And because it is my custom to present myself to managers as relentlessly, foolishly cheerful at club auditions, I told the DJ that I liked to dance to everything with a shrug and a grin, aware that the manager was still within earshot. An audition generally consists of two songs: the first with the dress on and the second with the dress half off. Even when it is just an audition, management does not like to interrupt the otherwise ongoing show, and so auditioners are called to the stage by their performer names as if they already work at the club. “Lane, can I get Lane to the main stage?” he overinflected into his microphone. I dutifully climbed the three steps on the side of the stage and helped down the girl who had just finished, as is customary if she is clearly struggling with the height of her shoes and the cash haphazardly tucked into her G-string and you’re not a total fucking bitch. I held the pole in preparation.
I recognized the first few chords immediately and swayed briefly to the familiar guitar curlicue, but I was certain the song had been played by accident and would be corrected immediately. Guitar strings buzzing gave way to a synthetic arpeggio, however, and it became clear that the DJ had every intention of playing this song. A voice emerged from the stale air to say, “Welcome to your life / There’s no turning back,” as if reciting from my own punitive internal monologue. The song was “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears, an anthemic pop song that has occupied countless minds for hours on end with its catchiness and inspired approximately zero erections with its massive dearth of sexual references.
“Help me make the most of freedom and of pleasure / Nothing ever lasts forever / Everybody wants to rule the world.” I heard the lyrics with a pitiless clarity and took notice of musical elements that I had never been in the custom of detecting. “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” contains not one but two guitar solos, for example. And while there are plenty of guitar solos that one can strip to, Tears for Fears is not responsible for any of them.
The song ultimately doesn’t work because it is sung in the first person; there is no romantic or sexual object to inhabit. There is only the dreaded occupation of inhabiting the song’s first-person narrative coming to terms with the destructiveness of war. But I am reasonably seasoned at these auditions at this point and get the job anyway. And so I start again the process of embodying the narratives of other imaginary women with whom I cross paths on the club sound track.
Some songs are famously about individuals. “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel is about Rosanna Arquette’s eyes. “You Oughta Know” by Alanis Morissette is about Dave Coulier’s apparent predilection for oral sex in theaters, among other things. “Heart-Shaped Box” by Nirvana is about Courtney Love’s… you know. I have never heard any of these songs in a strip club. What I have heard far more often are songs directed at an unidentified “you” or about an unidentified “her” and subsequently let the predominantly male voices singing them inform how I might make use of their words for my own financial benefit.
A famously popular strip club song is “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails, sometimes delicately referred to as the “I wanna fuck you like an animal” song. The song is rotten to the core, but its lyrical simplicity makes it a favorite. I often wonder to whom it was directed. What incredible creature prompted such debased carnal desires in Trent Reznor? Who simultaneously made him desire animal coitus but also reportedly brought him “closer to God”? On more than one occasion onstage and on the strip club floor, I was that person, responding to the song as if it were being sung to me. I danced in a way that was aloof but accessible, that demanded customer effort in a way some men loved and others profoundly despised. Other times I was Reznor, not quite singing along but signaling enough desire with my eyes that the man whose lap I sat in would upgrade to a private room, where we were mercifully spared such graphic lyrics, as “Closer” was over. I hated dancing to this song in the club because I loved it in my personal life. I hated sharing feigned animal desire even for a few minutes. A song that had felt like mine became about so many men and about me and about every person in the club. It lost the particular smell of the Lower East Side apartment where it was true; it ended without the pleased sigh of one man’s particular climax as he hit the pillow in 2008. I made thousands of dollars dancing as if I were the woman at the center of that song, but I lost a lot to it, too.
One of the best songs specifically about stripping is by Chris Brown, though admitting as much is heresy in my current social circle. The now infamous episode in which he assaulted Rihanna and left contusions on her face remains an open wound to many women. I suspect this is often the case for people who have witnessed only the physical of domestic violence in that particular event. I detest Brown’s violence and his apparent refusal to accept the consequences, but only as much as I detest plenty of powerful, famous men whose violence was not as well documented in a public spectacle.
When I first heard a song by Chris Brown while working, it was after 3 a.m., and I and the woman on the second stage exchanged exasperated sighs that we were continuing the charade that men in New York City strip clubs give half a shit about our pole-dancing skills. I saw Brown’s name appear on the TV screens that hang in the corners of the club and momentarily imagined the two of us refusing to dance in solidarity against him. But rebellion is the luxury of the paid, and neither of us were especially well paid that night.
In “Strip,” Brown’s voice is beautiful and his demands are simple. “Girl I just wanna see you strip right now ’cause it’s late,” he sings. He is the perfect customer. He does not want to know why you work at the club, when you get off, if he can see you later. He does not tell you that he never spends time in “places like this,” nor does he suggest that you leave such places entirely without offering some alternative but equally lucrative position to you. He just wants to see you strip. The customer with this demand is the great relief in a job plagued by men who demand so much more than what your title describes. They ask so often that you strip off more than your clothes, but also the character you’re playing. They ask that you answer their questions and that you love them for no reason other than the fascinating beat of their own unremarkable hearts.