It Aint A Strip Club If You Aint Showing Stage Presence

For my 21st birthday my wife’s gift to me was a trip to an Atlanta strip club (RIP Folly’s). Boy did we have a time that night! Made more fun by being in the club with all of my wife’s girlfriends who proceeded to make friends with all of the strippers. This has been Jam’s modus operandi ever since, go to the strip club and become friends with the women while throwing money (s/o to our girl Skittlez). I say all this to say that my relationship to the strip club has always been one of fun and not nearly as sexual as the environment would connote. It is because of this I wondered what the time working in strip clubs had given to the biggest names in hip-hop and R&B.

SZA, Summer Walker, Cardi B, and Kash Doll (Back On Dexter is one of my favorite projects of 2023 so far) all started their careers in the strip club. These women all had their own reasons for going into sex work, but the pipeline from strip club to artist becomes more clear when you mention their names together. On the hip hop side, it has been clear that strippers have served a pseudo-A&R role for several of the biggest songs coming out of Atlanta. There are plenty of stories from Jermaine Dupri to Gucci Mane discussing how they would take their records to the strip club to see how crowds reacted to them. It is only natural that these women would then create the art themselves, not merely give it their stamp of approval. However, I wonder if the strip club services another role for musical development. I wonder if the strip club serves as a conservatory for performance art to an underrepresented population.

Black people have always been forced to seek untraditional paths to artist development. The Black church for generations has not only served a spiritual purpose, but also a very practical role in supporting the arts. Whether it be the singers at choir rehearsal or the band shedding, the Black church is itself a conservatory for Black music. Many of the best singers and musicians to walk this earth have come out of the Black church, because it served as a training ground. I pitch to you that the strip club may be the same thing for performance art.  Any body who has taken a pole class can tell you that there is a massive amount of skill in the art form, but not only skill is required. The line of work itself demands stage presence. The ability to turn that “it factor” on when you hit a stage is not inherent to most, but rather cultivated through performance. I’ve been to enough strip clubs to have seen the most attractive girl outperformed by an OG (once again, s/o to our girl Skittlez). The ability comes from experience and learning. An education that most musical artists do not get until they are on their rise. I argue that starting in the club merely extended the learning period and possibly makes a more learned, experienced and better performer.

However, you could retort that the reason that strippers are prevalent in hip-hop and R&B is simply that sex sells and these women have learned how to sell sex efficiently, not a higher performance IQ. I think the undergirding argument of this is an argument that feminism has been having since the fourth wave. Can the female form be commodified outside of patriarchy or does a capitalist system run on patriarchy always win? In other words, does a woman’s sexual liberation and empowerment service her or does it service the patriarchy by further condoning actions which men ultimately also enjoy the benefits of. For instance, is WAP a fourth wave feminist anthem empowering women to take back their sexuality or is the song and video merely another tool for men to ogle at the female form and profess power over.  I don’t have an answer there, but what I can say is that even if sex sells, finding a way to sell it in a way where you become a household name is one helluva skill. A skill likely honed by Cardi B’s time in the strip club.

There are also rappers who talk about their time in the club in a non-sexual way, similar to how many men talk about their time in the streets. Armani Ceasar, the first lady of Griselda and a true lyricist, often paints the strip club in this way. Not as the place for men to fulfill fantasies, but rather a hustle. A trap house where you either make it out or you don’t.  Her ability to flip the concept of the strip club back on the men who created the  environment and use it as a hustle to propel herself is not only commendable, but a story that people need to hear (Summer Walker’s Set Up paints a similar story of the club as a way out). I say this to say that the emphasis on relating the women in the club to sex is in itself viewing it through a patriarchal tinged lens. Instead maybe we should listen to the women who not only survived, but used their time in the club to learn how to make it out. When we take the sexual component out of the strip club what you get is performance art. A learned skill which is integral to the next level after cultivating it in the club. Propelling these now international stars from a small stage to the biggest imaginable.