Friday, December 5, 2008

Things Are Really Getting Better: #1

One cardinal rule of strip club music: Any song about strippers or strip clubs, no matter how crass, unrealistic or goofy, gets played over and over. So does any song with "strip" in the name, so Faith No More's "Stripsearch", despite being, as far as I can tell from the video, about a counterfeiter getting stopped at a border checkpoint, is on the list of songs I first heard in a titty bar, as is Depeche Mode's "Stripped" and the Rammstein cover of same. (Though since that one's actually about getting naked and back to the wilderness, it's fairly suitable.)

I digress. Anyway, "Shake That". Eminem & Nate Dogg. I've heard it to death -- it's a song about, basically, a fantasy of a stripper who'll totally give it up to the guys in the club. Or at least to Eminem and Nate Dogg.

The lyrics are pretty misogynistic, mostly in an over-the-top way: they're "lookin for a girl I can fuck in my Hummer truck / Apple bottom jeans and a big ol slut", and are talking about slipping her E - which is not a date-rape drug, but srsly, guys, don't drug anyone without their permission, that's just not cool.

And yet, in the middle of all this, it becomes clear that something's shifting, because part of their fantasy of this extremely fuckable girl is that she

"Knows that she can but she won't say no."

I like that. It tells me that, for every one step back, we really DO get our two steps forward.

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