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Friday, June 02, 2006
DRIVE ME WILD
Vanity 6
Vanity 6
WEA : 1982
[Buy It]
Click here to read Part I of this post....
From: Emily Barton
To: Alex Abramovich
Date: 6/2/2006
Subject: Down on my knees
Dear Alex,
The Bessie Smith version is unbelievable. "I need a little hot dog in my
roll"? And the whole gruff command bit at the end? How sublime and
ridiculous; thanks for attaching it. You're quite right that the emotional
valence of "Nasty Girl" and "Sugar in My Bowl" couldn't be more different;
though I would argue that across Nina Simone's work, whenever she talks
about something "down in my soul" she means her hoo-hoo.
Thanks for the Wolk sections on James Brown, as well; they do shed some
light on the "I'm down on my knees/I'm begging you please/I say please"
bit of "Nasty Girl." Somehow I hadn't managed to connect the "down on my
knees" of begging (whether with histrionic or masochistic intent) with the
"down on my knees" of fellatio, which Vanity's no doubt referencing. (This
would, after all, be one culturally sanctioned way of proving she's a nasty
girl.) In both senses that's a nice tie-in to the Prince as (Weird Genius Ambisexual) Pimp scenario you mention, and to the question of whether this is ultimately a song about power. I think it is, and actually a pretty smart one, in that it doesn't assert either of the easy sides of the argument (i.e., either the gazer or she who holds the gaze being empowered) but ricochets between them, which may be why there's that infinite regression in who's imagining what in the song's set-up. What kind of power is it, after all, to be asked to front a band not because of any intrinsic desire or even talent, but because you look the way you do? A certain kind, to be sure.
I'm thinking about that other Vanity 6 song "Drive Me Wild," - musically it's pretty far inferior to "Nasty Girl," and it was written and performed by Susan Moonsie, not by Vanity herself, but I think its subject is relevant. The song's premise is that the singer compares herself to all manner of spanky-new inanimate objects to prove she can please whoever she's talking to. So for example, one verse runs:Ooh look at me I'm a Cadillac I'm a brand new convertible child
Never been driven baby you're the first
Come on baby drive me wild (I very much like that "child," which you can read either as that Susan is a "brand new convertible child" - a scary notion - or in the "Oooh, CHILD" sense.)
Another verse:Ooh look at me I'm a telephone
Whatever you want just dial
Come on baby please it's so easy
Come on baby drive me wild There's that "please" again, right alongside the ambiguity of at once issuing commands and comparing oneself to a machine. One thing I'm interested in, in all of this, is that these issues are still so live almost a quarter century later; that for all the reams of feminist (and other -ist) criticism the late twentieth century produced, we've got not just a can of worms but an intractably tangled knot of worms on our hands here. And no, first time out we didn't bother to comment on how funky and fucky this song is. That's so much of its appeal- that for all its (semi-) sinister complexity it's also great to dance to. Which is its own breed of complexity.
I have a piece of unconfirmed trivia: Someone recently told me that the inexplicable line "un chien Andalusia" in the Pixies song Debaser (sort of a reference to "Un chien andalou" and sort of not) was originally "strip Apollonia," Apollonia being the gal who replaced Vanity when she bowed out (and the group became Apollonia 6- still referring, we must suppose, to the breast count).
O vanitas vanitatum. What's next?
Yrs
EB
_____________________
From: Alex Abramovich
To: Emily Barton
Date: 6/2/2006
Subject: Our Love Is Rice & Beans
Em, that's a fantastic anecdote, about the Pixies - any sense of how true or verifiable it might be? Because, if the original refrain was "strip Apollonia/oh-ho-ho-ho" - well, that puts "I wanna be/be a debaser!" in a whole new light. Not to mention the bit about "slicin' up eyeballs," which is actually the part of the song that did make sense to me. Incidentally, I spent a long time revisiting the Pixies last year, after (a) Sam Lipsyte got me hooked on Frank Black's solo work and (b) the good folks at Slate asked me to write about the band, in the course of which assignment the most interesting thing I ran across was Black's Oulipian approach to age-old problems of form v. meaning. Here's the relevant passage:On tour, [The Pixies] were known to play their set-list alphabetically, or in reverse chronological order (starting with the encore). In the studio, their lyrics took the shape of anagrams, sonnets, and haikus. For them, meaning was secondary to sound and syntax, and depth was an illusion-what counted was the meticulous construction of surface attributes: not the stock rock explications of what "our love is..." but the sharp enjambment of
Our love
Is rice
And beans.
"Our songs are random," Black Francis told interviewers. "I write songs by singing a whole bunch of syllables to chord progressions and they become words." I bring this up, not because I, too, have been self-googling, or because I think Pixies songs are as obscure as they're cracked up to be - e.g., "I was talking to Preachy Preach/About kissy kiss/He bought me a soda/And tried to molest me in the parking lot" doesn't seem to be too hard to decode - but because I think it's interesting that Pixies often did try foil our expectations of what and how a song could mean. Try as we might to push our way into a song like "Debaser," there's Frank Black, pushing just as hard to keep us out (and thereby, interested).
Which brings us in a roundabout way to "the question of whether [Nasty Girl] is ultimately a song about power." You write: "I think it is, and actually a pretty smart one, in that it doesn't assert either of the easy sides of the argument (i.e., either the gazer or she who holds the gaze being empowered) but ricochets between them, which may be why there's that infinite regression in who's imagining what in the song's set-up." That's beautifully phrased, and just right: Infinite regression, and the ensuing layers of ambiguity - aren't those the very reasons it's taking us two days, and six thousand words, to decode a song that takes five minutes to listen to (that is, if you're able to listen to it just once!)? If you'll allow me one more tangent - is it a coincidence infinite regression, and neurotic self-awareness/reflexivity, are also the concerns of some of the more
interesting writers working today?
"Drive Me Wilds"'s another good song to bring into the mix. (I'm curious: Why are you more willing to ascribe authorship to Moonsie than Matthews?) You'd have to rope in R. Kelly:Girl you remind me of my Jeep/I want to ride you to come up with a better example of woman-as-commodity-fetish. And, like R. Kelly's song, this one strikes me as especially sad. Look, Moonsies is saying. I know you're going to objectify me no matter what I do or say, so I'm going to beat you to the punch and objectify myself. The world this song is describing is a world in which no one really looks into another's eyes, except to catch their own reflection. And what the song has in common with "Nasty Girl" (or, at least, the interpretation of "Nasty Girl" we seem to be working towards) is internalization, bred of an anticipation which may or me not be rooted in some form of something a more religious man might call despair. Still, I wonder: Can it be yet another coincidence that one punishment for the original fall from grace was the burden of self-knowledge?
I'm out of my depth here, but I do want to address a few of your remaining questions. Re: The Knot Of Worms. Emily, it'd take a better man to untangle it for you. But I'm not sure there is a solution. Members of the Frankfurt School (who would probably approve of this exchange), or feminist theorists (who probably wouldn't) have helped us come up with a way of framing the problem we're touching upon - of keeping it in our heads, and feeling our way around and inside it. But the problem itself is a paradox - a Mexican standoff between Vanity, Prince, and the listener - in which (1) The pseudo-literary construct known as Vanity's existence is predicated on our/Prince's perception of her as a nasty girl, but (2) Seeing Denise Matthews as such tends to strip Denise and Vanity both of any authentic, lasting, communicable reasons to be. Well, the collective efforts of Helene Cixous, Jacques Lacan, and the Baffler boys couldn't get you out of that mess. To quote Vanity's mentor, something in the water doesn't compute. And, I have to ask: Is it one, last, coincidence that Denise Matthew's own, initial impulse was to self-destruct?
Re: Role-playing and puppetry. Did you happen to see Megan's comments on yesterday's exchange?:Look how nasty Prince is: so nasty he can create a woman who's so nasty she'll go into feeding frenzy for 7 inches or more. But she can't be totally indiscriminate; that would cast aspersions on Prince. Hence, the longing for someone who can do it "real good." And hence the anxiety about what the guy thinks. What is it that Prince is trying to prove anyway? I think she's on to something here, don't you?
Re: Fellatio. You know, at 33 I don't feel 15 years past my sexual prime. But I have to admit, fellatio didn't even occur to me. Funny, isn't it, that you and I had completely counterintuitive gender-specific reactions. Or, did we?
Re: Nina Simone's "hoo-hoo." Would you mind just saying that again?
Re: Danceability. I referenced the Gang of Four yesterday and, well, their ethos amounted to playing danceable songs in which the undertone was always "Stop! The very thing you're now dancing to is killing you!" A mixed message if ever there was one. But then, there are lots of songs like this - songs which use the form against itself. (The first truly political rap song, How We Gonna Make The Black Nation Rise, by Brother D. with Collective Effort - "While you're partying through the night/The country's moving too to the right" - or even Young Tiger's anti-bebop-"Calypso Be," which you'll find in a post way lower down on this page - both fit the bill.) Which brings to mind an old Ramparts article quoted on this site a few months ago:Rock and roll is not a revolutionary music because it has never gotten beyond the articulation in this paradox [the author's just described rock musicians, and their followers, being "torn between the obvious pleasures America held out and the price paid for them," but a paradox is a paradox is a paradox]. At best it has offered the defiance of withdrawal; its violence never amounted to more than a cry of 'Don't bother me.' Paradox, paradox, wherever you turn. I'd better stop, else my head will explode, but some final thoughts before I do: Has your opinion of the song, and your sense of what it really does mean, changed since you first heard it after that long pause between Freshman year and earlier this month? Do you think it's a sad song? A vile song? I think it is, in some ways, a terrifying song. But I can't, for the life of me, stop listening. So: It's been a pleasure working this stuff through with you, Emily - I'd never have gotten this far myself, and I despite the stuff I said above, I don't think we didn't get anywhere. Sometimes articulating the problem can be its own solution.
As ever,
Alex
__________________
From: Emily Barton
To: Alex Abramovich
Date: 6/2/06
Subject: The pleasures of conversation
Dear Alex,
The source was Amy Benfer, the arts reporter for Metro; I believe she'd been writing a piece about the Pixies and had somehow discovered this. It really
is a wonderful possibility, though, isn't it? I mean, the entire first verse could run:Got me a movie, I want you to know
Slicin' up eyeballs, I want you to know
Girl is so groovy, I want you to know
Don't you about you, but I want to
Strip Apollonia
I want to
Strip Apollonia
I want to
Strip Apollonia
I want to
Strip Apollonia
Wanna grow
Up to be
Be a debaser Which is significantly more upsetting than the verse as it stands. It also, then, ties in to what you said so eloquently about "Drive Me Wild": "The world this song is describing is a world in which no one really looks into another's eyes, except to catch their own reflection. And what the song has in common with "Nasty Girl" (or, at least, the interpretation of "Nasty Girl" we seem to be working towards) is internalization, bred of an anticipation which may or me not be rooted in some form of something a more religious man might call despair." Slicing up eyeballs, indeed. I'm also thinking about how the thoroughly sexualized leather-wearing girlbot ninja assassin character in William Gibson's Neuromancer has polarized lenses embedded in her eye sockets. Her eyes work, behind them, but can never be seen. And I guess that as long as we have Cixous and Lacan in the mix, we might take it all the way back to Bentham, whose Panopticon essentially took as its premise that the very fact of visibility is a form of punishment.
Megan is on to something. Partly I think that what we're all onto, here, is the simple pleasure of turning a very bright light onto something so small it may not ever have been meant to be seen. As you say, five minutes to listen to it, two days and crampy fingers to puzzle it out; and we haven't even arrived at an answer. But, like you, I've found this conversation profitable. (And sometimes, not arriving at an answer is the best place you could end up.) My opinion of the song has changed through discussing it with you; I find it a lot richer and more disturbing than I thought I did, a lot less celebratory. This kind of engagement is, I think, one of the great consolations of late culture: a way of speaking and thinking and being that causes us to reconsider and grow. Unlike current political discourse, which mainly seems to ask us to retrench. (I hope I'm not flying off on a huge tangent to quote from Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address. I stumbled across this passage the other day: "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds." I am frankly undone by the idea that a political leader could be so modest about his understanding of what's right, and so generous in his idea of how to use it.)
To wrap up some small points:
1) It's funny, I'm not actually any more likely to ascribe authorship to Moonsie than to Vanity; I think it equally likely that Prince wrote, or had a hand in, both songs. But that certainly is what I wrote.
2) The odd thing about what I agree with you are our counterintuitive gender responses to the "down on my knees" bit is that it would only stand to reason that straight women would think about fellatio at least somewhere near as often as men do. Or wouldn't it?
3) No, I will not say hoo-hoo again.
Thanks for the making this conversation possible, and for its many pleasures.
As ever,
EmilyLabels: alex, emily barton
posted by Alex
LINK |
Thursday, June 01, 2006
NASTY GIRL
Vanity 6
Vanity 6
WEA : 1982
[Buy It]
* * *
From: Alex Abramovich
To: Emily Barton
Date: 6/1/2006
Subject: Hello, Nasty!
Dear Emily,
A few days ago, I was afraid "Nasty Girl" would buckle under the weight of our critical faculties. Today I'm wondering if I'm up to the existential challenge. I'm glad you're along for the ride.
Let's start with the bare facts: The first of Prince's many side-projects, Vanity 6 was made up of Prince's high school girlfriend, his wardrobe supervisor, and a chiseled nude model named Denise Matthews (no relation to MW's own, chiseled Megan Matthews). It was a concept band, in that Prince envisioned a group dressed in lingerie, performing the lewdest songs imaginable. (Bonus Facts: Prince wanted to name the group "The Hookers," and suggested that Matthews - the "Vanity" in Vanity 6 - go by the stage name "Vagina." According to Wikipedia, "the 6 represented the group's breast count." Nice one, Prince!)
According to the credits, "Nasty Girl" was written by Vanity herself (the music was performed by the Time). But it's likely that Prince played no small role in its composition, and this makes "Nasty Girl" especially odd, because the song's real subject seems to have something to do with imaginative projection: A girl, who calls herself a "mystery girl," who refuses to give her name, who's "living in a fantasy," who's repeatedly asking her prospective lover if he imagines her to be "a nasty girl." Which, this is the kind of question that once it's posed, there's only one way to answer it and you'd better wear a condom.
As if to prove the point, Vanity gets into some rather bizarre specifics (ie, she's "looking for a man who'll do it anywhere/even on my limousine floor" - if I'm remembering No Way Out correctly, isn't "doing it" pretty much what limousine floors are for?) Also, did I mention that Vanity has a thing for sailors? For her, it's as if "water on the brain" is a turn-on. She must have missed fleet week, though, because it's "been a while" since she "had a man who did it real good." And so: "Whip it out/whip it out," and the strange (non)specificity of "7 inches or more," and the weird (non)entendre of "Give me something I can croon to/Catch my drift?"
Emily, this is a weird song.
Weird, too, is Vanity's idea of what a "nasty girl" might be: I don't think she means "nasty" as in "yellow teeth, and a cha-cha that smells like a hot day in Chinatown." But neither does she mean "nasty" in a totally funky get-down-on-the-get-down (preferably on my limousine floor) sort of way - and not just because (I.) whorish Madonnas are sexier than pure-hearted prostitutes, and (II.) the nastiest girls often turn out to be librarians on vacation. In fact, the more I think about the nasty girl under discussion, the safer she comes to seem. There's so much distancing involved - the mask, the mystery girl, Vanity channeling a Prince who's imagining what it's like to be a woman imagining a man imagining her as a nasty girl - that, dirty-minded or not, Vanity might as well be wearing a chastity belt.
I'm looking forward to getting into all of this (not to mention the video) with you. But before signing off, a few more things about Vanity, nee Matthews, who (cue the puritanism) ended up addicted to crack, suffered a stroke, a heart attack, kidney damage, and the (temporary) loss of her sight and hearing, before (I'm reading from her website here) finding Jesus:Prior to finding my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, I lived in a bottomless pit playground of cocaine addiction.... I'd inhaled enough rock that you could light me up, smoke me, and stick me in the nearest cold grave. Sinking down into deep, deep depression, I camouflaged my pain with even more makeup and a fake smile." These days, Vanity appears in public as "The Evangelist Denise Matthews" ("Please don't call her 'Vanity' any more," a fan site advises. "'Vanity' means nothingness, and we wouldn't want to call her that"). But listening again, I'm beginning to wonder if Matthews didn't write the song herself, in anticipation of the song Prince might have written for her. And so, if the camouflaged pain and fake smiles were there from day one.
Vanity, vanity....
aa
__________________
From: Emily Barton
To: Alex Abramovich
Date: 6/1/2006
Subject: Water on the Brain
Dear Alex,
I agree with you there's a lot to puzzle over in this song - beginning, for me, with why as a sixteen-year-old good-girl college freshman, raised on a steady diet of "Free to Be You and Me" [MP3] by my liberal, feminist parents, I should have been obsessed with it. (Maybe I just answered my own question.) When I originally asked you about the song, I assumed I was interested purely for nostalgic reasons; but having listened to it steadily over the past few weeks, I realize it's also a really good song, in spite or perhaps because of its many textual instabilities.
Just for starters, we are in agreement that limousine floors were made for doin' it, but the verse as a whole may be even weirder than you've mentioned:
I'm lookin' for a man to love me
Like I never been loved before
I'm lookin' for a man that'll do it anywhere
Even on a limousine floor If we leave aside the irksome "that," Vanity is, to paraphrase, looking for someone who'll be willing to have sex anywhere - not, as far as I know, a
super-rare characteristic in a man - including the most promising locations. So, um, this is hard to come by?
Or take the next verse:
Guess I'm just used to sailors
I think they got water on the brain
I think they got more water upstairs
Than they got sugar on a candy cane I'm guessing that it's not so much that she has a thing for sailors, as that most of the fellas she's been with have been pretty dumb; so dumb, in fact, that they - well. That's probably the same "sugar" as in Nina Simone's magnificent "I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl," [MP3] i.e., some lovin'; and I don't think we have to stretch our imaginations too far to find an analog for the candy cane. These guys are dumber than they are sexy. "That's right," Vanity goes on,
. . . Been a long time
Since I had a man that did it real good
So if you ain't scared take it out
I'll do it like a real live nasty girl should (Still that blasted "that.") So, okay: she hasn't been satisfied with these meatheads, and if the guy she's propositioning isn't afraid, she'll be happy to show him a thing or two. But why would he be afraid? And is she differentiating a real, live nasty girl from a make-believe one? And why, after all, does she pose her nastiness as a question in the chorus? Why, when she's Vanity, for God's sake, does she need some guy to tell her she's a nasty girl?
I like your reading - that she's Vanity channeling Prince imagining what it'd be like to be a woman imagining a guy imagining her as a nasty girl - but I also want to ask, do you really think she wrote this song? Because if she didn't, then it's more like Prince channeling Vanity imagining Prince imagining what it'd be like to be a woman imagining a guy imagining her as a nasty girl. If we were in college, this is the point at which I'd write, "And so, as you see, the text literally deconstructs itself;" and the point at which our TF would make a little red exclamation point in the margin.
I guess the real question is, why so many layers of remove from the central problem of whether others perceive Vanity as nasty? (Both your readings of "nasty" have some truth in them; there may also be a smidgen of the kind of nastiness high-school girls shoot in their little poison-blow-dart comments to each other. The get-down-on-the-get-down kind of nastiness is, as you say, not in actual fact quite as sexy as the "I may look like a respectable citizen but in fact
I like to get down on the get down" type; and perhaps this is what Vanity recognizes when she asks her man to tell her he thinks she's nasty. E.g., "Although I am built like a warrior goddess and am standing here in a black teddy and gloves, do you think I'm sexy?" It's a paradox, parallel to the conundrum of finding a guy who'll be willing to do the nasty any-old-where.) I agree with you about the camouflaged pain and fake smiles; and I also think that if Vanity really is "nothingness" as Denise the Evangelist suggests, this is not the Zen nothingness of your face before your parents were born but the vanitas vanitatum, a deeply Christian reading of the emptiness of the manifest world.
Also, have we talked about the weird little "Please, please" interlude that seems to have come straight out of an Aretha Franklin number? And have we talked about the Inaya Day dance remix? I kind of like it.
On another note, I'm eager to hear what you have to say about the video. I have a few preliminary notes on it:
1) Is it just because I'm a straight girl that I'm totally unmoved by the gyrating bum sequence?
2) What do you make of the costume change? First they're in slutty dresses and then they're in the aforementioned lingerie (with a tail coat? I guess that was sexy in 1982?), but is anything changed by the change?
3) Alex, look at their hair.
Look forward to hearing back from you tomorrow.
EB
_____________________
From: Alex Abramovich
To: Emily Barton
Date: 6/1/2006
Subject: Sugar, Sugar
Dear Emily,
Have you heard the Bessie Smith's gloriously vulgar recording of "Need Some Sugar In My Bowl"? [MP3] Does that fact that Nina cleaned up the lyrics, four decades down the line, say something about the wax and wane of America's puritanical impulse?
Speaking of same: I think you're right to connect the two songs, but it seems to me that, despite the obvious parallels, they're really quite different: "Sugar" is a sweet and bittersweet song; what Nina "wants" is ""some sugar in my bowl," and "some sweetness down in my soul," and "some steam on my clothes." What Vanity wants is a man who's not too scared to "whip it out" and "do it" on "my limousine floor." Doing without makes Nina feel "so lonely," and "so sad," like someone who hasn't been held or stroked in a long time. Doing without makes Vanity aggressively - well - nasty. (It's worth noting that, working with the same text Nina used, Bessie Smith managed to be far more explicit; is it going too far to say that, for her, "sugar in my bowl" amounts to "ejaculate in my vaginal canal"?) In any case, in lieu of Vanity's nastiness, we have Nina's vulnerability. And in lieu of Vanity's "please," we've got the tension between Nina's carefully-worded "I could stand some loving" and almost- desperate "oh so bad!" The songs have sultriness in common, but Nina's seems to contain more erotic possibilities. Why is that?
My guess is it's because Vanity's relations might just be of power. And here's where things get really interesting: I hedged my bets a bit, in regards to whether or not Prince ghostwrote "Nasty Girl," because I didn't want to assume the obvious: That Prince ghostwrote "Nasty Girl." That he might have done so is interesting - as you say, "Nasty Girl" would then amount to "Prince channeling Vanity imagining Prince imagining what it'd be like to be a woman imagining a guy imagining her as a nasty girl." But given the time Vanity spent in Prince's company (and Prince's bed), it seems possible that she could have anticipated the song he might have written - channeled him channeling her - internalized the hyper-sexual fantasies he was projecting onto her (remember "The Hookers," or Prince's original idea for Vanity's stage name?) - then turned around and asked/begged us to project those same fantasies back onto her. This isn't sex; it's role-playing, and while it might all be benign (it isn't, but let's say that it is), it's still pretty manipulative. In fact, you might say that control, no less than sex, is what "Nasty Girl"'s really all about.
You wrote: "I guess the real question is, why so many layers of remove from the central problem of whether others perceive Vanity as nasty?" Perhaps it's that, for Vanity - a beautiful woman, a nude actress, a singer who performs in lingerie and tail-coat, and no stranger to the male (& let's not forget, female) gaze - so much depends upon "the problem of whether others perceive Vanity as nasty" as to obscure whatever extra-sexual virtues Denise Matthews might possess. So much so, perhaps, that the correct answer to "Do you think I'm a nasty girl?" might just be "No, Denise, and I'm not sure your relationship with Prince is doing you much good, either." Cue: "Free To Be You And Me". (Is it a coincidence that the other Vanity record that comes up on Amazon is a death metal album called Enslaved, or that a few years later, Prince magic-markered the word "Slave" across the side of his own face? Like Malcolm said, in a slightly different context, the chickens - they will roost.)) Also, did we forget to mention how funky and fuckish this song is?
Another song that comes to mind is the great Ike & Tina Turner recording of "I've Been Loving You Too Long," [MP3] in which Ike, who renamed and married Tina, then beat, burned, and tortured her, uses the call-and-response form to evoke the relationship a pimp might have with a prostitute. The song derives its charge, in part, from the same sado-and-just-plain-masochistic impulse that drives The Crystal's "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)" - which song would take us another two days to work through. But cue the camouflaged pain and fake smiles, right?
Regarding "please, please" - in his excellent book-length deconstruction of James Brown's "Live At The Apollo" album, Douglas Wolk points out that Brown's position, vis-a-vis his audience, is essentially prostrate:
"I'll Go Crazy" is the first statement here of [Brown's] great theme: you must not leave him. If he stops commanding your attention, the craziness that makes him yowl and moan will consume everything. Here's Wolk again, on the subject of Brown's knees:James Brown does not, as a matter of routine, perform without begging, repeatedly. Not being one for half measures, he does not beg without falling to his knees. He falls to his knees half a dozen or so times in every show: on soft wooden floors like the Apollo's, on hard concrete stages, on carpet, on stone, on metal, on earth. Four or five shows a day, three hundred days a year, in the early years. A hundred or more shows a year, even now that he's in his seventies. Fifty years in show business. Imagine James Brown falling to his knees for his audience tens of thousands of times, probably hundreds of thousands of times. Imagine the scar tissue, inches thick, on the knees of James Brown.
As you note, Vanity 6 is something of a warrior goddess - could her begging, then, be another clue to what's going on in the song? Aretha's an interesting analogy, but she seems to me to be more of a proud asserter of her own authority. Still, what does it tell us that Billie Holliday, Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner, Nina Simone, and (I'd guess) Vanity seemed to go for guys who badly misused them?
As for the video:
1) I'm afraid the ass-shaking's not doing it for me. But isn't Vanity a striking woman?
2) The tail coat + neglige is a classic, classy look. Is anything changed? Perhaps it's no more complicated than: The song progresses, the girl undresses. But what's cool about this abbreviated, radio-friendly edit, is the way Vanity and/or Prince save the real filth for the end - a far better form of self-censorship than the constant bleeping you hear in today's "clean version" slow-jams.
3) I know, I know. There's not much to this video. But, really, all that's missing from it is Vincent Price.
Ok, we've got a lot of cans open in front of us. What should we do with the worms? And, I absolutely agree - it's vanity in the biblical sense. But then, what isn't?
More tomorrow?Labels: alex, emily barton
posted by Alex
LINK |
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
BITCHES AIN'T SHIT
Dr. Dre feat. Snoop Dogg, Dat Nigga Daz, Kurupt, & Jewell
The Chronic
Death Row : 1992
[Buy It]
BITCHES AIN'T SHIT
Ben Folds
Available on iTunes
Last summer, I encountered the Ben Folds song "Bitches Ain't Shit" while up in Vermont visiting friends, who put the song on the stereo as part of an attempt to soothe their crying baby. (I suspect that the song was never, in either of its incarnations, intended as a lullaby, which has no doubt fueled my fascination with it.) "Bitches Ain't Shit" was originally recorded by Dr. Dre with Snoop Dogg, Dat Nigga Daz, Kurupt and Jewell as a catchy if otherwise standard piece of woman-slandering braggadocio. The appeal of Ben Folds's version is a little trickier to pin down.
When I first heard the song, I was struck by the contrast between Folds's earnest voice and the lyrics he was singing. If comedy is largely about the inversion of expectation, then it's intrinsically funny to hear a white boy from Tennessee sing, "Long as my motherfuckin' pockets was fat/I didn't give a fuck where the bitch was at." The contrast between the tough lyrics and Folds's sweet melody and opening-bars-of-"Scenes-from-an-Italian-Restaurant"-style piano (apologies for the reference; I'm from New Jersey) are also good for a quick laugh. But if Ben Folds's song was all about such comic dissonance - if it was a mere joke at the expense of Compton, Nashville, or both - it would be a one-trick pony, like Steve Martin's only-relevant-in-1978 "King Tut." (Sorry again.)
The fact is, for all the song's humor, there's something touching about it, too. Not a whole lot about the original could warm your heart, but it isn't just Folds's voice that changes the tenor of the piece; his artful tweaking of the lyrics transforms "Bitches Ain't Shit" into something with real emotional resonance. Dr. Dre, for example, repeats the chorus -
Bitches ain't shit but hos and tricks
Lick on these nuts and suck the dick
Gets the fuck out after you're done
And I hops in my ride to make a quick run
- five times; and as with the gross-out jokes in The Aristocrats, after a time your ear grows numb to the vulgarity. In Folds's song, the chorus comes back only once after its original iteration, and then with a full host of backup singers. The lyrics retain their shock value, and instead of merely repeating them, the backup singers lay on the irony with a trowel.
Folds also excises two rambling verses and retains those with discernible storyline. In the central one, the song's subject - "the maniac in black, Mr. Snoop Eastwood" - recounts a relationship with "a bitch named Mandy May" which he understands as purely sexual ("The pussy was the bomb, had a nigga unsprung / I was in love like a motherfucker lickin' the pro tongue"). When he gets out of jail to find Mandy having sex with his cousin Daz, however, the severity of his reaction suggests not so much violated honor as a broken heart. (He grabs his Glock, drives to her house, kicks down the door, and "uncock"s his "shit" - a loaded choice of words if ever I heard one.) The rancor in Folds's tone as he recounts this incident reverberates throughout the song; if the subject has Mandy May in mind when he denigrates her entire sex, I'm saying, you don't have to agree with him to understand his synecdoche.
But perhaps Folds's most interesting decision in reworking "Bitches Ain't Shit" is to repeat the first verse following the original chorus:
I used to know a bitch named Eric Wright
We used to roll around and fuck the hos at night
Tighter than a motherfuckin' gansta beat
And we was ballin' on the motherfuckin' Compton streets
In part, this verse is interesting because it raises the question of why Wright (a.k.a. Eazy E) should be a bitch, since in the context of the song the term usually refers to a woman. (At one point the subject vilifies a former girlfriend and her new white boyfriend by saying, "She was hangin' with a white bitch, doin' the shit she do / Suckin' on his dick just to get a buck or two;" displacing the "bitch" from the woman to the man shows his disdain for both.) Eazy E's feud with Dr. Dre was well known, but by the time of E's death from AIDS in 1995, they had made peace with each other.
In Fold's retelling, the song begins to sound like an elegy: I suspect that Wright is a bitch for dying, and that the subject is haunted by his memory. Why else would the verse recur, sung with such feeling, in Folds's song?
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Emily Barton is the author of Brookland and The Testament of Yves Gundron. In her childhood, she spent many an uplifting afternoon with her father listening to Alan Lomax's recordings of chain gang songs. Her favorite word is "Schadenfreude."Labels: emily barton, writer's week
posted by Alex
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