first round
(16) Sohodolls, “Stripper”
stopped
(1) Rihanna, “Don't Stop the Music”
183-161
and will play on in the second round
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/5/24.
dance party on a bike: Erin Langner on rihanna’s “Don’t Stop the Music”
To stop the music is to arrest a body in motion. When I think back to 2007, the year Rihanna’s “Don’t Stop the Music” filled the airwaves, I land on the moment my music stopped: the day I opened my university email account, to find a message from my father, telling me he was getting a divorce. The separation was from his second wife; my mother had died years before from cancer. As I read his note, the snag of my breath in chest surprised me; she wasn’t my mother, after all. They started dating when I was in high school and got married after I’d moved many states away, for college. By the time I received the email I was in graduate school, fully adult, with my own partnership to oversee. Yet, my eyes glazed over the words, pausing on the ones that might answer the question filling my mind—why? A question of every kid in every divorce story I’d watched and read growing up. A question I felt too old to be asking but that nonetheless brought everything to a standstill.
“Don’t Stop the Music” tells the familiar dance music story of a night at a club. The scene: a narrator who goes out, not looking for love or a hook-up; her only desire is to dance. The conflict: the incredible aura and naughty moves of an unexpected “candidate.” In short, someone who stops the music for her—stops her internal narrative, of a night on the town for herself. Hands and chests and faces get involved, suspending her in that perspiring, pulsating grind of bodies caught between the jewel tone shadows, drinking in the collective euphoria of the room as they push themselves to the brink.
My club in 2007 was the spin bike. There, I pounded out my heartbeats while riding “uphill,” though there was no hill, merely a red knob the size of my fist that I cranked when I was told. Like a good club-goer, my legs were beholden to the beat. I prided the self I saw behind the thick condensation stuck to the mirrors: there she was, using her ten years of ballet classes to ensure her hips swayed steadily as a metronome, in time with the music. 1-2-1-2. Don’t stop. Don’t stop. This was not SoulCycle; there was no blacklight or disco ball. The brash overhead fluorescents exposed our reddened, sweat-drenched selves as we tightened the magnets to the sides of our silver flywheels. Our legs throbbed, our breaths quickened, our bodies became almost unbearable, the tension between our legs building excruciatingly, as we rode in place, throttling the resistance, pushing forward with all of our might.
I’d been resistant to taking Rihanna’s music seriously at the time. Reviews I read called her the harbinger of music’s future: emotionless. Slick. Unapologetically autotuned. The story of the writer-producers behind “Don’t Stop the Music” known as Stargate (Tor E. Hermansen and Mikkel S. Eriksen) reinforced my reticence. To date, the duo has produced over twenty Billboard top 10 songs, though their catalogue extends well beyond their very top hits. They work in collaboration with “top line” writers, who penned lyrics and hooks to lay over Stargate’s instrumental backing tracks that they make using Pro Tools music software. The resulting songs lack enough distinction that they can suit musicians ranging as widely as Beyonce, S Club 7, Coldplay, and Katy Perry. The more I read about Stargate, the more it sounded like they were making assembly line music—something less than the music I loved. Which made me wonder: isn’t artistic creation more than layering assortment of beats and words?
It’s obvious to me now that my dismissal of Rihanna was less about the reviews and more about the twenty-something identity I was cultivating at the time. I thought of myself as at a remove from pop music. I was living in Seattle on Capitol Hill, a historically gay but rapidly gentrifying neighborhood where in 2007 it was still possible drink cans of cheap Rainier in dive bars and disappear into a bubble of local indie music like Benjamin Gibbard, the Blue Scholars and the Decemberists—musicians that filled my electric blue iPod Mini’s playlists. I ignored the way the anthems of the early aughts that I heard at spinning class inhabited my body so much that I found myself singing them for days, despite refusing to listen to them on my own accord. I was not brushing my teeth with whiskey, playing Russian roulette, or popping champagne; I didn’t need what they were offering. Or so I told myself.
Good Girl Gone Bad, the album that included “Don’t Stop the Music,” remade Rihanna for the first of many times to come. As the story goes, the night before photographing the cover, the nineteen-year-old snuck away from her record company Def Jam’s reps; she wanted to work with her stylist alone. When she emerged from the stylist’s chair, the long, highlighted locks that defined the Barbados-born singer’s ingenue persona on her first two albums had vanished. Out came the icon: Rihanna styled in a jet-black, asymmetrical bob that mirrored the glossy sexiness of her music. Given the album’s title, it’s hard to know how much of this origin story is true, and how much is part of the marketing package of the singer “going bad.” Either way, it worked. Rihanna’s astronomical fame promptly followed as the singles surfaced: First, “Umbrella” came out in April and exploded as the song of the summer. Then, the hits kept layering on top of one another in rapid-fire succession. “Shut Up and Drive” (May). “Hate that I Love You” (August) “Don’t Stop the Music” (September). “Rehab” (October). In 2007, Rihanna became inescapable.
Patrick was my preferred spinning instructor back then, a modestly muscular man with a tidy, black haircut and a strict attention to our riding form. I went out of my way to attend his classes, whose tracks and choreography he plotted out with such attention, it felt like we were taking a fifty-five-minute journey, rather than merely pedaling on a stationary bike to the beat of pop music. We’ll go up some foothills. We’ll pass through the valley. Then we’ll hit the big mountain. And finally, we will come back down. The stories were simple, if somewhat nonsensical at times, but they clicked into my brain, which was longing for enough distraction to forget the emotional baggage he told us to leave at the door—in my case, my family life. The dance music he chose heightened the effect—all contemporary songs by Usher, Pink, the Black Eyed Peas, and, of course, Rihanna. Patrick’s occasional substitute Lena, by contrast, planned her workouts to 90s pop on the fly, sometimes taking a poll to determine the ride as we went. I despised this method; I needed cohesion. I needed the full-body escape.
I had thought my dad’s second wife could save us, you see—him, my sister, and most of all, me. After he told me they were divorcing, my mind kept wandering back to an omelet his second wife had made the morning they told me they were getting married. My father only ever cooked us sweet breakfasts when we were young—thick Bisquick pancakes, cinnamon raisin French toast, blueberry waffles. I was taken aback by the yellow half-moon of creamy eggs that she flipped onto my plate that morning. I remember it as being dusted in a confetti of dried flower petals (though, it was probably chopped vegetables); I was so relieved. I hadn’t realized before then how much less-than a “family” I had felt since my mother passed away; I had never met anyone else whose parent had died at my age; we barely even knew anyone who was divorced back then. This was all framework for my understanding of what a family should be. To hear that we were finally going back to being four people again, instead of three, offered the sense of ordinariness I’d longed for. I was also assured that my father and younger sister would have someone besides me to rely on as we aged. This new person would take care of them while I pursued my own trajectory. Her family would be the backup. When my father’s email about his divorce shredded that fantasy, I needed to be comforted. But instead I was in spinning class, pedaling without moving.
Most of the songs that I heard in the class tend to run together in my memory now. But “Don’t Stop the Music” stayed with me. Its use of “mama-say mama-sa ma-ma-coo-sa” from Michael Jackson’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” might have been the first reimagining of a song from my childhood I’d encountered. By the late 2000s, it felt like the 80s were reappearing everywhere. The first time I heard Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance,” in 2008, I thought it was Madonna returning to her roots; I still mistook Leona Lewis’s “Still Bleeding” (also 2008) for an 80s song until recently. By contrast, I recognized Rihanna’s use of Jackson’s single the first time I heard it. Though it was one of a dozen or so songs I heard each class, I could never get it out of my head; sometimes I heard it in my dreams. It was as if we were connected.
My mother had Thriller on a cassette she’d duped from the library’s copy. I found it among the cassettes stored in a wooden case in our living room a few weeks after she died; I was drawn to the label and track listings, all of which were in her swooping, familiar handwriting. I don’t have any specific memories of listening to Thriller with her. But, for the first few years after I found it, I played it constantly, memorizing every lyric as I did the Disney movie songs that comprised the rest of my cassette collection. “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” was the first track, so I knew it best and became able to recognize it within a second or two of hearing the throbbing drum work by Paulinho da Costa that opens the song. As I pumped the pedals of the spin bike, twenty-something years later, my body must have responded to that familiar sound floating through the speakers when “Don’t Stop the Music” came on—an aural encounter that brought together my old self and my current self in a way that I didn’t know I needed.
What does it feel like to hear a piece of music for the very first time, when it sounds unlike anything you’ve ever heard? Jackson borrowed “mama-say mama-sa ma-ma-coo-sa” from Manu Dibango’s "Soul Makossa,” one of the first mainstream disco hits from 1972. But I only learned that when Dibango sued both Rihanna and Jackson in 2009, over its use in “Don’t Stop the Music.” I don’t have personal meaning to make from the song’s life on the dancefloors of the 1970s, before I was born. Similarly, people twenty years younger than I am may never have heard that lyric before “Don’t Stop the Music”; they don’t find memories from the 1980s buried in the track the way I do. In this sense, the meaning doesn’t have to be about telling any one songwriter’s narrative; something else can rise from the interplay between sound and body and all of the disparate elements in between that come together in a particular moment. The absence of a cohesive story doesn’t have to amount to something less than.
I’ve realized that the more I age, the more I have expectations of music to transport me—often to another time in my life. I am the one stopping the music from existing in its own right these days; maybe it’s why I often find it harder to love songs from the present as much as I adore songs from the past. I’m too often begging the music to tell me the stories of the things I miss: the people, the lost narratives, the past selves. I can see now how I expected too much from some music I heard in 2007, just as I expected too much from the story of my own family. According to the theory of Gestalt psychology, the brain inherently pieces together multiple, simultaneous perceptions to arrive at an orderly, holistic experience of the world; you find your own meaning in the absence of a story. I need to be confident in the absence of a narrative, rather than searching for one when it isn’t a necessity. Maybe if I had been more so in 2007, I could have better used the strength of “Don’t Stop the Music,” a song about exactly what it promises. A solid beat. An exuberating build. A path to total immersion in the moment.
Erin Langner is the author of the essay collection Souvenirs from Paradise (Zone 3 Press, 2022). Her writing has also appeared in Electric Literature, Fourth Genre, Bright Wall/Dark Room, The Offing, and The Brooklyn Rail. She still goes to spin class once a week but often wishes for better music selections these days.
The Special Cult inside of Maya von Doll’s Sohodolls: “Stripper” by rose pacult
How many readers would consider themselves a reformed clubber?
This is what I think of myself. Admittedly I don’t consider myself a *good* dancer by any means, but I have danced badly, like, *infinite times* in my life. The most clubbing I partake in nowadays involves putting on YouTube while wearing wireless headphones and jumping / twirling / dropping to the floor / etc. etc. etc. around my home in Missoni loungewear (ah to be in the thirties 🙂 ).
I recall when I moved to Manhattan a decade-ish ago bringing along this artist friend who was double my age to a club around midnight: she grew up in the alt club scene of the late eighties in NYC. She walked inside with a totally bewildered look on her face, yelled into my ear the way one must inside a heavily populated, loud place: “I had no idea club kids could look the exact same for over twenty years.”
I had never thought about that: but I guess once there are club kids, there are always gonna be club kids.
Cliched, but there’s something about disappearing into a crowd’s anonymity in the darkness only kaladescoped by a disco ball that appeals to finding the freedom where I could be anyone, anything. I know that common feeling of clubbing til dawn, having started out the evening orderly, composed, maybe stressed out, what have ya, and emerging to the sunlight a laughing, dopamine infused, happier person. Dancing brings joy. In the first rays of morning—typically—I’d walk to the nearest park in doc martens, sheer blouses, leotards, short skirts, fishnets, and find a swingset or tire swing, where I’d sit for a long while watching people walk to work. A night of dancing to fab tunes can make you appreciate things like a swingset, like a morning’s first light.
I attended a boarding school on the East Coast. This means living on a campus in a dorm for 95%. The other 5% lived close by and attended as daystudents. 70% of my classmates were international. I rarely went home, but I did have a (permanently borrowed) Swedish ID, as well as a penchant for befriending the 5% of days students who would sign me out for weekends, and very, very often escaped to Boston or New York. I wasn’t always the ballsy kid willing to go out alone to dance the night away. Before my East Coast school I went to a Midwestern boarding school. And even further back, before that, I lived with my beloved family on a plot surrounded by cornfields until there was a family tragedy, which led me to leave for school as a new teenager. Tragedy can make or break depending on attitude. For me, I leaned into many coping mechanisms, one of which was dance, an activity my mom tried to keep me invested in growing up. I learned as a teen how to make the night something special, somewhere special where one moves for the sole purpose of doing it for oneself. For me, dance is fun, but it’s more than fun, it’s like…the only time when talking to your body with your mind works is when the body hears your interpretation of music and reacts to it with movement.
A lot of music can make a person dance, but I realize some beats can drive somebody to change. A dancer knows dance comes not from the beat, but the way a dance makes you feel and feel yourself. If you feel yourself, if you hear yourself, you can actually listen to what your body is saying, how it is responding. You can actually just whip your body better when you feel the song better. For me, I have to feel the song to dance to the song.
A song that makes me feel myself, my body, my mind, is the ultimate dance song. I need something that eats up insecurities with bodily hunger. That gives a feeling that for once this body is sexiness and moving it should evoke proud sensations. I want a moment when I can go up and down, side to side, forgetting the club, who's watching, knowing that my body is the club to be at: I don’t need a beat that jumps down my throat, I want my throat to swallow the beat slowly, noticeably, for it to be just me and the song, me and the voice.
At the turn of the century a lot was going on for me, you see, I was six years old going on seven, my dad was a doomsday prepper stockpiling gargantuan cans of dehydrated soup, I lived in the middle of nowhere, Indiana (called Fremont, Indiana), and within two years, I had begun to obsessively listen to playlists my cooler older brothers made on CDs or on the desktop; reading book series on girls living glamorous lifestyles; while actively plotting my escape from Indiana (which ironically came unexpectedly and unplanned) so that by the latter part of the decade I’d join the very rich-and-famous’ probably children at a fancy school.
I read the Gossip Girl young adult series with unadulterated shame, like I didn’t even want it on my bookshelves, but I couldn’t stop from sleeping with one of the books under my pillows. Like why would these books about “it girls” mean so much to me?
I knew it was embarrassing even then that I wanted so much to join their seemingly superior alien race. I wanted a kind of liberation and sexiness which can only stem from financial freedom coupled with confidence. If only I understood then liberation and sexiness is not a matter of what’s in the bank, but knowing the worth of oneself as a commodity.
The fact was that by the time I did get to boarding school the series Gossip Girl was already in the middle of its first season beyond the pages and onto television, which I would download weekly off the iTunes Store. Then, my roommates and I would climb into the top bunk of the bed drinking Tab Sodas, eating Cheez-Its, and watching these overwhelmingly white, American homogenous teens…with their Bobbi Brown inspired makeup; very trimmed, arched, thick eyebrows (when skinny was in the mainstream); casual wearing of Christian Louboutins (red bottom status) to limited edition runs of brightly patterned colored cashmere socks from Hermes (you know, a kind of wealth where it’s no longer about buying “traditional” fits, but instead more, oh…je ne sais quoi…to wear the more “out there,” funky looks to express a little personality if you will); adorned with watches (Cartier to Casio and beyond); while clinging to cute, colorful slide phones like LG’s Chocolates (before this was the typical for the pleebs too); moving fast at making their sex lives compelling (with the occasional escort popping in to visit); wearing legendary inherited gem-encrusted rings from the Vanderbilts; travelling to chalets in Aspen while ignoring their rigid (yet cliched) Fortune 500 company owning, emotionally-absent parents often consumed by scandals: extramarital affairs, cocaine-use, and at times, willing to hit their ‘treasured’ children to make a point; all the while occasionally engaging with the token “poor” family from school that lives in a multimillion dollar flat in Manhattan; and somehow remaining top in the class under the weight of intense academic expectations at private school (for their supposed futures at schools like Dartmouth); but nevertheless, having abilities to drink and club despite being in high school just due to their stature (not fake IDs)—oh gosh, these wellgroomed, beautiful fabulous teens meant something dear to me. These teens were like the Euphoria of the early aughts (that means, to me, showing an unrealistic, yet hyper glamorization of youth sex, rock, and roll culture).
Seriously, I don’t even want to come up with some cooler scenario than what it was when I first heard Sohodolls “Stripper,” because this is the genuine experience of a teen finding a song that changes them.
Still, perhaps, I would love it so much if I had heard it before Gossip Girl’s first season (2007), episode seven: “Victor / Victrola.”
The main character, teenage beauty Blaire—notoriously uptight, posh, and a rule follower—just breaks up with her boyfriend because he’s cheated on her with her best friend.
Right after the breakup, Blaire visits a burlesque club—Victrola—owned by her friend Chuck Bass’ family. Blaire sits on a couch with Chuck. Green and blue hazy lights shine down on the women dancing in corsets and thigh highs stockings. Transitions happen quickly so the pacing feels fast. Blaire tells Chuck about the breakup.
She pauses.
Holding the stem of a champagne flute against her cheek, the song “Stripper” starts to play. Blaire wears a traditional mother of pearl necklace strand with a modest lace mock turtleneck dress. Her hair frames her face like she’s a contemporary Farrah Fawcett (much sleeker than the seventies puffiness but still flipped out) but the hair is sternly held in place with a thick headband a tween might wear. She juts her chin up toward the women: curvy thighs, short bob haircuts, moving in unison with each other in what I surmise is a symbolic gesture of community that contradicts the betrayal and lack of trust in Blaire’s own circle given the cheating scandal.
Surprisingly, the shot zooms in to Blaire’s eyes moving up and down. We can assume she’s moving her eyes in tune with watching the burlesque dancers. A smile begins to radiate on her brightening face.
She says to Chuck: “You know, I’ve got moves.” Chuck Bass challenges the teenage broken hearted girl to get up there. She says: “Guard my drink,” and approaches the stage, climbing up with the camera showing close up shots of her pedicured open-toed, black wedge sandal heels (red bottomed, of course), then cuts to a very zoomed in, intensely focused shot of her forearm…illuminated by low, colorful disco ball lighting as it poses in the air.
The crowd begins to cheer for this young woman now surrounded by burlesque dancers, head to toe in relatively modest clothes still. The first zoomed out look we get of Blaire on the stage is her taking the headband and tossing it into the audience so her hair becomes a free thing itself. The song lyrics begin to repeat the words “Hey! Stripper!” as Chuck looks at Blaire awestruck. The next shot is of Blaire’s legs, and the dropping of her mock turtleneck lace dress around her heeled ankles. Chuck stands up. Blaire, this underage teen, is now on the stage surrounded by the sexily composed, smiling women in a semicircle around her. Blaire’s back is turned to the audience. She’s in what looks like a La Perla silk slip. The song’s intensity is picking up: “Na na na na na na na.” She begins waggling her bottom back and forth, and we now see for the first time, like the burlesque dancers, Blaire is wearing nude thigh highs with a black seam down the back of the legs.
With the crowd going wild Blaire slowly glances over her shoulder at the audience—made up of very put together men and women who are unraveling in composure the longer Blaire is on stage: the longer this dance goes.
A sequined dressed individual approaches Chuck and whispers: “Who's that girl?” Chuck replies: “I have no idea.” For the record, I don’t have to rewatch this episode to remember these lines. I write this to you without rewatching yet this section and interaction: I just remember perfectly Chuck not knowing who this girl is now that she’s on stage, now that she's someone totally new. She’s gone from miserable on the couch from her breakup to now smiling, looking powerful, running a finger along the lace hem of the slip, touching the seam of her thigh high. She begins to bend her knees, dropping close to the stage’s floor, tracing her pearls through her fingers while giggling. She’s transitioned fully at this point into the liberated woman. The woman I admire and want to be…Chuck can’t look away. He raises his flute to Blaire in disbelief that the person dancing is the person who moments earlier sat next to him.
The show has this anonymous narrator who goes by the name ‘Gossip Girl:’ She narrates as the song winds toward the end and Blaire moves even more animated, tossing her thick, long locks over her bare shoulders: “As you might have guessed Upper East Siders, prohibition never stood a chance against exhibition. It’s human nature to be free, and no matter how long you try to be good, you can’t keep a bad girl down.”
Alas, I heard “Stripper” while in the top bunk in my dormitory at the school Cranbrook Kingswood with two roommates I felt particularly close to. I recall being awestruck as Chuck Bass looks mesmerized, and funnily enough, I know I’d pause the episode after the scene. I bought the song immediately for either $1.99 or $.99, one of the two—you know, before streaming as we know it today existed, and us roommates, Nana and Sara and me, dancing like Blaire, around our small dorm room. Sexy. Liberated. Fantasizing about the person a song could make us.
That, everybody, is dance music. It’s that special kind of music that makes you very aware of all of your body. It makes you feel truly a little otherworldly, a little more cunty than other tunes.
Like, when I heard it I thought damn I am going to learn to move to this song. I swore I will never quit moving to songs like this for the rest of life.
Like Blaire, I felt combined by the pressures to be one way, when in my heart I wanted to be the girl who could get on a stage after a traumatic experience, like having one’s life’s trajectory torn in an instant from the actions of another person, and instead of breaking down into despair, finding something from within to get up and move, to dance to in a way pain’s forgotten through the accompaniment of a great dance song. That’s what “Stripper” does for me.
So, I would dance in my dorm room to this song on my playlists for the next four years.
The years of high school dancing to “Stripper” by Sohodolls, the years after dancing to “Stripper” by Sohodolls, hearing it from a dorm room on a teenage drama television show to a club, to a bedroom to a kitchen, to a cd player to an iPod to an iPhone, and I was aware that if I did not write about Maya von Doll I would be lying to the audience about what is unequivocally the most important dance song to me, to my life in the early naughty aughties: “Stripper,” because “Stripper” makes us know the bad boy inside ourselves, and know how to stand strong against anything. Dance songs that just make you dance because it makes you jump / fidget / etc. are, to me, meaningless and empty. I want music that makes me change.
Admittedly, I may love this song more than any of my readers, but I hope you will come to love it similarly to how I love it by the end of listening to it.
I do not know many famous people. To meet someone famous who you actually have cared about for nearly two decades…that is special! And it isn’t as if Maya von Doll is not busy, she very much is: this woman reflects the world in her eyes. Always in the works: her musical journey with Sohodolls continues onward, as “Stripper” among other songs rise on Tiktok (quick aside, I tell my two classes of eighteen to nineteen year olds about interviewing Maya von Doll, and immediately am faced with their jealousy, they all know her save for one in a singular class, from Tiktok, and they promise to read my essay on her), as does her solo works through Maya von Doll to other projects like New Pharaohs, which is a rocking band also that embraces a more seventies feel and her roots in Cyprus and Beirut.
She is rising, rising, rising, and I am lucky enough to spend 80 minutes visiting with her. She is the kind of person worth fangirling over because Maya von Doll is anything but a diva all while being glamorous, articulate, gracious, fun, poised. In fact, she is actually so kind with a beautiful personality inside and out, with such a fascinating mind to boot. I felt really humbled hearing about her life, what led her to the making of “Stripper,” and what she has in the works, and her absolute torrid love affair with consuming every fact about historical battles from ancient history she can find.
So that’s what we do: we talk “Stripper.”
So let’s go back before that Gossip Girl episode which actively utilized “Stripper” for a burlesque scene. What was happening leading up to the song “Stripper” being written?
It’s 2006 in far old East London. There’s that star in the making, Maya von Doll, in black jeans, black t-shirt, black boots, dark hair, carrying under her arm a synth in a black case.
She’s there with two music mates on a Tuesday. Perhaps even a Monday. It’s eleven ‘o'clock in the morning. The recording studio isn’t yet open.
It’s an ordinary time, ordinary weekday, ordinary moment, she explains to me. The three pause outside a nondescript concrete, cityscape building. It’s decided together to make their way inside to kill time.
With a clean (read: no makeup covered) face, and unpainted nails, Maya von Doll, lugging that synth, sits at the bar, and von Doll looks to the dancer towering above her, curvy thighs and voluptuous chest.
Imagine the lights are off aside for a spotlight on Maya von Doll, and a spotlight on the stripper on stage above her. In the dim lit room, von Doll watches the electric, magnetic stripper on this impromptu stage. She’s adorned with hair extensions, nails, the works. She dances, moving, shaking, kinesthetic, liberated, feminine. Maya von Doll describes this lady as: “foxy,” “in command,” and “sexy.”
Maya von Doll watches, mesmerized by this free woman, and while watching she experiences duality there—in this meeting space—for rivalry… which then begins to shake hands with arousal.
von Doll describes this intense fascination with the care in which the stripper’s created her look. The way it reads to me: Maya von Doll felt obsession and the invoking nature of obsession’s immediacy: how obsession may provide this specific and special frenetic energy capable of propelling someone to create, as what was done with the archiving of this moment between Maya and the dancer through music.
This was when the empty pint glass gets passed for coins to fill the cup.
This pub is not an obvious strip club. It’s just a pub which happens to have a stripper. “She was quite striking.”
Lyric: *I’ve come to stare, I am a voyeur.*
This is one lyric written by von Doll; actually, wait, all the lyrics in this song are written by von Doll. Wait, wait. All of the song—the bass, the chords, the melody, and the lyrics—come from Maya von Doll.
It goes like this:
“Stripper” is written like this: Maya works out the guitar riff, the bass, the chords, the melody, then the lyrics that are vocalized in a posh, soft spoken, feminine voice.
This is a shuffle beat song, meaning there are alternating long and short pauses between beats, which is quite similar to Marilyn Manson’s many tracks with similar alterations (Maya von Doll tells me she likes his style of music). This is the first time it has been done by Sohodolls. The producers and Maya von Doll thrive together in producing the drum beat. There is the narrator in the song—in which here the narrator is also the speaker, which is also the song writer, as well as the artist, meaning Maya is speaking directly to us in her own words—confronting metaphysically a dancer on stage. von Doll explains while she thinks dancing is great, it’s not something she feels automatically fab at: that it’s a kind of intelligence for sure, a kind of processing that sends information to different limbs in space in a split second, and while she can do the choreography, the dancing itself feels difficult, makes her feel like a puppet. Funnily enough this hits the crux on why this song is the best dance song there is from the early naughty aughties. It IS a sexy dance song, that makes you feel yourself, kinetic and free, like a stripper on stage, like a beautiful being, who smells fragrant, looks stunning, who is beautiful, and able to move around up and down intelligently, smoothly.
Afterall, this is why I love the song, and probably at its core one of the many reasons why it becomes a song: because it indulges this side to Maya von Doll, and to her listeners.
So at that time, like the mid naughty aughties, what was in?
In: Crimped hair. Pink eyeshadow. Agora Sweaters. Crocheted ponchos. Gladiator sandals. Anorexia. Gay as a derogatory adjective. Waspy level repression.
So “Stripper” was an antidote to this, well perhaps not to all of the above, but at least perhaps gay as a derogatory adjective. As well as biblical level repression. And also, anorexia. As this song’s origin story begins with a woman watching and singing with queer curiosity toward the dancer on stage elevates this song to moving way beyond the mainstream of the mid aughts’ depiction of queerness and provides a representation for what queer desire can look like. If you look at Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” which came out a year after “Stripper” it’s notable the intro beat is quite similar, almost identical—to “Stripper.” While we all like that song too (as it is so catchy) it’s unfortunately lame that it looks at a woman kissing another woman occurring only after a night of drinking. As von Doll puts it: “I did find it a little bit cowardly that in the middle they're like, yeah, you know, I kissed a girl, but it doesn't mean anything.” She acknowledges it is a good melodic pop song. Nevertheless, I’d take a subtly influential, more meaningful dance song anytime, opposed to one unwilling to take a stand.
Still, a chance for a queer someone to be another’s experiment science project is contrite, annoying. The lines from “I Kissed A Girl:” “No. I don’t even know your name. It doesn’t matter. You’re my experimental game” actually makes a rage course through me. It’s happened to every queer person, for sure, and the ramifications are detrimental. “Stripper” is the antithesis of “I Kissed A Girl,” because in Maya von Doll’s “Stripper” the origin story is about finding another woman, sober, on a basic morning of an ordinary work day, and being entranced to the point of mesmerization, to the point of wanting to be her, be with her. To the point art is created to honor the embrace of queerness, what queerness looks like, what it means to be a female aroused by a female, and not stepping away from that bicuriosity. Not citing alcohol as a justification for a natural desire.
I love that there’s this honest lustful prowess here, a sassy edge, an intellectual dialogue between the voyeur and the exhibitionist, which shies away from covering up intrinsically natural feelings of queerness in a fashion seen in the empowering original music video. (In the past von Doll has been reviewed as being a cross between Marilyn Manson and Kylie Minogue. I would place Sohodolls Maya von Doll as an edgier Metric’s Emily Haines. For example, right now I toss on “Just for once” by Metric, and hear that similar vibe).
In the music video, the band members watch the singer on stage. The imagery is very 1970s to me, although admittedly, I learn from von Doll two things: first it was meant to be more 1930s with the beginnings of cabaret popularity. Secondly—and more a fascination I notice when engaging in our interview how she is so focused on the world around her: she’s curious about anything and everything. I learn about what she finds inspiring, how the inspiration for the aesthetic comes from some of her heroes like Marlene Dietrich the film / cabaret star and gorgeous Debbie Harry from Blondie, or a classic film The Night Porter.
In the music video, von Doll moves from a burlesque outfit at a cabaret into a replica Victorian cape (key word: Victorian) hiding her body, timid, shy, into censored nudity with just black tape over her breasts and black undies, while singing. This progression from being covered up to exposure full on really replicates the entire storyline behind “Stripper” being written by von Doll. There’s a pole: the dancer working it onstage at what looks like a queer party where everyone of every gender is made up with dramatic make-up, heavy eyeliner. It’s almost like I can smell her delicious perfume through the screen.
Everyone looks gorgeously alt. This moment is constructed, a short film, music video, whatever. It’s artificial because it’s constructed for an audience. But to me, it’s a recreation of what happened in Far East London when Maya von Doll found the Stripper who changed her life, that propelled her to create the soundtrack for the moment. This construction carefully cultivated in the music video provides the space for Maya von Doll to go from one individual and transform into the freer, more powerful individual.
You see, von Doll is confronted by an aggressive situation: “I get shoved and pushed, you know, like a bit of Clockwork Orange, just a bit of weird kind of violence… I thought of it more like this. Like a collision happening between worlds, right?”
This is essentially what the song does to a tee for me as a listener. This is why I love this song: because I become somebody else when I listen to it, I become the me I want to be, and that’s a real dance: the dance of change, which is inevitably the only kind of dance I care about listening to.
Maya von Doll makes note of the situation between the studio and herself regarding artwork for the album. Somebody, either the label or the band, had this idea for the band being shot through the legs of a vixen of a stripper. von Doll made a huge point to prefer not a skinny model. She didn’t want “skinny stick legs.” Of course, in the early aughts models practiced a religion in thinness.
von Doll advocated for her wish and eventually won. The label found a commercial modeling agency to find a model who was actually quite curvy. But then, when the artwork was done, they stretched her body to fit all the band members in the shot between her legs.
von Doll was really disappointed by how thin her legs ended up being because they pulled them to be very skinny afterward. Why did they go to extra lengths to avoid an editorial look, which doesn’t show what is reality for most, only to then have her appear to be six foot two and totally skinny?
Nevertheless—I still think about what it is like to dance to “Stripper.” It’s turning down the lights. Throwing your hands up, then sliding fingers slowly down the sides of your body. It’s swaying. Doesn’t have to be choreographed. It can just be in pajamas. von Doll tells me “Number one, I wish I was a good dancer,” and admits to being far from that. She says “I’ve always really appreciated dancing as an art form.” Dance music like “Stripper” is to make you feel like you’re at the hottest night club. It’s being at the hottest nightclub, but no one is there except you and your confidence is boosting.
Next month Sohodolls will release a song titled “What Kind of Love?” that’s meant to be the new “Stripper,” “Stripper 2.0” and it incorporates VR technology, according to von Doll. I can’t wait to give it a listen.
Works Cited
Maya von Doll. Maya von Doll Interviewed by Rose Pacult. Zoom, 12 Jan. 2024.
Rose Pacult gave up the novelty of nightlife in exchange for the bed by nine life. In summer she completed 90% of the Transamerica Trail with her boyfriend, and dreams about camping and driving through small town America. She gratefully attends and teaches at UC San Diego, and loves that California lifestyle after growing up in Indiana. Her X handle is @rosepacult.