{"id":94496,"date":"2016-02-17T16:00:50","date_gmt":"2016-02-17T21:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=94496"},"modified":"2016-02-18T12:19:47","modified_gmt":"2016-02-18T17:19:47","slug":"all-is-vanity-part-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/02\/17\/all-is-vanity-part-one\/","title":{"rendered":"All Is Vanity: Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"art_vanity\"<\/span><\/p>\n

Denise Matthews\u2014aka Vanity\u2014died this week, at the age of fifty-seven. In memoriam, we\u2019re sharing this \u201906 exchange from the late, lamented Moistworks, the music blog founded by James Morris and more or less edited by Alex Abramovich.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

From:\u00a0Alex Abramovich
To:\u00a0Emily Barton
Date: 6\/1\/2006
Subject:\u00a0 Hello, Nasty
<\/span><\/p>\n

Dear Emily,<\/p>\n

A few days ago, I was afraid \u201cNasty Girl<\/a>\u201d\u00a0would buckle under the weight of our critical faculties. Today, I\u2019m wondering if I\u2019m up to the existential challenge. I\u2019m glad you\u2019re along for the ride.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start with the bare facts: The first of Prince\u2019s many side projects, Vanity 6 was made up of Prince\u2019s high school girlfriend, his wardrobe supervisor, and a chiseled nude model named Denise Matthews (no relation to Moistworks\u2019s own, chiseled Megan Matthews<\/a>). It was a concept band, in that Prince envisioned a group dressed in lingerie, performing the lewdest songs imaginable. (Bonus Facts: Prince wanted to name the group the\u00a0Hookers, and suggested that Matthews\u2014the \u201cVanity\u201d in Vanity 6\u2014go by the stage name Vagina. According to Wikipedia, \u201cthe 6 represented the group\u2019s breast count.\u201d Nice one, Prince!)<\/p>\n

According to the credits, \u201cNasty Girl\u201d was written by Vanity herself (the music was performed by the\u00a0Time<\/a>). But it\u2019s likely that Prince played no small role in its composition, and this makes \u201cNasty Girl\u201d especially odd, because the song\u2019s real subject seems to have something to do with imaginative projection: a\u00a0girl, who calls herself a \u201cmystery girl,\u201d who refuses to give her name, who\u2019s \u201cliving in a fantasy,\u201d who\u2019s repeatedly asking her prospective lover if\u00a0he<\/i>\u00a0imagines her to be \u201ca nasty girl.\u201d\u00a0This is the kind of question that once it\u2019s posed, there\u2019s only one way to answer it, and you\u2019d better wear a condom.<\/p>\n

As if to prove the point, Vanity gets into some rather bizarre specifics (i.e., she\u2019s \u201clooking for a man who\u2019ll do it anywhere \/ Even on my limousine floor\u201d\u2014if I\u2019m remembering\u00a0No Way Out<\/a><\/em>\u00a0correctly, isn\u2019t \u201cdoing it\u201d pretty much what limousine floors are for?) Also, did I mention that Vanity has a thing for sailors? For her, it\u2019s as if \u201cwater on the brain\u201d is a turn-on. She must have missed fleet week, though, because it\u2019s \u201cbeen a while\u201d since she \u201chad a man who did it real good.\u201d And so: \u201cWhip it out \/ Whip it out,\u201d and the strange (non)specificity of \u201cseven\u00a0inches or more,\u201d and the weird (non)entendre of \u201cGive me something I can croon to \/ Catch my drift?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Emily, this is a weird song.<\/p>\n

Weird, too, is Vanity\u2019s idea of what a nasty girl might be: I don\u2019t think she means \u201cnasty\u201d as in \u201cyellow teeth, and a cha-cha that smells like a hot day in Chinatown.\u201d But neither does she mean \u201cnasty\u201d in a totally funky get-down-on-the-get-down (preferably on my limousine floor) sort of way\u2014and not just because (a.) whorish Madonnas are sexier than pure-hearted prostitutes, and (b.) the nastiest girls often turn out to be librarians on vacation. In fact, the more I think about the nasty girl under discussion, the safer she comes to seem. There\u2019s so much distancing involved\u2014the mask, the mystery girl, Vanity channeling a Prince who\u2019s imagining what it\u2019s like to be a woman imagining a man imagining her as a nasty girl\u2014that, dirty-minded or not, Vanity might as well be wearing a chastity belt.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m looking forward to getting into all of this (not to mention the\u00a0video<\/a>) with you. But before signing off, a few more things about Vanity, nee Matthews, who (cue the puritanism) ended up addicted to crack, suffered a stroke, a heart attack, kidney damage, and the (temporary) loss of her sight and hearing, before (I\u2019m reading from her\u00a0Web site<\/a>\u00a0here) finding Jesus:<\/span><\/p>\n

Prior to finding my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, I lived in a bottomless pit playground of cocaine addiction…. I\u2019d inhaled enough rock that you could light me up, smoke me, and stick me in the nearest cold grave. Sinking down into deep, deep depression, I camouflaged my pain with even more makeup and a fake smile.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These days, Vanity appears in public as The Evangelist Denise Matthews (\u201cPlease don’t call her Vanity any more,\u201d a\u00a0fan<\/a>\u00a0site advises. \u201cVanity<\/em> means nothingness, and we wouldn\u2019t want to call her that\u201d). But listening again, I’m beginning to wonder if Matthews didn\u2019t write the song herself, in anticipation of the song Prince might have written for her. And so, if the camouflaged pain and fake smiles were there from day one.<\/p>\n

Vanity, vanity …<\/p>\n

aa<\/p>\n

__________________<\/p>\n

From: Emily Barton
To: Alex Abramovich
Date: 6\/1\/2006
Subject: Water on the Brain<\/p>\n

Dear Alex,<\/p>\n

I agree with you. There\u2019s a lot to puzzle over in this song\u2014beginning, for me, with why, as a sixteen-year-old good-girl college freshman raised on a steady diet of \u201cFree to Be You and Me\u201d\u00a0[MP3]<\/a>\u00a0by my liberal, feminist parents, I should have been obsessed with it. (Maybe I just answered my own question.) When I originally asked you about the song, I assumed I was interested purely for nostalgic reasons; but having listened to it steadily over the past few weeks, I realize it\u2019s also a really good song, in spite or perhaps because of its many textual instabilities.<\/p>\n

Just for starters, we are in agreement that limousine floors were made for doin\u2019 it, but the verse as a whole may be even weirder than you\u2019ve mentioned:
<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m lookin\u2019 for a man to love me
Like I never been loved before
I\u2019m lookin\u2019\u00a0for a man that\u2019ll do it anywhere\u00a0
Even on a limousine floor<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If we leave aside the irksome \u201cthat,\u201d Vanity is, to paraphrase, looking for someone who\u2019ll be willing to have sex anywhere\u2014not, as far as I know, a\u00a0super-rare characteristic in a man\u2014including\u00a0the most promising<\/i>\u00a0locations. So, um, this is hard to come by?<\/p>\n

Or take the next verse:
<\/span><\/p>\n

Guess I\u2019m just used to sailors
I think they got water on the brain
I think they got more water upstairs
Than they got sugar on a candy cane\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019m guessing that it\u2019s not so much that she has a thing for sailors, as that most of the fellas she\u2019s been with have been pretty dumb; so dumb, in fact, that they\u2014well. That\u2019s probably the same \u201csugar\u201d as in Nina Simone\u2019s magnificent \u201cI Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl<\/a>,\u201d i.e., some lovin\u2019; and I don\u2019t think we have to stretch our imaginations too far to find an analog for the candy cane. These guys are dumber than they are sexy. \u201cThat\u2019s right,\u201d\u00a0Vanity goes on,
<\/span><\/p>\n

…. Been a long time
Since I had a man that did it real good
So if you ain’t scared take it out
I’ll do it like a real live nasty girl should<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Still that blasted \u201cthat.\u201d) So, okay: she hasn\u2019t been satisfied with these meatheads, and if the guy she\u2019s propositioning isn\u2019t afraid, she\u2019ll be happy to show him a thing or two. But why would he be afraid? And is she differentiating a real, live nasty girl from a make-believe one? And why, after all, does she pose her nastiness as a question in the chorus? Why, when she\u2019s Vanity, for God\u2019s sake, does she need some guy to tell her she\u2019s a nasty girl?<\/p>\n

I like your reading \u2014that she\u2019s Vanity channeling Prince imagining what it\u2019d be like to be a woman imagining a guy imagining her as a nasty girl\u2014but I also want to ask, Do you really think she wrote this song? Because if she didn\u2019t, then it\u2019s more like Prince channeling Vanity imagining Prince imagining what it\u2019d be like to be a woman imagining a guy imagining her as a nasty girl. If we were in college, this is the point at which I\u2019d write, \u201cAnd so, as you see, the text\u00a0literally deconstructs itself<\/i>,\u201d\u00a0and the point at which our TF would make a little red exclamation point in the margin.<\/p>\n

I guess the real question is, why so many layers of remove from the central problem of whether others perceive Vanity as nasty? (Both your readings of nasty<\/em>\u00a0have some truth in them; there may also be a smidgen of the kind of nastiness high school girls shoot in their little poison-blow-dart comments to each other. The get-down-on-the-get-down kind of nastiness is, as you say, not in actual fact quite as sexy as the \u201cI may look like a respectable citizen but in fact\u00a0I like to get down on the get down\u201d type; and perhaps this is what Vanity recognizes when she\u00a0asks<\/i>\u00a0her man to tell her he thinks she\u2019s nasty. E.g., \u201cAlthough I am built like a warrior goddess and am standing here in a black teddy and gloves, do you think I’m sexy?\u201d It\u2019s a paradox, parallel to the conundrum of finding a guy who\u2019ll be willing to do the nasty any-old-where.) I agree with you about the camouflaged pain and fake smiles; and I also think that if Vanity really is \u201cnothingness\u201d as Denise the Evangelist suggests, this is not the Zen nothingness of your face before your parents were born but the\u00a0vanitas vanitatum<\/i>, a deeply Christian reading of the emptiness of the manifest world.<\/p>\n

Also, have we talked about the weird little \u201cPlease, please\u201d interlude that seems to have come straight out of an Aretha Franklin number? And have we talked about the Inaya Day dance remix? I kind of like it.<\/p>\n

On another note, I\u2019m eager to hear what you have to say about the video. I have a few preliminary notes on it:<\/p>\n

1) Is it just because I\u2019m a straight girl that I\u2019m totally unmoved by the gyrating bum sequence?<\/p>\n

2) What do you make of the costume change? First they\u2019re in slutty dresses and then they\u2019re in the aforementioned lingerie (with a tailcoat? I guess that was sexy in 1982?), but is anything changed by the change?<\/p>\n

3) Alex, look at their\u00a0hair<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Look forward to hearing back from you tomorrow.
EB<\/p>\n

_____________________<\/p>\n

From: Alex Abramovich
To: Emily Barton
Date: 6\/1\/2006\u00a0
Subject: Sugar, Sugar\u00a0<\/p>\n

Dear Emily,<\/p>\n

Have you heard the Bessie Smith\u2019s gloriously vulgar recording of \u201cNeed Some Sugar In My Bowl\u201d<\/a>?\u00a0\u00a0Does the\u00a0fact that Nina cleaned up the lyrics, four decades down the line, say something about the wax and wane of America\u2019s puritanical impulse?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Speaking of same: I think you\u2019re right to connect the two songs, but it seems to me that, despite the obvious parallels, they\u2019re really quite different: \u201cSugar\u201d is a sweet and bittersweet song; what Nina \u201cwants\u201d is \u201csome sugar in my \u201d\u00a0and \u201csome sweetness down in my soul,\u201d\u00a0\u201cand “some steam on my clothes.\u201d What Vanity wants is a man who\u2019s not too scared to \u201cwhip it out\u201d and \u201cdo it\u201d on \u201cmy limousine floor.\u201d\u00a0Doing without makes Nina feel \u201cso lonely,\u201d and \u201cso sad,\u201d like someone who hasn\u2019t been held or stroked in a long time. Doing without makes Vanity aggressively\u2014well\u2014nasty. (It\u2019s worth noting that, working with the same text Nina used, Bessie Smith managed to be far more explicit; is it going too far to say that, for her, \u201csugar in my bowl\u201d amounts to \u201cejaculate in my vaginal canal\u201d?) In any case, in lieu of Vanity\u2019s nastiness, we have Nina\u2019s vulnerability. And in lieu of Vanity\u2019s \u201cplease,\u201d we\u2019ve got the tension between Nina\u2019s carefully-worded \u201cI could stand some loving\u201d and almost-desperate \u201coh so bad!\u201d\u00a0The songs have sultriness in common, but Nina\u2019s seems to contain more erotic possibilities. Why is that?<\/p>\n

My guess is it\u2019s because Vanity\u2019s\u00a0relations<\/a>\u00a0might just be of power. And here\u2019s where things get\u00a0really<\/i>\u00a0interesting: I hedged my bets a bit, in regards to whether or not Prince ghostwrote \u201cNasty Girl,\u201d because I didn\u2019t want to assume the obvious: that Prince ghostwrote \u201cNasty Girl.\u201d That he might have done so is interesting\u2014as you say, \u201cNasty Girl\u201d would then amount to \u201cPrince channeling Vanity imagining Prince imagining what it\u2019d be like to be a woman imagining a guy imagining her as a nasty girl.\u201d\u00a0But given the time Vanity spent in Prince\u2019s company (and Prince\u2019s bed), it seems possible that she could have anticipated the song he might have written\u2014channeled him channeling her\u2014internalized the hyper-sexual fantasies he was projecting onto her (remember the\u00a0Hookers, or Prince\u2019s original idea for Vanity\u2019s stage name?)\u2014then turned around and asked\/begged us to project those same fantasies back onto her. This isn\u2019t sex; it\u2019s role-playing, and while it might all be benign (it isn\u2019t, but let\u2019s say that it is), it\u2019s still pretty manipulative. In fact, you might say that control, no less than sex, is what \u201cNasty Girl\u201d is really all about.<\/p>\n

You wrote: \u201cI guess the real question is, why so many layers of remove from the central problem of whether others perceive Vanity as nasty?\u201d Perhaps it\u2019s that, for Vanity\u2014a beautiful woman, a nude actress, a singer who performs in lingerie and tailcoat, and no stranger to the male (and let\u2019s not forget, female) gaze\u2014so much depends upon \u201cthe problem of whether others perceive Vanity as nasty\u201d\u00a0as to obscure whatever extra-sexual virtues Denise Matthews might possess. So much so, perhaps, that the correct answer to \u201cDo you think I\u2019m a nasty girl?\u201d might just be \u201cNo, Denise, and I\u2019m not sure your relationship with Prince is doing you much good, either.\u201d\u00a0Cue: \u201cFree To Be You And Me.\u201d (Is it a coincidence that the other Vanity record that comes up on Amazon is a death-metal album called\u00a0Enslaved<\/a><\/em>, or that a few years later, Prince magic-markered the word slave<\/em> across the side of his own face? Like Malcolm said, in a slightly different context, the chickens\u2014they will roost.) Also, did we forget to mention how funky and fuckish this song is?<\/p>\n

Another thing that comes to mind is that great Ike & Tina Turner performance of \u201cI’ve Been Loving You Too Long<\/a>,\u201d in which Ike, who renamed and married Tina, then beat, burned, and tortured her, uses the call-and-response form to evoke the relationship a pimp might have with a prostitute. The song derives its charge, in part, from the same sado-and-just-plain-masochistic impulse that drives the\u00a0Crystal\u2019s \u201cHe Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)\u201d\u2014which would take us another two days to work through. But cue the camouflaged pain and fake smiles, right?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Regarding \u201cplease, please\u201d\u2014in his excellent\u00a0book<\/a>-length deconstruction of James Brown\u2019s Live At the Apollo<\/em>\u00a0album, Douglas Wolk points out that Brown\u2019s position, vis-\u00e0-vis his audience, is essentially prostrate:
<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI’ll Go Crazy\u201d is the first statement here of [Brown\u2019s] great theme:\u00a0you must not leave him<\/i>. If he stops commanding your attention, the craziness that makes him yowl and moan will consume everything.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here\u2019s Wolk again, on the subject of Brown\u2019s knees:<\/span><\/p>\n

James Brown does not, as a matter of routine, perform without begging, repeatedly. Not being one for half measures, he does not beg without falling to his knees. He falls to his knees half a dozen or so times in every show: on soft wooden floors like the Apollo\u2019s, on hard concrete stages, on carpet, on stone, on metal, on earth. Four or five shows a day, three hundred days a year, in the early years. A hundred or more shows a year, even now that he’s in his seventies. Fifty years in show business. Imagine James Brown falling to his knees for his audience tens of thousands of times, probably hundreds of thousands of times. Imagine the scar tissue, inches thick, on the knees of James Brown.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n


As you note, Vanity 6 is something of a warrior goddess\u2014could her begging, then, be another clue to what\u2019s going on in the song? Aretha\u2019s an interesting analogy, but she seems to me to be more of a proud asserter of her own authority. Still, what does it tell us that Billie Holliday, Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner, Nina Simone, and (I\u2019d guess) Vanity seemed to go for guys who badly misused them?<\/p>\n

As for the video:<\/p>\n

1) I\u2019m afraid the ass shaking\u2019s not doing it for me. But isn\u2019t Vanity a striking woman?<\/p>\n

2) The tailcoat + neglige is a classic, classy look. Is anything changed? Perhaps it\u2019s no more complicated: the song progresses, the girl undresses. But what\u2019s cool about this abbreviated, radio-friendly edit, is the way Vanity and\/or Prince save the real filth for the end\u2014a far better form of self-censorship than the constant bleeping you hear in today\u2019s \u201cclean version\u201d\u00a0slow jams.<\/p>\n

3) I know, I know. There\u2019s not much to this video. But, really, all that\u2019s missing from it is Vincent Price.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Okay, we\u2019ve got a lot of cans open in front of us. What should we do with the worms? And, I absolutely agree\u2014it\u2019s vanity in the\u00a0biblical<\/a>\u00a0sense. But then, what isn\u2019t?<\/p>\n

More tomorrow?<\/span><\/p>\n

Stay tuned for Part 2 tomorrow.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n
Alex Abramovich<\/a>\u00a0is the author of\u00a0<\/span><\/em>Bullies: A Friendship<\/a><\/span>, which will be published in March.<\/span><\/em><\/div>\n
Emily Barton\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0new novel,<\/em>\u00a0The Book of Esther<\/a>,\u00a0comes out this summer.\u00a0<\/em><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Denise Matthews\u2014aka Vanity\u2014died this week, at the age of fifty-seven. 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