We Mean It, Man

I must be more obtuse (or idealistic?) than I expected, 'cuz I didn't realize that some people were genuinely perturbed by Odd Future's patently sociopathic content. The self-styled vanguardistes at the Village Voice - surely eager to spare their liberal patrons' delicate sensibilities - are now sweating the same stale vapors that a musical group heralds the collapse of decent society by advocating "abominable acts of murder, kidnapping, blasphemy, and rape." Granted, unlike most previous musical Horsemen of the Apocalypse (cf Elvis, Black Sabbath, Prince), Odd Future do actually rap about murder, kidnapping, and rape. But many of the same writers who are now concern-trolling Odd Future were, mere months ago, performing the most absurd moral Chinese algebra to justify M.I.A.'s nebulously pro-terrorist politics. What, has months of midterm-fueled Tea Party xenophobia impoverished everyone's sense of humour?

One of the base assumptions seems to be that Tyler the Creator & Co. misunderstand their own malevolence - which is just silly. Tyler closes the second track on Bastard with the deadpan punchline, "As you can tell by listening to this record, I was probably angry... I didn't mean to offend anyone. Alright, I'm lying!" Odd Future are keenly aware of structural violence in the same way that Nick Sylvester claimed M.I.A. is: anyone who emblazons "Fuck 'Em All" atop of photo of Mussolini understands that vindictive, solipsistic cultural works buttress a coercive, bulldozer politics.

What's missing from the conversation is context. The surreal pranksterism of their videos and the deliberately repulsive content of their lyrics suggest that Odd Future are the first all-Troll hip-hop group, and by Troll logic, any reaction is better than none. You find them a hilarious shot in the arm of hip-hop dulled by materialism and "keeping it street"? They win. You find them a horrific example of cultural necrosis? They win. It just happens that bad reactions are way easier to elicit than good ones.

One of the weaker defenses of Odd Future's content is that they haven't really raped, kidnapped, or killed anyone, but this confuses talking about something with encouraging it. Odd Future's members seem more keen on gross-out contests, skateboarding, and generally fuckin' around than committing felonies. As Sean Fennessey noted in his Pitchfork profile of the group, "How far will you go to make someone laugh is a standard in the ritual emptiness of teenage life." Boredom & isolation as a bottomless well of artistic inspiration has produced music as brilliant as it is variegated: Iggy Pop's The Idiot, most of Elliott Smith's catalogue, Fugazi's Steady Diet of Nothing. Much closer to Odd Future's idiom are Norwegian scum-rockers Brainbombs, whose singularly obscene work (sample song title: "Lipstick On My Dick") is a testament to the cabin-fever psychosis of Nordic winters.

Which brings us to another Norwegian band, Burzum. Varg Vikernes' one-man black metal act has become the litmus test for disassociating an artist from their art, as demonstrated in the Village Voice article mentioned at the top. But the analogy between Odd Future and Burzum is grossly insulting: the former is a bunch of teenagers flipping polite society the bird (i.e. doing what teenagers do), the latter is a convicted murderer and avowed white-supremacist Pagan theocrat. There is nothing to suggest that Odd Future are anything other than punk brats being punk brats, and rapping about terrible things is a far remove from being the kind of loathsome cur that Vikernes truly is.

Some may detect the whiff of hypocrisy in shrugging off Odd Future's repellent rhymes when I took M.I.A. to task for having "renovated 'not meaning it' from an emergency exit to a revolving door." There is, however, a difference. Maya Arulpragasam insists (at length & ad nauseum) that she is a political artist who stands for something, yet she resists explicitly political interpretations of her work because advocating suicide bombing is not a good look for a pop star. But what does Odd Future stand for? By all appearances, nothing. They're hedonist pranksters who offer a purely negative worldview that's breathtaking in its viciousness. And here, the precise mistake most people make is to cleave content from style, artist from art: the very fact that we, the audience, simultaneously enjoy and are disgusted is what we need to investigate. As Zach Baron points out in his Voice article, "What artists like Odd Future... do, maybe, is venture where other people won't and there start considering all sorts of human behavior we would prefer not to think of as possible. But it is possible."

Art as abreaction, discussing the unspeakable. As a friend of mine recently said of Dario Argento's Profondo Rosso, when the hatchet drops and the music kicks in Super Fly-style, it's more thrilling than chilling because the buzz comes from identifying with the killer instead of the victim. Despite this, Argento obviously does not advocate cutting up strangers, and so the question is returned to the audience: why do we enjoy watching it onscreen? Like Baron, I've got no stomach for torture-porn, which clearly casts us in the minority of Western movie-goers, yet the same question I ask myself watching Profondo Rosso can be asked of any Saw series fan: why do you enjoy watching it onscreen?

Musicians are in an odd place compared with other artists, in that so often what they speak of is assumed to be a direct expression of their true intentions or feelings. But there is no evidence that Odd Future sincerely countenance rape any more than, say, Gaspar Noé. If an artist is a genuinely terrible person or an exponent of profanation, the conversation is necessarily about them and why they do/say terrible things. But in the case of Odd Future or Argento or Noé, there is no disassociation between artist & art necessary because they are not meant to be taken at face-value. The error is to scrutinize why Odd Future rap about rape when, really, we should be examining why we like listening to them rap about it.

Tell the Historians I'm Right Here Holdin' My Nuts

(I was about to post this two weeks ago when my internet connection went dead, hence the handful of borderline-obsolete references & links.)

While explaining to a friend some of the ridiculous online arguments I get dragged into (okay, often by myself), I remarked that for people speciously concerned with the future, the opposition spends a hell of a lot of time talking only of the past. Now, my friend doesn't waste his time reading overlong & defamatory pseudo-psychoanalytical tracts that basically amount to grandiloquent iterations of "Y'all just hatin'!" But he knew what I was talking about.

"I read these news articles," he said, "about some recently-unearthed ancient Abyssinian wooden tablet that had been written upon in wax. Obviously, the wax has long since disintegrated, but they can use computers and subcutaneous radar to reconstruct it, or whatever, and this will reveal some fantastic ancient truth... Now, perhaps I'm living too firmly in the present, but who cares? In a real and immediate sense, insofar as dealing with the situation we're in right now, who fucking cares?"

Putting a finer point on it, we were wondering exactly what good will be served by the posthumously-conceived cultural theory book about Michael Jackson (that I maintain is as macabre and exploitive as anything Jermaine or Joe is peddling). Is this really needed? Will it actually offer any fresh insights, intimations, angles, or gags that were somehow missed in the past 25 years of MJ's increasingly ulcerated ubiquity? Even if it does flint a new spark, how does that help us?

America's cutting-edge crackpots are putting on their brownshirts, people are losing their jobs all over the damn place, Taiwan was almost washed onto the seabed, Iran's still all kinds of fucked up, and not even Bill Ward & Tony Iommi can keep it together for old times' sake. The fuck do I care about Michael Jackson as reified symbol of Reaganite predatory accumulation?

But oh me, oh my - I've just disqualified myself from the conversation, at least according to Mark "K-Punk" Fisher's rules of (dis)engagement. I've exhibited "the dull malice of snatching people's toys away from them," perhaps even "a poisonous envy of others who are possessed by this kind of depersonalising passion." Maybe I'm what Mark calls a "grey vampire" ("Like moths... drawn by the light of energetic commitment, but unable to themselves commit"), though I'm more probably a "troll". As some gonzoid shit-talker outside the south English inner sanctum of serious cultural theory, surely I "think that is a duty to deflate enthusiasm and puncture projects", what with my incessant entreaties for "more bitterness, less enthusiasm" from behind my "devil's advocate" parapet. Yet fear not, for Mark has a foolproof prescription to counteract my rhetorical toxicity:

Once you've established they are a troll, sever all contact with them and - this is imperative - don't read anything they write... The final victory over them is achieved by simply persisting in the pursuit of a project, refusing to allow yourself to be ensnared in the self-doubts and impotent autocritique... Occasionally GVs can be caught out. Beneath the moth-grey sadness of the GVs, there is always a raging red core of useless anger and resentment - the worst kind of anger and resentment, because it is directed against those who have projects.

To prune this academic survival guide to its essence: ignore anyone who is less than sycophantically supportive, because they're just jealous loafers whose accomplishments are nil. Gosh, I know there's a conventional nickname for this energy-sapping backseat driver that Mark's daintily avoided employing... what is it, what is it, what is it?

Oh yeah, that's right - Haters!

A short while ago, Ads Without Products noted that "grey vampires" and Mark's taxonomic retailoring of "troll" seem to be code for "those who disagree with Mark":

The fact of the matter is that there are no conversational slots to fit into other than fawning agreement apparently. Respectful criticism is in fact disrespectful passive-aggressiveness, but disrespectful criticism won’t even be countenanced... The analysis of social structures and their deformative effect upon discourse isn’t meant to be employed as a sort of defensive wall, an affirmative action programme for the bad ideas of the (self-positioned) abject. Anyone who disagrees with Mark disagrees because they are the over-confident agents of power and class. Sorry, though. Whatever the social dynamics at play, it could be that your ideas are simply wrong.

...doesn’t this seem like the sort of thing you would say when you’re not so much resolute in your ideas, single-mindedly committed to your project, but rather scared shitless that someone’s found a hole or holes, someone is asking questions that you simply don’t have the guts or brains or honesty to answer?

Two months later, Mark still refuses to respond directly to any of AWP's criticisms - which at least demonstrates a practical harmony among Mark's ideas & actions. Unfortunately, limiting discussion of the academic bestiary to what amounts to a monologue doesn't bolster Mark's own hypothesis. Bloody-minded fealty to an idea that someone else has discredited isn't gambling to "uncover new worlds", it's just ol'-fashioned idiocy. This puerile plugging of ears reminds of one of my favourite Space Ghost quotes, as he calmly describes to Bob Costas the sensation of having his skull heated to "a scorching 450 degrees":

You see, my brain's sending a message to my arms right now to put my head out. But I'm choosing to ignore that.

To be sure, this speculatively-inflated vilifcation of phantom Haters is one of the dumbest memes to have gathered steam around certain blogipelagos - and not just because it's the dialectic equivalent of going foetal. If Mark wasn't Quixotically trying to reappropriate the term "troll", then he appears to have radically misunderstood the word. First, he fails to distinguish between just some prick talkin' shit on a bulletin board, and a troll. Real trolls, trolls-by-vocation, capital-T troublemakers who can crack into Kevin Mitnick's iPhone - like those profiled in the NYT "Malwebolence" article from last August - are the frontiersmen stationed at the ever-expanding outermost fringes of the internet. They are the self-styled outlaws of an online Wild West of which most of us genteel folk are scarcely aware. Contrary to Mark's understanding, trolls neither "[spend] a great deal of time on the web saying how debased, how unsophisticated, the web is," nor do they "lose all their power once you cease to pay them attention." Trolls are the very engine of internet innovation, thanks to their fluid approaches to morality & identity, their circumvention of authority, and yes their ability to expand online hostilities into the physical realm. (For a detailed illustration of how trolls can bring the intermedial ruckus, google Adam L. Goldstein.) Trolls' ability to infiltrate & incinerate an online environment is the very kind of revolutionary, scorched-earth, "Year Zero" program of which Mark is (or until very recently was) very fond.

Orotund excuses for ignoring any & all criticism are very seductive, and so aboard the bandwagon an embarrassing number of people jumped, often making their own additions to the menagerie of academic boogeymen. Larval Subjects proposed a defensive counterpart to the grey vampire's passive-aggressive parasitism: the Minotaur.

For the Minotaur it is never possible for there to be a genuine philosophical difference or a genuine difference in positions among philosophers. Rather, the Minotaur converts every philosophical opposition into a misinterpretation. The text(s) guarded by the Minotaur thus become a Labyrinth from which there is no escape.

Of course, when Mikhail Emelianov pointed out that the Minotaur was a prisoner, not a guardian, of the Labyrinthe, he was immediately accused of being... a troll. How quickly that conversation cocooned itself.

This mythological mix-up, along with Mark K-Punk's erroneous understanding of what monsters actually inhabit the internet, is symptomatic of the pandemic problem with online punditry: far too often, people just don't know what the fuck they're talking about.

Seems quite obvious, I know. But I'm not even talking about the scatological free-for-alls of, say, YouTube comment threads; I'm speaking strictly of widely-read, respected writers with obvious enthusiasm for their subjects and a large font of knowledge & experience from which to draw. Even they seem to suffer from twin inabilities to admit (1) there's knowledge beyond their specific proficiency, and (2) that sometimes, sometimes, they're wrong. I've made each of these missteps, mostly the former, though I try to outline the gaps in my expertise up front. I know next to nothing about the broader sweep of popular electronic music; in such a discussion, I'd have to defer to Simon Reynolds, Zone Styx, et al. Similarly, I'm largely ignorant about architecture (beyond the perfunctory opinion that brutalism is butt-ugly) and so submit to the superior acquaintance of E&V's Murphey or Owen Hatherley.

However, when Hatherley starts waxing forlorn about the Wu-Tang Clan, my bullshit detector registers in the red. That Hatherley "decided to investigate what the GZA is up to now" - as opposed to having given Pro Tools several spins when it dropped - betrays what's little more than a touristic interest in hip-hop. The anonymous plaintiff who asks "where's [Wu-Tang's] grit, the murk?" has clearly missed the first ten years of Cage's career, Ghostface's fantastic Fishscale, the widely-hailed Madvillain, Madlib's grubby production on Mos Def's The Ecstatic, and damn near the whole Def Jux catalogue. More disturbingly, the litany of references to The Wire and preoccupation with "unglamorous, non-gangsta poverty" seem to insist that potent hip-hop (and perhaps African-American culture in general) is born only of dire, undesirable circumstances. At its most benign, this is the juvenile drama-club/Hot Topic contention that suffering is essential to art; at worst, it's a patronizing claim that authenticity within hip-hop can only be earned by dodging bullets at Cabrini Green. Evidently, middle-class black musicians such as Erykah Badu, Outkast, and the Roots need not apply.

Aside from literally ghettoizing an art form that is meant to be emancipatory, this condescension demands that hip-hop remain immature. It demands that Jay-Z, rather than celebrating his ascension from the Marcy Projects to the Forbes Top 20, continue slinging rhymes about "bare cupboards, late cheques, unemployment." It demands that Ghostface, age 39, remain the raging 23-year-old he was on Enter the 36 Chambers. Dennis Coles himself, however, refuses to deny the passage of time and its effect of both himself and his art:

There aren’t enough men in the world. You got all these cats running around, trying to be little 19-year-old niggas and shit. But you’s a man, B. It’s time to grow up.

But this isn't a pissing contest about who has a more genuine affection for hip-hop. This is about the manner in which "cultural theorists" (at least those who deserve the scare quotes) construct and support their arguments. Most arrive at the table with a well-manicured set of aesthetics and/or a predetermined cultural hypothesis and cherry-pick music, film, etc. that supports the conclusion to which they've already come. They do this by focusing on relics, ephemera that has already settled into a well-worn niche in the cultural canon - precisely why an old co-worker of mine lambasted hip-hop "fans" who only listened to hip-hop that was at least already a decade old. There's not much bravery in basing a theory entirely on hindsight, nor is parading the urn of a long-interred artistic phenomenon, a.k.a. hauntology, anything other than another form of necrophilic post-modernism. So until someone produces an essay on how, for example, Lil Jon or the Three Six Mafia are demonstrative of the post-millenial rapacity of George W. Bush's America, I won't believe that they approach their analysis in any other way.

Not to mention - I defy anyone to come up with a succinct-yet-sweeping diagnosis of Michael Jackson's terminal simulacrum in America's memory to top Katt Williams'.

Duh-Duh-Duh-Deutsche Unit!

Dear Jessica,

Yes, Peter Fox is what passes for domestic hip-hop here in DE (not, however unlikely this may be, to be confused with Delaware). The pisser is that Fox is as good as it gets, and easily has the most musically sophisticated production. Here's the most popular *ahem* hip-hop group in Germany, Fettes Brot (Fatty Bread), from Hamburg:



And you thought anyone who still thought "Whoop! (There It Is)" is the bollocks was now confined to sharing a padded cell in a Miami psych ward with Luther Campbell. At least, contextually it renders the fact the Bloodhound Gang still have a career in this country a little less flabbergasting. But I don't give a shit if Thom Yorke rates 'em, Modeselektor are persona non grata on my stereo just for producing this tune.

Meanwhile, here's Berlin's godfather of gangsta, Bushido:



Ignore the fact that he nicked the backing synth pads from Madonna's "Power of Goodbye". And finally, here's Sido, who I've heard is supposed to be Germany's answer to both ODB and Jay-Z, but you tell me how that works. Actually, just tell me what the hell this guy's on about in the first place. Here's your RDA of WTF:



Of course, here I am slagging off Deutsche hip-hop when I'm about to move back to Japan. Bless the Japanese, man, 'cuz they can outdo anyone at garage-rock hissy-fits or brain-burning psych-noise, but they can not fucking do hip-hop:



So there's the second big backslap of the week, my Yankee comrade: y'all elected a liberal-leaning black intellectual, plus you're still the only nation on the planet that does hip-hop properly.

More Blogging About Buildings and Sound

It's been quite a busy week, hasn't it? The Democratic convention wrapped up, Putin continued coaxing heat from long-cold embers, Japan lost its second prime minister in as many years, New Orleans was struck by a dreadful deja-vu, Thailand's esteem as a vacationer's paradise plummeted, and (as Salon.com put it) Hurricane Bristol hit Minnesota. As the above links give away, I've been listening to an inordinate amount of Nick Cave because his dank, sleazy Jeremiads seem well-suited to the atmosphere. But I'm not interested in talking about Nick Cave today.

My friend JD is a devotee of '70s big-band funk & r'n'b - the Gap Band, Chic, P-Funk, and the like. Last week, he noted that (outside the state fair circuit) this species of act has gone extinct, and wondered aloud why this happened. The easy answer is that their moment in the sun had expired and they had to hang up their sequined jumpsuits. But that's as intellectually satisfying as saying 9/11 happened because They Hate Our Freedom.

A better explanation would be an economic one. The ascension of hip-hop in the late '70s was nothing less than the first homemade-music revolution: no longer was it necessary to have bulky amps, prohibitively priced instruments, PA, or (often the most troublesome variable) a secure practice space. If there was a turntable in the household, there was the sole necessary musical tool. By tapping into a streetlight's electricity, a home stereo could turn a park or street corner into a music venue as MCs battled unamplified in public.

This phenomenon grew exponentially and across genres with the advent of samplers, 4-track cassette recorders, and laptop computers equipped with a plethora of user-friendly software. In The Psychic Soviet, Ian Svenonius argued that a housing crunch exacerbated the trend towards smaller ensembles and amateur production. Following the urban blights of the 1980s, the forces of gentrification launched a full-scale invasion of major cities in the 1990s, leading to vanishing vacancy rates and skyrocketing rents. When a basement efficiency is costing upwards of 60% of your income, you can't afford to be concerned about practice space - you make the most of what you've got.

There's also the social element to consider. Bands are considered creatively compromising by, uh, everyone who's ever been in a band, which is why they all break up, spin off, or implode. The chance to be the lone (wo)man on the mic, solo and center-stage, is irresistible to the ego. As a matter of format, hip-hop is a soloist's idiom. Particularly gifted - or at least bankable - MCs can have their pick of the production litter while remaining the locus of attention, if only because they're the sole constant over the course of a whole album. Conversely, a skilled producer also adept at rhyming can run the whole show unfettered by conflicting opinions.

Also, though there's an unmatched magic in the balance of multiple strong personalities, every additional person in a creative venture represents a risk. At best, they're an extra voice in the conversation, but at worst they're a liability - a truth clear to those familiar with Professor Griff of Public Enemy, The Game, or, heck, Scott Weiland.

Having taken extensive notes, the rock underground (Jacking black culture since 1951!) has produced its own reconstitutions of the above creative considerations. Electroclash, mash-ups, chiptune, hardware-free solid-state techno, whatever the fuck it is village idiot Dan Deacon does - these are all self-produced, small-ensemble subgenres born of cost-efficient equipment and claustrophobic spaces. But unlike hip-hop, they're also tainted by the nebbish indie insistence upon an intrinsic smallness of the music; when made, grand gestures and spectacle invariably wink so hard the irony drips out like crocodile tears.

And so begins the bitter expostulatory portion of the essay! Following the analogous relationship between religion and music, I'd define myself as a kind of gnostic pentecostal; my philosophy is antithetical to Momus' anti-metaphysical "superflat" nihilism. Consequently, I find that the deconstructive materialism of much indie rock misses the whole point, smirking itself into an artistic Limbo instead of shooting the moon with the crosshairs on Heaven. There's little solace in hip-hop either, but for an entirely different reason: I find the human voice to be an invasive, traumatic presence. Card-carrying Lacanian Slavoj Žižek put it in layman's terms in his Pervert's Guide to Cinema:

Voice is not an organic part of the human body, it is coming from somewhere in-between your body. Whenever we talk to another person, there is always this minimum of ventriloquist effect, as if some foreign power took possession... It is as if we are expecting the famous scene from Ridley Scott's Alien to repeat itself. As if we have just waited for some terrifying, alien, evil-looking small animal to jump out.

In that regard, most of my favourite vocalists are pointedly unpleasant, exaggerating their assaultive presence within the music: David Yow, Mark E. Smith, El-P, early Nick Cave. (He made it into the conversation after all!) If only because their skills are rooted in street-corner braggadocio, most MCs have no interest in psychically unsettling the listener. They opt instead for either political discomfort (considerably easier to dismiss), or paying tribute to their own boundless star-power.

Though this comes as no suprise given how often I refer to His Worship Kevin Shields, the music I find most effective is a pan-sensual miasma, a syrupy narcosis, or a searing hail of sonic shrapnel. It boasts mass and velocity, but of a mercurial, chaotic sort. The music that ultimately means anything to me is an audial short-circuit to Stendhal Syndrome - immersive, overwhelming, yet organic. Being a mechanical artifice, the digital is incapable of transcendence. As noted last week, "Events that don't happen in air have no medium for existence, sounds made in a totally digital environment are effectively stillborn" - or, more horrifying, undead. But, stripped of digital alchemy, it becomes very difficult to produce music capable of sensory overload as a solo act.

And so, for all the squabbles, cramped quarters, and clumsy stacks of equipment... we're back in a big room, full of hotheaded humans, armed with steel, wood, and speakers.

By the way, the next time Earth, Wind & Fire come to your town, check 'em out. I hear they're still able to kill it. Click on the mix title to download.

Sensory Overloud

1. Ashra - "77 Slightly Delayed" (00:00)
2. Can - "Oh Yeah" (06:31)
3. Fugazi - "Steady Diet" (13:45)
4. The Jesus & Mary Chain - "Upside Down" (17:23)
5. Faust - "Krautrock" (20:16)
6. Brian Eno - "Here Come the Warm Jets" (27:45)
7. Tim Hecker - "Blood Rainbow" (31:30)
8. Jonny Greenwood - "Henry Plainview" (35:19)
9. My Bloody Valentine - "All I Need" (35:48)
10. Sonic Youth - "Eric's Trip" (38:47)
11. Tricky - "Christiansands" (42:32)
12. Fela Kuti - "Roforofo Fight" (46:11)
13. Boredoms - "Super Going" (53:57)
14. The Psychic Paramount - "Gamelan Into the Mink Supernatural" (01:05:56)
15. The Beatles - "Tomorrow Never Knows" (01:15:48)

Non-Sequitorial Postscript: Well, a pity - looks like we no longer live "in a whurruld..."

In Search of Fantasmic Coordinates

In a fit of nostalgia piqued by my Fourth of July mix, Th' Wife & I dusted off the Soundgarden catalogue and debated at length if the songs have been dated only by Chris Cornell's operatic caterwaul. I'd say so: the only things differentiating, say, "Limo Wreck" from the diamonds in the latter-day stoner-rock rough are (a) the teeth-grittingly crisp snare, and (b) that it's sung in neither a dozy one-octave moan, nor a Cookie Monster growl.

But the perennial relevance of sludge-blues post-Sabbath riffery isn't the point. While listening to the afore-mentioned song, my wife mentioned that it'd be perfect "stripper music." Huh? I thought miserablist hard rock was the soundtrack to garnment-relief only in certain niche clubs on the Reeperbahn or shameless subcultural caricatures like Doom Generation. But my wife insisted that hard rock is the pole-dancer's primary musical resource. (Not that she'd know firsthand, I'd should add.)

I conceded that the sledgehammer-subtle simian chest-thumping of Kid Rock, Nickelback, or Creed would make sense in stripclubs with stages wreathed in chickenwire, frequented by dudes who sport unironic moustaches and think Belgian beer makes you gay. By that standard, Motley Crue, Whitesnake, and Van Halen make stripperific music too.

So let's go one step beyond the machismo of Diamond Dave, via the fretboard fireworks of Eddie: skipping the Zeuhlish intro, could "YYZ" by Rush make a good stripper song? Hell no, said my wife.

Fair enough; perhaps that's a bit too distant from the id. Back to Soundgarden: evidently, not all their material makes a woman want to take her clothes off. "My Wave," for example, is too stiff-legged and asymmetrical to be sensual. It's the songs with more syrupy tempos and serpentine riffs that, e.g. "Mailman," that fit the bill.

Ah, I see the orthodoxy: stoner rock. But as I subjected my wife to a trawl through my music collection, the issue only became more clouded, and I couldn't quite find the thread that led to a surefire stripper hit.

~Kyuss - Yes, striptacular.
~Queens Of the Stone Age - Nope. Wait, what?! "Too dry, too much in the head and not the hips," apparently. I suppose I can see that: the woman is literally thrown away in the first verse, and Josh Homme is more concerned that he/we (?) "believe it in [his/our] head," but in neither the heart nor the loins.
~Rob Zombie - Yes. We're back on track. This makes sense, 'cuz it's basically a disco beat with monotonous metal guitars. By that standard, Rammstein would also work (which I find a little unsettling) yet, for reasons that escape me, Ministry would not.
~UFOMammut - "Oh, yeah, totally." Wow. This isn't just chewing on a freshly-harvested adrenaline gland, this is sexy? I'm either thrilled or terrified.
~Black Sabbath - No, and for the same reason that QOTSA didn't qualify: this is unfeeling, adolescent alienation, all male mushaburui isolated from a sensualizing female touch. It's there from the first line: "Finished with my woman 'cuz she couldn't help me with my mind." The song actually banishes the female to remain rooted in the unphysical male psyche.
~Sleep - Yes, but their appeal would be more "boutique."
~Om - Nope.
~Melvins - Maybe?
~Zoroaster - Meh.
~Boris - Uh-uh. Who could dance to this, other than spazzes or zombies?

My wife said, "It's not so much a matter of being sexy as being stripperful."* I smell a doctoral thesis somewhere in here. Of course, because of my familiarity with heavy guitar rock in general, I can start to sense the inarticulable subtleties that cleave strip-worthy stoner rock from not. But, taking a step back out of my element: beyond blaring Marshall stacks and a slamming rhythm section, what do Kid Rock and Whitesnake have in common with each other, let alone Soundgarden or Kyuss? And what makes them "good" stripper music?

A brief scan of various Yahoo! Answers surveys and a Maxim online list offered no new leads, only the usual suspects: Aerosmith, Def Leppard, Guns N Roses, "Closer," and yes, Motley Crue, Whitesnake, and Kid Rock. There's the occasional stripclub DJ frontiersman who'll be so bold as to spin Tricky, Lovage, or the Kills, but this appears to be far from the norm.

The crux of my conundrum is: in what way does glam-metal & arena-rock enable the fantasmic element essential to enjoying a stripclub? How does "Welcome To the Jungle" fit into the sexual psyche? Actually - does it? Could it be that so many people find stripclubs depressing and/or pathetic because it's been erroneously assumed that the absurd debauchery of, say, Tommy Lee's lovelife is what we want?

I should confess that I've never actually been to a stripclub, for two key reasons: (1) nowhere in my sexual psyche is there a place where I empty my wallet to watch young(ish) women desperately disrobe, and (2) I came of age in Baltimore. Have you ever been to The Block? Since I didn't wanna get shot for looking at the wrong guy, stabbed with a dirty hypodermic needle, or catch VD by simply breathing in the wrong direction, I stayed far, far away from such establishments.

Of course, it wouldn't do to ignore the other genre that looms large over stripclub playlists: r'n'b-inflected hip-hop (or is that hip-hop-inflected r'n'b?). It's immediately a more intuitive choice, given that it aims to induce hip-shaking and not head-banging. But as the "playa" has gradually supplanted the "gangsta" as hip-hop's dominant mythological figure, much hip-hop & r'n'b seems to be tailored specifically for stripclubs, as opposed to nightclubs in general.

This is much to the chagrin of, amongst others, a good friend of ours. "I am so sick of music telling me, as a woman, what to do," she's said on a few occasions. "I'm not getting low, shaking, dropping, or spreading a damn thing. Why don't you show me what you can do, punk?" She's taken a vow of dancefloor abstinence until a time when the YinYang Twins are plowed into the landflow of embarrassing pop-cultural mistakes. (I'm sure she'd be appalled at how frequently the YingYang Twins are cited as exemplary stripping music on this Yahoo! Answers thread.)

The manner in which contemporary hip-hop & r'n'b unfurl their cartoonishly lurid & utterly unironic sexual fantasia is remarkably similar to how glam-metal & arena-rock do it. I find such self-seriousness both comical and repugnant; there is nothing fantastic in it for me, only confusion. (But then, nothing gets me in the mood like the live Birthday Party LP, so there's no accounting for taste.) Consequently, I need some assistance in locating the fantasmic coordinates of this... "good" stripper music.

SO... what is good stripper music, and (if I may be so bold) why?

(*) As quickly as she can hit the nail on the head, my wife can also infinitely complicate the issue, as she did when noting the cultural bridges between stripper music and (1) "trucker music," and (2) redneck arena-rock anthems. As ugly as it is to contemplate, perhaps American sexual nirvana is some combination of a baseball cap with a Confederate flag, No-Doze, and some chick jumping out of her overalls.