Naked Music Monday

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Stripper Music Monday: Kate Hate

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.

Naked Music Monday: Prince

Prince centerfold calendar spread from Creem Magazine
Prince was a centerfold; scan from Creem Magazine, June 1985

A game I like to play with my stripper friends sometimes is one where we pick our desert island strip club musicians: If you could only have five artists to dance to, ever, in the club, who would they be? The one artist that’s on everyone’s list is Prince.

There is no other catalog of music that has a broader application for strippers. Working in a club that banned hip-hop? Working in a hip hop club but feel like you can’t pull it off? DJ who doesn’t understand your requests? “Only top 40” rule? Old crowd? Young crowd? Prince has it covered like no other. And like Josephine said to me the other day, “Literally the worst pole dancer cannot screw up ‘Darling Nikki.'” When I was a baby stripper, dancing to Prince was how I learned to dance sexy on stage. “What would Prince do?” I thought, and then I humped the floor, and made more stage tips.

Escort Music Monday: Ambient Incall Songs

As we’ve learned from the titillating weekly edition of “Stripper Music Monday,” music plays a big part in setting a vibe which endears clients/customers to us and encourages them to open their pockets. As an escort, it’s important to me to have an ambient yet modern soundtrack to the experience at hand, and I get positive feedback on my playlist quite often, that which I play in the background during my appointments. When the music is good, the mood is more likely to be good, thereby putting clients more at ease. I also find that when a client recognizes even one song, he feels safer (though at the same time, diggin’ on music he’s never heard before can be intellectually stimulating). So recently I had a music buff client ask me to send him the contents of my playlist (cuz it’s that good), and I was inspired to share it here with you all as well, since I know I’m always on the hunt for new additions to my repertoire.  

Dominatrix Music Monday: HTRK

Nothing says sexy and evil like the Australian electro/rock trio HTRK (pronounced “hate rock”). Their second album, Work (Work work), came out last September and has become one of my favorite sex work soundtracks. Their record label, Ghostly, describes their sound like “a comedown, a bad trip, a hip romance.” I’d add to that “the cool restrained thrill of watching your trick’s back cover in welt marks while a stack of cash looks on patiently from the bedside table.”

Naked Music Monday: Mastodon, “The Motherload”

The ladies I performed with in the new Mastodon video, “The Motherload,” were not all strippers, but I don’t think that matters much to the 800,000-plus viewers that watched the video in the first week. Though those of us who were strippers initially sat in cliques—the girls who knew each other from the same club or girls who had danced with each other in the past—we still exchanged pleasant glances. When the director came in and told us we’d be having a twerk dance battle with dancers we didn’t know, there was a momentary gasp.

This could get ugly.