THE VIDEO Mötley Crüe, "Girls, Girls, Girls," Girls, Girls, Girls, 1987, Elektra
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SAMPLE LYRIC "Girls! Girls! Girls! / Long legs and burgundy lips! / Girls! Girls! Girls! / Dancin' down on the Sunset Strip"
THE VERDICT Girls, Girls, Girls is definitely not my favorite Mötley Crüe album. It all feels a bit forced, like Vince Neil wearing frosted pink lipstick during Theatre of Pain threatened their male fanbase soo much that now they have to go as far the other way as possible, with strippers, motorcycles, and the beginnings of what will soon be all-out tattoo bonanzas on Nikki Sixx and Tommy Lee. Boo!
On the other hand, people always say to "write what you know" and "do what you love" and so on, so it's not entirely surprising that the Crüe would write an ode to strip clubs. If you've ever read The Dirt or really even just seen an interview with any member of the band (or okay, any member of the band who isn't Mick Mars), you know that the Crüe are really into boobs and performative sex.
Yes, even years before Tommy Lee would marry Pamela Anderson, and create the sex tape that really solidifies this Crüe-boobs-performative sex triumvirate, this comes across loud and clear. It predates the tattoos and motorcycles by nearly a decade in my estimation.
I was, as per the internet, only able to come up with the NSFW version of this video (or I guess really the NSFMTV version). It's really not that different from the original though -- more ass-only shots, thongs, toplessness toward the end. It merely underscores how all of these women would not be strippers today -- there's hardly an implant in sight (okay, there's one woman I find suspicious), a bunch of them aren't that young, and in general, they're wayyy more natural.
I'm actually thinking there's possibly more than one NSFW version of this video. The one I've been watching to write this post has a lot of topless women actually dancing around Vince, who's sitting in a backward-facing chair on the stage. I feel like though I've seen another one where the black-and-white canned footage of Nikki at the end has topless women superimposed next to it. You never know, I could be wrong. I spend so much time watching them that I've been known to have oddly specific dreams about heavy metal videos that don't really exist.
Actually there's one other thing that's different about it -- if you've seen the MTV version, you'll see that almost no money is exchanged. In the uncut version, the strippers often have cash stuffed in their various, uh, garments. It's interesting that MTV was like having exotic dancers is okay, but demonstrating that it's a monetary transaction is a no-no. What, do they really think that'll take this down to the level of Club MTV?
This video is basically like Flashdance meets the Robin Byrd Show. If you've ever lived in New York City, you freakin' know who Robin Byrd is, don't pretend. Okay, for those who don't, she's an often fairly out-of-it adult entertainer who interviews strippers and porn stars, and lets them do a little dance (frequently set to bad early '90s club music and with a backdrop reminiscent of You Can't Do That on Television). They mostly run reruns, so a lot of her guests are from around this time, or a little later. In general, the whole thing is only slightly more salacious than what you see here (there's some mild fondling and the occasional pantomimed sex act) -- at the same time though, if I were you, I wouldn't click on any of the links in this paragraph if I were at work.
At the same time, this video is totally like Flashdance, a movie whose premise has always struck me as ridiculous. What, that a welder-by-day and dancer-by-night might realize her dreams of being a ballerina? Ummm noooo, the idea that the patrons of a dive bar like Mawby's really sit through a bunch of costumed modern dance routines without heckling the dancers to take off their tops. They even underscore this with the scene when Jennifer Beals' failed figure skater friend becomes a stripper, and they're all like, "no no, that's much too degrading. It's nothing like what we do every night."
In any event, the costumes in this video are very Flashdance, especially the girl in the sort of well, Mötley Crüe-esque costume who tears her fishnets and crawls around on the floor. If she'd just kept her top on, this would pretty much be a scene from Flashdance.
The other thing I find deeply amusing about this video is how the Crüe have created sort of an ideal typical strip club. If you aren't familiar with the concept of an ideal type, it comes from the sociologist Max Weber. The gist of it is that the ideal type of something is the perfect concept of how something would be. This isn't in the sense of perfect or ideal in that it's necessarily good or somehow best, it's more that it has all of the attributes that we would expect something to have. A key point about ideal types is that they don't really exist out in the world, they merely exist as reference points for generating theory. Oh, also they exist in heavy metal music videos.
Weber uses this to talk about things like the state and bureaucracy, but Mötley Crüe here extend the idea to the strip club. They've created a seedy looking place where the dancers are enthusiastic, and all of the male patrons can share in the ogling good times to be had. The Harley-riding bad boys of Mötley Crüe can sit side by side with the trucker and the businessman. The young and the old, the affluent and the working class stiff, all can share in the Crüe's strippertopian vision. Tommy and Nikki even joke around with some of the other patrons, showing themselves to be men of the (male) people.
Only Mick seems -- not unexpectedly -- more or less immune to the strippers' charms. He raises his sunglasses once, but otherwise he plays the solo in the Seventh Veil's dressing room without peeling his eyes away from his guitar even once. He is probably trying to figure out which of the strippers are really aliens or pod people or some such.
The other thing that's a bit genius about this song is the shout-outs the Crue give to all these real strip clubs of the world -- the Sunset Strip's (now defunct) Tropicana and (the very much still there) Body Shop, Vancouver's Marble Arch, the Crazy Horse in Paris (umm is that where Rusty gets caught in European Vacation?). They even show Thee Doll House (actually in Miami, but they needed to rhyme it with Tattletales), with a couple of genuinely gorgeous women hanging around in front (most of the video is shot at the Seventh Veil, in case you didn't notice the vaguely Middle Eastern-looking bar area). If they ever had to pay for drinks or lap dances at those places before, well, we can assume they never had to again. Plus, as long as those clubs stayed in business, the Crüe are more or less guaranteed that they'll have to play this song at least once an hour.
At the same time though, if you've again, ever seen an interview with the Crüe, read or heard anything about them really, you know that even women who weren't professional sex workers had a lot of trouble keeping their tops on around them in the 80s. Why would they even bother with strip clubs? Maybe they really like hot wings. Yeah, come to think, I could totally see Tommy being really into hot wings.