Of Strippers & Rappers

STRIPPERS AND rappers keep a curious symbiosis. In this "Rack City"-"No Hands" era, it is especially evident that rappers are great fans of strippers. Where the boast was once True pimp n****s spend no dough on the booty, it is now a point of pride to spend racks upon racks on the booty. One throws hunnids.


But despite their proud fandom, rappers--in thoughtful moods--view strippers with naive paternalism. Lil Wayne, as fanatical a stripper fan as there can be, and a critical thinker by his own estimation and mine, demonstrated this all too well in last year's "How To Love" video. The soft song was an admirable risk, and the video a well-made split narrative following two potential paths of a mother and daughter. Mother makes healthy choices and daughter becomes a smiling graduate. Mother makes poor choices and daughter becomes: a stripper.


The video is a variant on the tragic stripper fable. Due to hard life circumstances a decent woman must "resort" to stripping to feed herself or her children. She may be good, but her work is bad, and must corrupt and corrode her. In the "How To Love" video, bad daughter lets a skeezy white longhair take her home on what appears to be her first night dancing. He leaves money on the dresser and gives her HIV. I wonder how the accomplished pole dancers who work on Weezy's tour feel about this insultingly simplistic portrayal.


ALAS, THE SAME ATTITUDE underpinned Method Man's riveting 2005 documentary The Strip Game. Mef seems sincere in his mission to understand strippers, to humanize them. He and his film crew interview dozens of dancers from New York to LA. (He rainmakes on a few.) Their descriptions of their work run the same gamut most occupational interviews would: cynicism, enjoyment, burnout, professional detachment, amusement at the customer's expense, gratitude for having found lucrative self-employment. Some find the job titillating at times; others never.


Method Man sums up what he learned thusly:

I wanted to go up inside the clubs because I always felt like it was like this certain culture that nobody ever really on the outside can understand... The reason why the girls even feel like they gotta resort to the option a taking their clothes off for money...Picture a woman that gotta struggle with three kids by herself...she resorts to maybe going to the strip club, checking it out, and wants to take off her clothes for money because this is all she has left to do right here...So who are you to judge what anybody does to make their money.

This is meant to be sympathetic. Heroizing even. But it paints the women as infantilized victims with only the merest speck of agency in their lives. The language of "resorting" didn't come from the interviews. It was what Mef expected to hear, so it was what he heard. He couldn't humanize his subjects enough to imagine that they might value or enjoy their work, though he values and enjoys it.


Weezy and Mef and many of their ilk do respect strippers. (Many don't, of course.) But they can only officially articulate the "I respect that she's a hustler doin what she gotta do" interpretation. It would appear impossible to respect them for their talents as strippers. Controversial entertainers themselves, you'd think rappers would get it.


Indeed, many people who like rap--but can't quite accept that they do--employ similar mental gymnastics. Unable to reconcile enjoyment with disapproval, such types often end up listening to hip hop but belittling its makers.


I hope those shamefaced fans do buy the albums silly rappers make. And I hope the rappers keep tossing hunnids on those poor strippers. Let the dollar speak truth where the mind cannot.

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