All the Lives I Want: Essays about My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers(7)

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.

“Shine bright like a diamond,” Rihanna whispers in a song that I loved to dance to and that men seemed to feel ambivalent toward. Rihanna repeats herself sometimes twice, sometimes three times in the song to make certain we have heard her instructions. When I have been onstage for “Diamonds,” it has prompted me to look upward at the spotlights, obeying the command recorded years ago and far away, as if Rihanna were presently watching from the sound booth. It is a romantic song, but I’ve always thought of it as a song directed at a distressed friend by another, assuring her that she is more treasured than she can presently imagine. This is likely because I have used it that way. I would repeat the song’s central command in a deadpan voice to work friends on breaks and after shifts, smoking cigarettes and making grandiose proclamations about the big things we had in store for our impending windfalls. I don’t know if I said these things because I believed them to be true or because I wanted them to be true, but I don’t see those two places as that far from each other anymore.

In one club where I worked, all the girls had to line up on the main stage at the start of the shift and have our names called out one by one as we stepped forward and showed off. It felt like part beauty pageant, part Westminster dog show. It was not uncommon for them to play anthems of empowered womanhood during this interlude, a reminder of how much we all wanted to be there. Songs like “Independent Women II” by Destiny’s Child, “LoveGame” by Lady Gaga, and “Bad Girls” by M.I.A. appeared often, while an occasional lament like “Just a Girl” by No Doubt would sneak in that I took for a gentle nod from the DJ that he knew no one working in the club especially wanted to be there.

Once they played “Run the World (Girls)” by Beyoncé, a song that didn’t get its fair due as a feminist anthem or as a world-class banger in general. The song was met with criticism on its release, mostly because there is a worldwide committee of curmudgeonly old-guard feminists who refuse to accept Beyoncé as a leader or as one of their own. It was critiqued secondarily because of claims that women do not, in fact, run the world. I think often of this song in contrast to “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” and how Beyoncé was right, as she often is, even when she doesn’t always mean to be. Girls run the world in the sense that they perform the invisible and unappreciated labors that keep the world on its axis. That is different from doing what everyone wants to do, which is rule the world. We don’t speak of world leaders who run countries but of world leaders who rule countries. Running a thing is to toil in tedious and uncredited roles; ruling a thing is to hold dominion over it enough that little toil is required. I am glad I heard the song only once in the context of the club, so as not to be driven mad by the grim reality of its literal interpretation. In the light of day and off the clock, not surrounded by the glaring differences of who it is that rules and who it is that runs that were made evident by our coarse exchanges, the song is partially salvaged.

“You Be Killin’ ’Em” by Fabolous is the only song I ever cared enough about to request. The upbeat hip-hop celebration of female beauty and power was something of a personal anthem for years. The lyrics on their own might read like a litany of cheesy pickup lines, but accompanied by its urgent and danceable beat, it is a song you can run the fuck out of some errands to. The hook alone contains four compliments to the woman at whom it is directed: “You what’s up girl, ain’t gotta ask it / I dead ’em all now, I buy the caskets They should arrest you or whoever dressed you Ain’t gon’ stress you, but I’m a let you know / Girl you be killin’ ’em / You be killin’ ’em.” This woman whose appeal is so all-encompassing is rare in any genre, but what is especially remarkable is that her ruthless ambition and apparent materialism are considered attractive.