As determined by you is “Closer,” which handily beat “Pour Some Sugar On Me” 61% to 39%. If you’d like to review its path, here’s the full bracket and here’s the Spotify playlist with all 64 songs. Thank you to everyone who voted.
Any stripper worth her tear-away schoolgirl skirt can stage-dance to “(She’s) Sexy + 17” by the Stray Cats and make a few bucks. It’s not hard: the music is an irresistible anthem to statutory rape. If your audience is full of dudes in Ed Hardy shirts with brand new tattoos (or if you’re working in Portland, Ore., which may be redundant), toss it on and vacuum up the money with my blessings.* It doesn’t matter how old you are, because it’s not about you—it’s about your customers’ fond memories of hot high school girls they wished they’d fucked 20 years ago. Spin to win, Dancing Queen (and if the stage-lighting’s bad, slap a little Dermablend on that C-section scar before you go up).
There are certain hero tracks that nearly any stripper can make money to. You’ve probably got a go-to list of your own. “Closer,” by Nine Inch Nails, “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” by The Revolting Cocks, that annoying singing monks song by Enigma, anything by Portishead or Sade—they work because they work, and if you’re there to make money, those classic tracks are your friends. I’m not here to cast aspersions on “Erotic City” (Prince) or “Fade Into You” (Mazzy Star). I’ve danced to them on many occasions myself. They’re decent moneymakers and most DJs have them at their fingertips in case you’ve shown up to your shift late without your CD. These songs are a stripper’s meat and potatoes.
But sometimes the house just hates you no matter what you’re dancing to. Maybe it’s your look: in a houseful of tiny blondes, you’re a chubby brunette. Or maybe you’re a woman of color, or an older dancer, or heavily tattooed, or maybe you just aren’t good at extinguishing that spark of intelligence in your eyes that’s anathema to customers who need to feel a sense of intellectual superiority in order to get their dicks hard. In any case you’re not what they’re looking for, and they’re determined to punish you for failing to meet their needs as consumers.
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!
Someone hit my car in a parking lot (he left a note), so it’s been in the shop for a week. The dealer’s loaner is lacking, stereo-wise; there’s no SiriusXM and not even an AUX input plug. After three whole days of thinking “broadcast radio is not cutting it,” I realized that even without being able to plug in my iPhone, there was a way to listen to music in this car. On CD. That means that somehow the old, hard-copy method of listening to music in cars did not register for a full 72 hours.
Strip club music plays from a computer now, unless you’re in a little bar with a jukebox or a stereo with an iPod jack (hello, Portland). If the club allows dancers any control over the music, the DJ will either download requests or rip them from iPods/phones/flash drives. So it’s rare now to see a dancer bring CDs to work. Until relatively recently the ones with a particular interest in what they danced to while on stage would regularly haul their CD cases up to the DJ booth every shift, though.
Friday is Valentine’s Day, that special day wherein we celebrate patriarchal norms and reinforce insulting gender stereotypes with rampant consumerism.
So romantic.
Valentine’s Day is one of the those special “off” days that happen every-so-often in the strip club. Working the night of one these off days is never business-as-usual—it’s usually, business-as-oh-my-God-did-that-just-happen. The day of Cupid falls on a Friday this year, and there’s going to be a full moon.
Get ready.