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.
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.
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!
Starting a new club is never easy. You have to contend with the management, the staff, and a whole new crowd of customers. It takes a while, but eventually you adapt to the new atmosphere. So long as you make it through the initiation—the unspoken way a tight group of strippers sometimes try to break the new girl in. Try to not to take it personally. Use the music you dance to as a passive-aggressive tool to protect yourself—and impress everyone in the process. Here’s how I do it.
Once I feel comfortable at my new club, I’ll begin requesting changes to my setlists. The retaliation begins when dancers giggle and request a couple of my freshly incorporated tracks into their stage sets during our shift together, as if it will get a rise out of me the way it riles them up, seeing stacks thrown at another dancer “ruining their song.” You know, “Pussy Liquor.” Their song.
When this situation occurs, I wait for my eyes to return to their proper position post-roll and gather songs from these dancers’ elementary school days, ensuring that they either don’t know them, or would never think to request them because it’s much too difficult to pout at yourself in the mirror as they’re played. The following list contains songs that aren’t necessarily obscure—but if the club DJ still used vinyl or CDs, these tracks’ albums would be the ones covered in dust.
Yesterday, we opened voting in the Hip Hop/R&B and Dance/Pop brackets to begin selecting The Greatest Strip Club Song Of All Time. Today, voting opens in the Rock and Classics brackets. You can vote in all four until midnight (PST) Sunday. Here’s the full bracket, and here’s a Spotify playlist with (nearly) all the songs.
The Rock bracket is stocked with songs that have held on to constant play for years. Rammstein, White Zombie, Marilyn Manson, Pantera, Danzig. I’m unclear on who decided that “Pepper” and “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” were perfect for the strip club, but both still get regular play. It was, and I’m laughing as I’m typing this, difficult to decide on which Nickelback song to include, but after some dressing room conversations with coworkers, it’s clear that “Shakin’ Hands” is the standout.