Separation (Due To) Anxiety?
At some point in the mid-Aughts, maybe ’06 or so, there circulated among the blogs I read a graphic representation of the interconnectedness of the various topical galaxies in the blogging universe (it looked like this, though I cannot find the exact chart). With nodes representing individual blogs, their size and brightness reflecting their popularity (as measured by the number of incoming links), and colorful lines representing links, it was easy to see just how deeply intertwined the political, sports, pets, music, cooking, sewing, etc. segments of the blogosphere were.
There was, however, one large collection of nodes and lines that was almost completely separated from all of the others: the adult blogosphere. It was clear that, while adult blogs were really, really popular, cat and macramé bloggers who had no qualms about linking to political rants or baseball game recaps weren’t at all interested in linking to adult-themed sites. While food and sex, or sports and sex, or just about everything and sex, may be closely connected in our lives, we like to keep them completely separate in our blogs. Even as our worlds were becoming more and more connected, we were keeping that one world wholly separate.
I thought of this graphic, and its implications, yesterday when I stumbled upon Shea Serrano’s Grantland piece, “The Most Important Hip-Hop Song of 2004.” Serrano considers four songs, the first three of which I’ll drop in here:
“Roses” – Outkast (NSFW: “Shit” features heavily, and it ends with some not very nice words about the song’s subject.)
“Drop it Like it’s Hot” – Snoop Dogg feat. Pharrel (NSFW: N-word, drugs, and stuff, along with some rather suggestive dancing.)
“Jesus Walks” – Kanye West (Do I need to say it? OK, NSFW. N-word and some other words your parents/boss/random people at the coffee shop may not want to hear.)
Two of these are great (“Roses” and “Jesus Walks”) and the third is really good (“Drop It Like It’s Hot,” which will now be stuck in my head for days), but he chooses the fourth, Mike Jones’ “Still Tippin’”, featuring Slim Thug and Paul Wall. I haven’t embedded “Still Tippin’” for two reasons: (1) it’s awful and (2) it’s over-the-top sexist even for hip hop. Why does he choose it, then? Because it launched Houston to hip hop prominence, which I suppose does make it a pretty important song, even if it doesn’t represent Houston very well (this is the town that produces Scarface, damn it!).
Why would any of that remind me of a decade-old social networking graph? It wouldn’t! But after I made it through his reasoning for choosing “Still Tippin’,” I got to Serrano’s telling of Mike Jones’ origin story and long-quiet neural connections fired up:
This is what Mike Jones did to jump-start his career, and it’s really very smart and a fun thing to think about: At the beginning of his career — this was back around 2000 — nobody in rap would pay attention to Jones. And nor should they have. Mike Jones is a talented marketer, and he is an opportunistic businessman, but he is not that great of a rapper. And being not that great of a rapper is not a very good thing if you want to be a famous rapper.4 So he went to who people in rap would pay attention to: strippers.
He started visiting the most popular strip clubs in Houston. He introduced himself to the dancers, talked to them about music, and then he started making personalized rap songs for them to dance to onstage. He’d put a girl’s name in the song, describe her a little bit, talk her up. First it was one girl. He did it for free just to start. Then two girls. Then five girls. He started charging them for the songs. Demand grew and grew. Ten girls. Twenty girls. Eventually, all the girls in a particular club were dancing to his music. Then two clubs. Then five. He inundated the airspace with his adenoidal, unmistakable voice. What’s more, on those songs (and in the songs that came afterward) he’d repeat his name over and over again, put his phone number in them, on T-shirts, on posters, on everything.5 He seemed to exist only to promote his brand, and that’s one way a not very good rapper becomes the most visible rapper in his city, then state, then country. He made himself unavoidable. So people stopped avoiding him.
My first thoughts upon reading this were, “Damn, that’s genius,” and “Why the hell didn’t anyone think of that before?!” I mean, even if it doesn’t make you famous, selling customized songs — rap, rock, EDM, whatever — to dancers seems like a great way to make money as a musician, and as Jones shows, it’s a pretty good way to get exposure as well (pun definitely intended). That’s when I remembered that chart. Sure, music and sex may be deeply intertwined — in fact, much of our music is about sex — but where the latex meets the road, we like to keep our sex and our music separate. We may even play music during sex, but we’re not too keen on merging their respective markets. We’re so reticent, in fact, that as far as I can tell at least, artists rarely mix the two to the extent that Jones did, even though he did so to great success.
It seems like that this is precisely the sort of innovation that markets should produce over and over again, doesn’t it? But they don’t. Why? Perhaps there’s already an economic term for this phenomenon. Maybe prudish inefficiencies? Puritanical externalities? Market genophobia? Surely there are dissertations on why we prefer our sex completely separate from everything else, except when we’re actually having it? I know that there are barriers, most notably that the inclusion of sex in many things is legally proscribed. However, Jones showed that you can take the non-sex market and put it in the sex market and reap rewards in both realms. That seems like a no-brainer then, doesn’t it?
Also, picking a Mike Jones song for the most important hip hop song of 2004 is just wrong. I’m sorry, I get why he chose it, but I can’t help it! That song is just awful; he’s awful. “Roses,” man. “Jesus Walks”! Those are classics, two of the top 10 or 15 hip hop songs of that decade. Come on!
Image: “14-23000-Sparky-MassiveGalaxyFormation-20140827” by NASA, Z. Levay, G. Bacon (STScI). Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
I love Shea for precisely this reason, for what it’s worth…Report
For choosing Jones even though his wasn’t even close to the best song, or closer to the best than the worst song, of that year? Or for the strip club story? Because I can see both.Report
Because, much like I tend to, he looks beyond just the art and at the context. Does Mike Jones suck? Yea. And Shea admits as much. But he gets why Mike Jones was “important” and why his work that year couldn’t be ignored.
Sort of like why I put stuff I might not like or which are objectively bad on my old Mount Rushmores. Just because they are bad doesn’t mean they are not important. He’s simply using a different definition of “best”.
I think he sums it up here:
“The best song of 2004 was Kanye West’s “Jesus Walks,” a song so perfectly constructed I have to assume it is, and will remain forever, the high point of Jesus’s rap career. But it gets nixed, too, because while it was/is/will remain truly magnificent, it (mostly) didn’t accomplish anything broader than its own success.”
“Jesus Walks” was great. But “Still Tippin'” mattered. At least according to Shea.Report
Also, Shea does things like this:
http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/the-if-i-play-this-rb-singers-music-will-he-help-me-have-sex-chart/
And writes things like this:
“Every time I get mad at someone under 25 years old for anything, I have to stop and take a step back and remember that I grew up with Ginuwine and this person grew up with Trey Songz. What a tragedy.”
And it allows me to post one of my favorite clips ever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LW9Z0fiL46c
His reaction later in that episode when she responds to his “Minimum acceptable thread count level for sheets” question with “I just sleep on cotton t-shirt sheets” destroys me every time.Report
That chart has Prince and Chris Brown literally off the charts, in opposite directions. That seems about right.
I thought this was a funny line from the Mike Jones piece: “T-Pain, a large top hat with an R&B singer underneath it”. But I’ve kind of had a beef with comically-oversized hats on pop stars since the ’90’s.Report
Haha… last March, we went to a SXSW show that had as their last act of the night a “surprise guest.” Rumors were flying: It’s Kanye! It’s Kendrick! It’s Beyonce! There was a really long delay between the penultimate show and the “surprise guest,” and people were getting really hyped, convinced that someone huge was coming. Then music started, not particularly recognizable, and out came T-Pain. You could hear a groan make its way through the crowd.
People got excited once the show really got going, because it’s a free show with free booze, so who cares who’s playing ultimately, right? But I thought it was hilarious that people actually groaned.
Coincidentally, the next day we were walking down 6th Street when we ran into T-Pain. I had my picture taken with him. He seemed very nice. He wasn’t wearing a hat.Report
A R&B singer? No. Simply an auto-tune machine.Report
The thing is, he actually can sing fine. He used autotune because he liked the effect, which kind of screwed up his reputation, so he’s thought of as being someone who absolutely needed it.
(NSFW words, maybe):
https://youtu.be/CIjXUg1s5gcReport
It’s just funnier to think of him as the final evolution of the T-1000. Remove the hat and, with it, his skin covering revealing mankind’s greatest threat. I mean, even his moniker supports the theory!Report
Yeah, I get it. I just can’t hear that damn song (lord knows I heard it enough in 2004 to last me a lifetime).
Relatedly, I think one of the biggest influences on hip hop in the last 15 years was Hurricane Katrina. Within weeks of Katrina, I started hearing New Orleans hip hop and seeing New Orleans line dancing in Austin (ah, New Orleans line dancing), and within a year or so I started hearing that New Orleans style hip hop (which is not dissimilar from the Houston style, unsurprisingly given their proximity) that’s still big today (Li’l Wayne!) on the radio and everywhere else.
In other words, spreading an entire city around the country spread its culture really really fast, and this had a big impact in the hip hop world.
Am I saying that Jones is as bad as a devastating hurricane? No. I’m just saying that I can see including something not necessarily good (or in Katrina’s case, absolutely terrible) as impactful and therefore important and worth mentioning.
Still, Jones sucks.
Also, as the inclusion of the Snoop song indicates, he understands really catchy songs can actually be good.Report
It took me a while to get on board with the Snoop song. In a way, it’s catchiness… the way it burrowed through your ear into your brain… seemed to work against it. “If it’s this catchy, it can’t be good… can it?” But it was!
Yea, Jones sucks.
When Wale hit it big a few years back, I remember remarking to a friend who is an unabashed Mike Jones fan that Wale was setting records for using his own name in his songs. He then reminded me that Mike Jones existed and I stood corrected.
You comparing Mike Jones to Hurricane Katrina and concluding that the former — at least in terms of its impact on hip hop — was far more devastating might be the best thing this site produces that never gets seen by 99% of our people here. Bravo, sir.
Lil’Wayne!Report
Pharrel, sometimes for good (“Frontin'”!), sometimes for ill (“Blurred Lines”), is the master of the earworm.Report
Related:
I meant to email you about this but since it is, as I note above, related, I’ll post it here.
I was in a bar the other night packed with young, wealthy, white 20-somethings. Three songs came on that I could hear and recognize. They were by Nas, Kendrick Lamar, and Juvenile. Guess which one got the biggest response? Hint: It was Juvenile. And the song was probably older than half the people in the bar. And yet…Report
It is strange there isn’t more promiscuous cross-marketing. Motorhead did bring out their own vibrator recently and I can think of a few bands that contributed songs to porno films, but that’s about it.Report
First, yes, it is very strange to me.
Second, I hope everyone else uses sex-related puns in their comments.Report
I’m just glad it’s not inappropriate to insert them into this conversation!Report
Many years ago Jaybird and I decided that if we won the lottery we would move to Alaska and start a combination strip club / radio station. I’m not quite sure why we decided that. Inebriation may have been a factor, though I think it also stemmed out of a conversation about how both strippers and radio DJs didn’t have enough autonomy and their bosses ought to let them make the decisions. (As for why we were having that conversation in the first place, well, I think that’s where the inebriation comes in.)
I don’t think we have the energy to even contemplate such a venture these days.
But it still strikes me as a deeply underexploited niche.Report
“The dancing gets really weird during the free jazz hour.”
I’d invest.Report
I wonder from time to time about business models for different kinds of businesses. The strip club provides a business model that has some very distinctive features — the proliferation of so much cash, and the intentionally dim lighting making it difficult to track and follow it, seems to require, simultaneously, a very high level of trust in the people handling the cash, and a very high degree of managerial control over it. Combine that with the fact that the dancers typically pay the club for the opportunity to dance and then split the take with the club afterwards, and it looks to me like there’s a whole lot of opportunity and incentive for them to cheat on the rake, or cheat to subvert the people who track the rake. My preliminary conclusion is that the owner pretty much has to be there personally to track it all, but that doesn’t square up with the existence of club chains (e.g., Spearmint Rhino), because the owner can only be in one club on any given night. Does the Rhino just have exceptionally strong trust relationships with its managers?Report
I’ll bet that all the cash goes directly into a cage. And given the attire (or, rather, the lack thereof) of those handling the cash, there appear to be limited opportunities to divert the cash elsewhere.
casinos, after all, also work on a model of minimum wage workers handling large amounts of currency and they seem to make it work ok.Report
Hmm… there are plenty of opportunities, but the clubs make much of their money on the cover charges and drink minimums, which, while they both take place in relative dark, aren’t that different from the way a lot of regular shot bars and dance clubs, along with pretty much every comedy club, makes money. Plus the dancers are making enough money (it’s definitely not minimum wage) that they have an incentive not to lose the job by getting caught stealing.
I imagine plenty of them have their purses searched before they leave after a shift, though.Report
I think there is a fair deal of tax-dodging in any cash based businesses. Cash only dinners/restaurants are another example. There is a gas station near me that is cash only. The benefit to the consumer is that their gas seems to be priced thirty cents less than the nearby competition.
I also recall hearing a lot about exploitation at the clubs (surprise surprise) and that the least exploitive ones tend to be employee-owned coops/collectives. The paradox here is that those clubs are also the ones that tend to fold the quickest because they turn stripping into some kind of performance art with a neo-burlesque and alt.flavor that strip club attendees don’t seem to want.Report
When I worked as a waiter at Cracker Barrel, my coworkers told me I was a total chump for honestly reporting my income. Tax evasion is absolutely endemic in the restaurant industry.Report
My son works as a waiter, and they report tips as follows:
Sum up the total bill for the tables waited by the waiter. Calculate 15% of that. Decide that’s the tip for the shift. Pay taxes on that 15% plus the base waiter salary (that 2 bucks an hour).
Honestly, it’s pretty simple and I suspect it averages out fairly accurately. There’s always big tippers, but then there’s always teenagers.
He gets a lot of paychecks for 0 dollars though (they take the tax out of the 2 bucks an hour salary).Report
Some thoughts.
Rock and its various genres still believe in authenticity and often try to avoid the blatant marketing of hip-hop. Indie rock often seems to associate authenticity with a kind of shabby chic. You sing about used book stores, coffee houses, etc. You don’t sing about strippers. Usually. Belle and Sebastian have some mentions to sex work. But in a very different way than hip-hop
Do you know that Onion article about Autumn Man? I think a lot of indie pop wants to be the non-satirical version of that article. The desired result is whimsy and sincerity.
In NYC and SF, I see guys out on the street all the time trying to sell their rap albums. I don’t see indie rockers doing the same. Are the rap guys ever discovered from this? Do indie musicians find it distasteful?
TEal deer, I think indie rock has a complicated relationship with bombast, capitalism, and marketing. hip-hop does not. I suppose an indie rocker could write songs for used bookstores and coffee shops but those places have less money than strip clubs.Report
And yet, we constantly hear indie rock in commercials. It’s gotten to the point that when I hear one of those songs on the radio I start doing the voice over in my head “When you’ve found a bank that fits your life, you just know…”Report
Indeed. A piece of my soul died when I heard “How Soon Is Now” used to sell the Nissan Maxima.Report
How about an Iggy Pop song about doing drugs used to sell cruises. Or Johny Lydon doing his abrasive “i’m so punk” act to sell some other crap.Report
To be fair to Lydon, he turned right around and used that butter money to restart PIL. And to be fair to Pop et al, depending on the contracts and deals made when they were young, they may have very little say or control in how their music is used now.Report
Never been a Lydon fan myself; to heavy on the image and act. But i can see how people with lesser taste than myself could dig him. ( insert self-aware faux smug slyly winking emoji here).
I don’t begrudge Pop his money. He was very lucky to survive being himself so he can use a little jingle in his jeans to get some body fat and be comfy. Doesn’t make the song any less odd for a cruise line commercial though.Report
See, I don’t understand how this makes sense, That song is about alienation and depression with lyrics like “I am human and need to be loved, just like everyone else does” also but going to clubs on your own, leaving on your own, crying and dying.
Is it kind of anti-marketing? Do most people just not pay attention to the lyrics? Same with Lust for Life, that ode to Heroin, being used for cruises.Report
The one I actually liked quite a bit and have never been able to find on Youtube was a Miller Genuine Draft ad that was quite nice aesthetically and used The Cramps’ song New Kind of Kick, which is about doing every drug imaginable.Report
I think Golden Shower of Hits by The Circle Jerks would make a better beer commercial but maybe that is just me.Report
That one at least makes thematic sense and a beer company tries to market rebel images. Cruises tended to be about squeaky clean family fun from what I’ve seen.Report
Cruises are not just family fun. It depends on the line and the route. Some cruises are serious party boats. There are tons of short cruises out places like LA or Fla that are all young people trying to be drunk enough not to remember the cruise at all. There are usually older perma drunks on longer cruises.Report
The cruise ads that are mentioned above are certainly all about family fun if I am recalling them correctly.Report
Well they dont’ make many ads about 50 year olds getting drunk and trying to have sex on the railing of the ship. Or 20 year old peeps for that matter, but it happens.Report
But aren’t they just trying to tap into the target demo’s pop culture world? They don’t want young people to think cruises are full of drugs. They want 50-year-olds who associate that song with their fun-filled youth to hear it and think, “FUN!” and then see images of swans made out of towels and think, “FUN!” and then they go buy tickets.Report
I don’t watch too much TV but I remember being floored a bit when a pet food company used “I think I need a new heart” by the Magnetic Fields. They didn’t use the lyrics because the lyrics are about a breakup but they did use the music and it is pretty recognizable.Report
How much of this may be a function of the economic class the artists populating the different genres tend to come from?Report
Good question. Probably the overwhelming majority of it.Report
Tori Amos sang about strippers.Report
Kinda sorta related, Beats Antique is both a world fusion / bass music group and a tribal fusion belly dancer, each of their pieces being fairly inseparably both the music and the dance.
Unlike Mike Jones (apparently – I’m not familiar with his music), they are very good indeed – both the musicianship and dancing skill, and the compositions and choreography.
e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6apdulliTZYReport
We saw them live last month.Report
Meant to add that they were quite fun.
I suppose there’s a difference between sexiness and sex. People in the adult world would definitely see Beats Antique as part of the “vanilla” world (the adult name for the non-adult world), but they’re definitely utilizing sexiness, as does a lot of music. Perhaps the distinction might be labeled sexiness vs. sex.Report
This reminds me of one of those weird “I just don’t get it” things (or maybe – and related to this post – it’s easily-explicable, once you accept that all cultures try to keep a bright boundary between “sex/not-sex”, that doesn’t always make a lot of objective sense) .
I’ve seen commentary from women from ethnic backgrounds where belly-dancing is an indigenous artform, expressing dismay at the way many Westerners see/utilize it; essentially saying that bellydancing is not really meant to be sexual (or sexy, whatever that distinction may be?)
But – and maybe I’m just a dumb guy, or conditioned by my own culture – I fail to see how a form of dance and its dress that is specifically designed around emphasizing certain muscle groups (and strategically-placing jangly/shiny things on hips/bellies, the better to draw attention to their nimble and vigorous movement) could NOT be sex/sexualized (particularly since said cultures often tend to otherwise encourage women to cover up and be more demure – bellydancing seems to me like the “sexy Halloween costume” of the ME, a more-or-less socially-acceptable way for women to openly get a little risque).
I feel like it doesn’t take Dr. Freud to see what certain styles of dancing are really “about” (“Twerking is an ancient and venerable mode of artistic expression, with no sexual component!”) – and to be clear, I don’t CARE that that’s what they are “about”, and I appreciate the effort and ability that goes into it – expressing eroticism artistically, is no less valid than expressing human state [X] artistically.
But DENYING that’s what it’s (at least partly) about seems…disingenuous.Report
Hmm.. Yeah, I dated a woman long ago who taught belly dancing classes, which she saw as teaching exercise basically. She swore up and down that it wasn’t sexual, but I’m pretty sure I know what every person in the room was thinking when they saw her belly dancing.Report
Right. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I understand that something can stick around long enough so it has become a tradition that is somewhat divorced from its origins in practitioners’ minds (like Easter and ancient fertility rites); but the links here seem pretty…direct and obvious.Report
Is this the “appropriation” schtick, or something else?Report
Well, the appropriation complaint is often mixed in there too, but I wasn’t addressing that so much as this strange (to me) idea that bellydancing isn’t meant to be sexual or arousing to observers, that that is a misunderstanding of what it’s about.
Again, I could just be conditioned in a certain way, but it seems to me that it’s pretty expressly-designed to be sexually-suggestive.Report
This goes along with my pet theory that social partner dancing declined in the West because of the Sexual Revolution. Partner dancing was the only way unmarried couples could engage in any sort of romantic or sexual touching for centuries. Once pre-marital sex or at least making out become more socially acceptable and common, the need for partner dancing declined fast and only survived in communities that couldn’t be affectionate in public, LGBT people, or in pre-Sexual Revolution places like Hispanic communities.
I can understand why Middle Easterners would complain about belly dancing being overly sexual even if they come across as protesting too much. The overt sexuality of belly dancing in the West as a tendency to make the Middle East into an overly exotic place for Western fantasy. I’m not in complete agreement with Edward Said on most issues but you don’t need to fully buy into anti-colonial thought to realize why this would be aggravating to people from the Middle East.Report
I suspect that this comes from a wide variance of what the phase “sexual/sexualized” means to various people. One one level, all dancing is sexual. But I believe if you told someone who was a professional ballerina that what she was really doing was going onstage and acting all sexual, especially in those tight outfits, that she would reject that, and likely believe you had no idea what the hell you were talking about.
I suspect belly dancing is the same way.
And now I am remembering reading once that when it was first a thang, waltzing was considered scandalous and was even banned in some quarters because it was so overtly sexual. Now it’s what we teach our kids in elementary school (when we do bother to teach kids dance).Report
Sure, “on one level” all dancing is sexual.
But clearly, some styles of dancing are several levels closer to sex than others.
And belly-dancing (again, especially given that the costumes for it are significantly more revealing than other modes of traditional feminine dress in those cultures) seems closer than most, to this clueless male Westerner.Report
Oh, cool! I have not seen them, but I’ve seen other groups’ tribal fusion pieces to their music.
Other examples placed a little differently along a presumed sex / sexiness axis – Big John Bates and the Voodoo Dolls (rockabilly and burlesque), and the Dirty Gramophones (swing-hop and burlesque).
Modern burlesque is a funny one to me – it’s pretty centrally about the American late 19th Century striptease part, with the other periods and parts of the various variety show mostly downplayed. And yet it gets stripping at least halfway past the respectability filter, so the bands above, and probably others like them, can be booked for an all-ages festival, with perhaps some eyebrow raising but not a lot of shock-horror
There may be similar things going on now with non-respectable-ized striptease that I don’t know about – because it seems it would be harder to turn that into mainstream / vanilla success, or at least to carry it with you into mainstream success.Report
Oh, I guess I dropped this in editing the above – presumably, when 19th C American burlesque was current rather than retro, every such club and theatre with burlesque shows had a house band, or at least a piano player. The house musicians’ ongoing professional success was inevitably based in part on how good they were at music for stripping to.Report
Probably a pretty steady gig, too.Report
what. i love this essay (not as much as the grantland r+b laid-ness chart) but this part is not loveable.
let’s start with:
1) you need a large population of strip club regulars and enough critical mass for dilettantes and infrequent flyers
1a) this population must also be people who are likely to also be into your music, or at least accept it.
1b) the artist must be connected to this world enough to understand what makes for both good and bad stripping songs
2) you need a style of music that lends itself aesthetically to strip clubbing, that speaks to the strippiness of it all.
3) you need something worth dancing to and appropriate for being danced at.
3a) can’t be too fast, and probably not too slow either.
4) it requires a world where everyone can’t immediately stream everything whenever they feel like it. that world was beginning in 2004 but was not there yet. it is no longer here.
5) becoming the brian eno of jigglies isn’t necessarily a gateway to musical success sans jigglies. it worked in this context, but i’m thinking it was a one trick pony because of the difficulties of lining up all the prerequisites. the minecraft music guy isn’t opening for skrillex, after all. wrong product for that kind of platform.
6) ultimately this was just another way of getting the right demo in the right hands.
6a) e.g. if you’re watain, you make sure to have severed goat heads at every show. same diff.
so in my view the question should be more “why did lightning strike here?” rather than “why aren’t more bands making music for pornos?”Report
All of this is true, and you’re probably right that this is less generalizable than I initially thought. However, the 80s and 90s were filled with rock that was played in strip clubs, and bands that wanted to create rock that would some day be played in strip clubs (even if that’s not how they thought about it, but I suppose that’s sort of the point), so I think it could have struck multiple times before. And of course, everyone and his sister has a hip hop mixtape. But yeah, it’s probably not something most musicians could do, at least not in strip clubs psecifically. Iron & Wine just ain’t gonna work at Deja Vu.Report
Possibly relevant, K-Tel’s Difficult-to-Strip-to HitsReport
If you’ve never been, get thee to the (NSFW) source of that ‘shop, liartownusa. Absolutely hilarious.Report
This is somewhat tangential, but since sex, and Prince, and contracts/control and marketing all came up in comments, P4k had a pretty interesting piece.
Report
That is really interesting. Clearly, Prince was a visionary, though if the music career hadn’t worked out, he probably could have been the first NBA player under 5′ tall:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGqUwr9j8ZcReport
The funniest bit in the whole piece has to be this:
Why, yes…now that you mention it, “the effect” is indeed pretty much what the picture is!Report
Hehe… I imagine that for many people at that time, Prince made very little sense, even in an industry that had just gone through its disco phase.Report
So, there was once a musician with a very dirty mind…
He asked himself if there was a way of creating music to make a girl feel good.
Now it’s a whole genre.
But drugs have created far more designer brands of music than sex ever will. Because drugs alter ones ability to perceive…Report
It was Mike Jones who introduced me to Big Moe.
Rest in Peace, Big Moe. I’m sorry you never released a gospel album.Report