (real name Ann Swinton). Green explained that the idea was to present the alternative female view of the male construct of 'girl': "Having heard