second round
(8) NO DOUBT, “HELLA GOOD”
outlasted
(16) Sohodolls, “Stripper”
234-217
and will play in the sweet 16
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 at the end of regulation, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/13/24. (Note that Arizona does not do Daylight Saving time, so AZ time now = Pacific.)
KELLY SHIRE ON NO DOUBT’S “HELLA GOOD”
The waves keep on crashing on me, for some reason.
I didn’t do much research for this essay about the elements that make a song qualify as “dance,” versus any other type of song. Instead, I relied on my own knowledge base, or what my ears understand to be true: Rock songs equal heavy guitars and drums. Country songs feature the same, with additional twang and fiddle and some steel guitar, if you’re lucky. And dance songs, at least those from the last 50 years or so, also equal guitars—especially bass—and drums, but mostly feature a whole lot of synthesizer. Often there are horns, or synths that can sound almost exactly like horns. It’s the synth that makes it a dance song, I decided.
Then I thought back to all the other songs, and their enthusiastic dancers, that came before. I think of Motown, and the 60s R&B my parents loved: The Temptations, Junior Walker. Not a synth to be heard. My grandparents era: Tommy Dorsey, Glen Miller. Young people out there on the floor, swinging, swaying, coming close together and then apart. I think of that dated cliche from the old, original American Bandstand show, and the line the teenage dancers would deliver to Dick Clark, when asked if they liked a new song: it’s got a good beat; you can dance to it.
No Doubt’s “Hella Good” kicks off with a simple beat, a drum tap-tap-tapping for about half a minute, but then the hook, all synth and guitar, opens it wide up and the song really begins. This groove feels low down, funky. Its electronic, buzzy tone reminds me of the opening notes of Stevie Wonder’s “Boogie on Reggae Woman,” one of the sexiest grooves I can name off the top of my head. A song that never fails to move me to dance, even if it’s just while sitting in my chair. Maybe this similarity is my ears intuiting the dancehall influences of the album, hearing somehow that parts of “Rock Steady” the album that produced Hella Good as a single, were recorded in Jamaica.
Your love keeps on comin’ like a thunderbolt.
This is an essay about a dance song, but it was also going to be about getting older alongside your celebrity peers, we members of Generation X all snide and snarky as ever about our gray hairs and creaky joints, some of us going stark gray and some of us persisting in hair dye (me) and some persisting in embracing plastic and fillers because it’s our job, or part of our job, to remain ageless (Gwen). But it’s difficult to focus solely on aging, or even merely reminisce about life in the 90s/good old days, when writing about a song that’s so clearly, openly, about sex.
I wanna see you baby, real close up.
I grew up in a household where it was a given that my parents were good dancers, and I was a terrible one. My mom laughed whenever I tried to do it, mocking – what? My ungainliness, poor rhythm, general lack of grace. I grew up hearing my family’s own creation mythology, of my parent’s initial meeting at a nightclub, how sparks flew between them on the dance floor. Early on I internalized that dancing was part of their world, their private milieu. I wasn’t invited to join them, and was actively discouraged from trying, pretty much. I was an only child for most of my first decade. Needing to keep myself entertained, I instead took up singing. There wasn’t a Disney or musical soundtrack safe from my impassioned warbling.
Despite all that, I eventually came to enjoy dancing, after tentatively allowing myself to dance, privately, and always looking over my shoulder, should an adult be watching. It was a long evolution that started somewhere in my early teens, when flush with new hormones and images of my latest crush, I felt inspired to cut loose out on my grandmother’s back patio. I turned up the radio, playing the Go-Go’s “Vacation” and jumped along, in that very 80s/Molly Ringwald-esque elbow-and-knee pumping style that passed for dancing. A flutter of curtains, my grandma was watching me from her laundry room. She came outside, scowling, and told me to turn it down.
A few years later, I cranked it up and swayed when “Let’s Get it On,” or “Beast of Burden'' came on the radio while I dried the dishes in my parent’s kitchen. Both of these songs are slow, sexy grinds, not fast, driving beats. Rather than jumping around, I learned to trust my body to find the bass, to seek its own rhythm.
You got me feeling hella good.
“Just A Girl,” was No Doubt’s first big single, off their album Tragic Kingdom. As soon as I heard it, I knew the singer had to be from Southern California (I heard the song before learning the album title, and its play on the Disneyland nickname.) “Just a Girl” lists a lot of standard complaints about being a woman stuck in a man’s world, but it was Stefani’s line “cuz they won’t let me drive late at night” that stood out to me, alerted me that here was a local girl: it was a familiar warning, the reminders I heard from my own worried parents. I was single, independent, and still their concerns rattled in my head as I zipped down the 5, the 91 freeways in Anaheim and north Orange County, visiting friends, lovers, after midnight.
There was a famous crime around that time, a girl whose face appeared on billboards, gone missing in SoCal after attending a Cure concert. She had a flat tire or car trouble, pulled over on the freeway, and the rest eventually became a feature story on Dateline. Gwen and I came from close-knit families, heard the same warnings. It was a drag, being just a girl. And there was something unseemingly, too, about being out late at night, the Puritanical scold I heard from other, over-30 adults: nothing good happens after midnight, after one, two in the morning. What’s a girl doing out there? Having sex. Looking for sex, tempting it. Or out at a club, which was understood to be the same thing. “Meat market,” they called popular bars. We know what you’re out there doing, was the subtext.
A great, favorite song with an irresistible beat came over the sound system, and you grabbed your friend’s hand, rushed out of the bathroom maybe, to wiggle out onto the dance floor, your body needed to move, thrust, writhe to the beat pounding all the way through your bones. How good of a song, to be unself-conscious, lost in the groove, unaware. Cuz they often stare with their eyes, as Stefani sang. From the beginning, No Doubt made me want to dance. Even if it was more the jumping/pumping kind, versus a funky, disco groove. Jumping up and down is its own kind of dancing, too.
You hold me like you should, so I’m gonna keep on dancing.
If dance is a stand in for sex, then I can assume my parents were good at it. Maybe it’s why I wasn’t allowed to participate in the thing they had in common. When you’re an only child, you learn quickly the ways of adults. You look away from sights not meant for you, learn that your precocious comebacks will land wrong, half the time. It’s true that for much of my childhood I was chubby, near-sighted, unable to follow basic choreography steps required in school plays and talent shows. Maybe my parents had a point. After all, I still can’t follow any steps, or succeed at any of those dance routines that go viral on Tik Tok. My parents, if they could see me, would surely smirk and shake their heads at all my sweaty, spazzy attempts.
Don’t wake me if I’m dreaming/Cuz I’m in the mood
Despite the grainy, gritty black and white, the video for “Hella Good” looks high budget, artsy and sophisticated. Gwen appears a little older, wiser, one could argue sexier in 2002, than she did eight years prior, in her first videos. Gone is her baby face, the little-girl pout. Gone, at least in this song, is the novelty of the Betty Boop, cartoon character voice. It’s a sexy beat, a dirty, grooving synth, and water, water is everywhere. Gwen, the whole band, is wet, splashing about. Submerged, playful, going under, bobbing up again.
The song, the second single from No Doubt’s Rock Steady album, debuted 22 years ago, as of this writing. I know that, because I looked it up, and saw that my firstborn was born almost exactly a month before Hella Good was released. I would have been exhausted, covered in baby spit and struggling to breastfeed, and Gwen, well, she was on my late-night, baby-won’t-sleep TV screen, hotter than ever, rocking this funky, confident beat she wrote along with the Neptune Brothers, singing, panting about good sex:
A performance deserving of standing ovations/And who would’ve thought it’d be the two of us?
22 years ago, Gwen and I were both over 30. Do the math, a little addition: Women over 40, 50, aren’t supposed to groove. We aren’t supposed to yearn, lust for, seek out, desire that certain beat. Dancing, splashing about in all that metaphorical water—that’s for the young. Unless you’re an icon—Tina Turner, Rita Moreno, my mother, maybe—you’re supposed to hang all of it up, right around the time you’re supposed to stop going out to clubs, and instead sport your pricey yoga pants on the school pick-up line.
For years, whenever her name came up, if her voice or face was in the room, I’d offer up this fact about Gwen Stefani: we’re the same age, y’know. It became something of my private punchline, delivered mostly to my husband, and later, my kids. What I believe this proved, I’m not sure. Perhaps I wanted to infer that given different opportunities, different life choices, I too could marry a rock (or country) star, or dress in a sports bra and Dickies, affix a rhinestone bindi between my eyebrows, and present myself this way in mixed company. More recently, as Gwen has crossed over into that portal of celebrity vague-aging, while the years show more plainly on my own face, I might want you to assume that I, too, am just like her: still hip, stylish, relevant. That I too am energetic, cool enough to grab a mic and, like Gwen, hear the beat and start jumping up and down, with maybe even a few hip thrusts in your face, for good measure.
Keep on, keep on…
Stefani and No Doubt are reuniting to play at least one of the weekends at Coachella this year. I live a couple of hours from the Empire Polo Field where the annual music festival takes place; I’ve never been. I hope Stefani and the band can get the crowd…moving? Jumping? Do people even dance at Coachella, or do they merely vibe? Did Stefani, like me, like a lot of Gen X friends I know, squint at the full line up across the April weekends and scratch her head with one of her manicured fingernails over the majority of the acts? Who even ARE these people? Regardless, it’s her job to paint her face, pull her hair into that high, tight ponytail, and put on a show.
The artists, the musicians will age, my generation and our music will also eventually fade into obscurity. Still, the music itself will be there, hopefully always as easy to listen and dance to, as searching for the Glenn Miller band’s “In the Mood,” on my Spotify.
Keep on, keep on dancing.
And also: What I succumb to is making me numb.
Kelly Shire has participated in several March Xness tournaments, most recently writing about Motley Crue’s cover of “Helter Skelter” for March Faxness in 2022. Her essays and creative nonfiction have appeared in Catamaran journal, Brevity, and Quarterly West, among others, and her fiction is included in the crime anthology Palm Spring Noir. Born and raised in Southern California, she works as a school librarian by day and is finishing a memoir of music, road trips, and family.
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.