Playing all or any of these songs has resulted in at least one customer per set asking me which 80s band was responsible. “Need You Now” in particular always makes me imagine some sort of John Hughes movie montage. Play these and confuse your 40-to-50-year-old customers!
Zappa says that talking about music is like dancing about architecture. What few people realize is that normally I AM dancing about architecture, so I’m going to give the talking about music thing a shot.
Hi. My name is Lydia, and I’m from the Midwest. I’ve been honing my music folder in the same club for eight years and a few weeks. By the end of my first night my manager had nixed all instrumental music from my auditory arsenal forever (goodbye Amon Tobin). By the end of the first week I’d learned the hard way that Iggy’s “I Wanna Be Your Dog” was out too. In fact, anything produced and recorded in a manner that didn’t take up enough sound space was out (I still love you, Violent Femmes). Bass. Drums. In my manager’s words: stuff guys recognize, stuff they can sing along to. I spent some time fighting that, a lot of time dancing to “#1 Crush,” and a lot of time being completely fucking confused about how to bring my idea of music for a perfect strip club and the perfect music for my strip club together in a happy marriage of loving-the-one-you’re-with.
One of the great perks of stripping is the opportunity to make your own playlists for the stage. And soliciting others’ opinions on what they think strippers should dance to is a great icebreaker. But some of my Twitter friends have balked at my requests, claiming ignorance of what makes a good stripper set (clue: a good stripper). For them I present these examples of great setlists I was given by four people who hadn’t met me in person. They all instinctively followed these guidelines: maintain genre consistency, don’t pick songs that are too slow, too fast, or have weird time signatures, and think about your stripper.
Normally Stripper Music Monday is about music strippers dance to, but today’s features music by actual strippers from a stripper’s point of view. When a lady has her stacks and bought studio time, it’s natural that she’ll sing about what she knows. Here are some of the results.
Philly is a weird place to work, especially my club. We get a huge range of customers—blue collar workers, frat dudes, white collar dudes on their way home from work. Old dudes, young dudes. Dudes of every color. So the girls have to keep up with the general population of the customers when it comes to playing music. We have a lot of freedom when it comes to picking our songs, but every so often the DJ will veto us if he thinks the music is inappropriate for the crowd (He once vetoed “Monster” by Kanye West because of the Rick Ross verse where he says “fat motherfucker” then the n-word drops a million times). I have a pretty eclectic playlist, but I will take you through a typical weeknight shift for me.