All the Lives I Want: Essays about My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers(8)

Several small televisions hung from the ceiling playing the songs’ music videos and lighting up the otherwise dark corners of the establishment’s main room. I assumed they were primarily for the entertainment of men who had been dragged to the club by friends and needed refuge in something to look at besides the men they knew being reduced to ATMs by an army of scantily clad women. They were also a helpful distraction from the crawl through the first and last hours of dead shifts. More than just giving us something to focus on when there were no customers, they were windows to a world outside the club made glossy and bright by the commonly used palettes and filters of music video aesthetics. Despite being in heavy rotation on my personal playlists, I saw the video for “You Be Killin’ ’Em” during the one and only time I danced to it for work.

Taking the title of the song quite literally, Amber Rose plays Fabolous’s love interest while living a double life as an assassin. Interspersed with scenes of the two in romantic situations are scenes of Amber wearing disguises and murdering what appears to be an assortment of mobsters of the nouveau riche variety. At the end of the video, Fabolous answers a knock at the door while Amber is in the bathtub and is greeted by several members of law enforcement bearing warrants and pushing their way into the apartment. You’d think they would be discreet and do a sting operation to capture a world-class killer, but the kerfuffle tips her off, leaving Fabolous to find the bathtub empty except for a single red rose and the door to the balcony left open.

The video is wholly absurd from start to finish. For a song so richly colored by descriptions of luxury items and people, the video is shot in black and white to add drama. The plot and styling are presumably an homage to the narrative music videos of earlier decades in hip-hop, but the attempt at film noir, complete with opening credits and a femme fatale, is flimsy when it isn’t downright silly. There is a scene where Amber’s negligee appears red on-screen in contrast to the black and white. It is supposed to be sexy, but it looks like those sepia-toned photos you see on greeting cards, or framed in your aunt’s downstairs bathroom, with little kids dressed in oversized old-fashioned clothing and a boy giving a girl a red rose or a paper heart. Amber inexplicably wears a fur coat throughout an entire dinner date, which is frankly just not that slick. Fabolous cannot lip-synch to save his life. And in the final scene, when Amber escapes, you have to wonder how far she got without someone calling the cops on the woman wearing only a bath towel running for her life. And while I’m overthinking it, what kind of deranged architect puts the balcony off the bathroom?

These overthought thoughts did not cross my mind when I first watched the video from the stage, nor when I watched the handful of other music videos in which Amber appears. When she is on-screen, there is only transfixed attention and giddy celebration. Amber Rose is more than an unofficial mascot for strippers, she is our patron saint. Her rise to mainstream visibility was a testament to the fact that there was life on the other side of the club that would require neither repentance nor denial. And what a life it was! People think that strippers look up to Amber because she got famous for no other reason than that she was dating Kanye West. That isn’t the reason she’s famous, and it isn’t the reason we love her. Amber was already making a name for herself as a model and video star before Kanye came along. As for dating Kanye, I could walk into any strip club in Manhattan, throw a handful of quarters, and hit four strippers who have dated a famous man at some point. (But I wouldn’t do that, because it is rude and there’s nowhere to store change on stripper apparel.)

There are plenty of famous women to admire besides Amber Rose who similarly found their way to the top on the arms of famous men. There are also plenty of famous women who publicly acknowledge that they were strippers. Most famous ex-strippers tell tales of redemption from these sordid ways. More gratingly, several claim they were no good at it, which is really just code for “too good for it.” (I see you, Diablo Cody.) But Amber carried this piece of her past into the spotlight with her and treated it like the asset it was instead of the albatross everyone expected. “All the girls were really cool… I was young, beautiful, I was onstage, I wasn’t really ashamed of my body. I made lifelong friends,” she told Cosmopolitan in 2015.1

Though the media treated Amber like an art project that Kanye West pulled from his own imagination and sculpted in bronze and neon, Amber was not a stripper in distress awaiting his rescue. She reportedly stripped until she was twenty-five, with modeling jobs and her first music video cameo coming that same year: “What Them Girls Like” by Ludacris. Transitioning from the club to a successful career outside the adult industry is a testament to the transferable skills learned as a stripper. There is wisdom and art in harnessing one’s own desirability and fitting it into the spaces required by the typical strip club patron and then taking them elsewhere as needed. Amber’s success became the bridge between the lived reality of being a stripper and being the one-dimensional fantasies strippers are asked to play, with and without their consent.

Among the most important contributions Amber made to dismantling these fantasies was openly discussing that she was in relationships with women for years before dating Kanye.2 Her bisexuality poured cold water on the myth that strippers are all dick-crazed banshees who see the money as a mere bonus. Amber also changed the tradition of audiences’ not often hearing from music video models outside the brief period around the premiere when they are trotted out before the press to discuss what an honor it was to work with a real artist. But Amber’s presence in videos often eclipsed the star power of the artists therein. Strippers who have so often played the animated backdrops and occasional slow-motion booty shots in music videos got a vicarious moment in the sun when the focus was on Amber. Meticulously crafting an image that subverts expectations about women with certain pasts, Amber outstayed the welcome generally extended to such performers and established her own place in the entertainment industry. And though she and Kanye as a couple would be together only two years, Amber stayed on the radar through product endorsements and fashion campaigns, an Instagram of otherworldly sex appeal, a self-help book, and what looks like a genuinely great fucking time.