Rock & Roll Whores

So I says to myself, self, I says, why do these rock & rollers always have songs about prostitutes? Maybe it’s the outsider status they both share, although, now, rockers are hardly outsiders. Maybe it’s because sex and money is what they both are all about. Also, the ones I choose were all English rockers, so maybe there is some stuffy English attitudes in there somewhere. Whatever it is, it needs scrutinizing. So I picked a few I knew and checked ‘em out. Won’t you join me? But first are you a cop? Cuz you have to tell me if you are a cop. Okay, here we go.

“Roxanne” by The Police

The most well-known ‘ho’ song. The Police took reggae music and extracted politics and sex to make safe pop music. Later on, Sting threw in references to Jung and all that, but no ganja references can be found. The narrator is in love with the whore and, lucky her, he doesn’t “talk down to” her. He is her knight in shining armor, bringing his chalice through the teaming crowds for her thirst. No more will she have to sell her body through the night. We never hear what she has to say though. We are stuck in his continuous chant, turn off the red light. Sounds ominous doesn’t it? Kind of like Othello’s chant of put out the light? All we know about Roxy is she doesn’t care if it’s wrong or right. My kind of woman. Maybe that’s the English attraction, since morals are about caring what your neighbor thinks, and the English love that shit. Personally, I don’t think the relationship will last. He’s too needy and bossy, and she looks great in red.

“22 Acacia Avenue” by Iron Maiden

The most straight forward and therefore lame streetwalker songs. And like most Iron Maiden songs, it’s in E and chugs along like a train. It has two narrators, but, again, not the prostitute’s view. The first narrator is a pimp telling the client about Charlotte the Harlot (from another Iron Maiden song). She only costs 15 quid, which is roughly 30 American dollars—not a bad deal, really. The song changes tempo and then we get the lovesick client begging her to stop, much like Sting’s wet-bag narrator. He warns her of disease and going past her prime. He asks if she loves to lay or the pay—looks like someone bought a rhyming dictionary. The pimp comes back and lists the various things you can do to her, the British are so exact. And in the end the narrator tells her to pack her bags, for she is coming with him. Yay! In Adrian Smith’s defense, he did write this when he was eighteen, but really, this song sucks. A heavy metal band should never be sincere, and that is what this song is.

“Sweet Painted Lady” by Elton John and Bernie Taupin

This song probably influenced the preceding two but as a far as lyrics go, it’s much better. Taupin is a weird lyricist, usually substituting wacky for emotion: “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids / In fact it’s cold as hell. And there’s no one there to raise them, if you did.” Hmm, okay, I won’t argue that Mars sucks to raise your children, but you could rocket up a nanny from earth I suppose. In “Sweet Painted Lady”, he tries to capture a relationship rather than a fantasy of men saving broken women. The narrator is a seaman—we know this because he is on dry land, there is a squeeze box playing in the background, along with the sound of seagulls—who apparently has tricks that he wants to show off. Where did he learn these tricks? On board the manly ship, perhaps? We also have a madam, promising beer, sex, and a warm bed to sleep in. That’s all I ever wanted. What’s nice about the lyrics is the lack of moralizing. The narrator shrugs, saying that sex for pay is the name of the game. And the olfactory mnemonic of the “smell of sea in your beds” is both post-coital, and a great symbol for the loneliness of the sea and its workers. Sex at its heart is a face slap to loneliness.

“Trick of the Light” by The Who

I suppose I should warn you, I thought John Entwistle, the writer of this song, was the cat’s meow for a very long time. You see, I played bass for many years, and I wanted to be John Entwistle. The guy was one of the best bassists to walk the earth. He also was a coke addict with a weak heart. So falls one of my idols. Anywhoo, he wrote one of the best working girl songs (working girl, now isn’t that a quaint title?). The song has the typical Who roar, especially since Entwistle is playing an eight-string bass on it (the bass has each string set with a higher string making for a very thick sound.).

Again the narrator is the prostitute’s john. The scene starts after the sex. The prostitute is reading True Confessions, a woman’s magazine. The john thinks those supposedly sordid stories are fairy tales compared to her life. But he has fallen in love with her and asks her if she had an orgasm. He thinks he might have seen a flicker of emotion on her deadpan face although it could have been a trick of the light—Apparently, there are prostitutes who advertise giving a girlfriend experience, that is to say, they act like they love you when they fuck you. I suppose I can say something snarky about it, or maybe say tisk, tisk, but small amount of feeling nice even with a price tag isn’t so bad.

The narrator then breaks down into a series of clichés: “What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this? / They don't make girls like you no more / And I'd like to get to know you on closer terms than this.” And finally he asks her, like most other narrators, to steal away with him. Although we still never hear the prostitute’s point of view, she does get to roll her eyes and kick him out. With the red light shining in his eyes, he still wonders if her made her come. I’m betting, he didn’t. This song really captures the monetary relationship of whore and john. The job is sex, but that doesn’t mean it’s not as dull as any other job.

Summation

So what have we learned? One thing, we need songs from the prostitute’s point of view. I’m sure they are out there. We also learned if you fall in love with a streetwalker and ask her to run away with you, the cliché police will come knocking on your door. We’ve also learned the red light symbol, with its intimations of passion and tumescence, is too hard to pass up. The prostitute is romanticized by rockers. She is a woman in dire straits, needing her knight for salvation, but like Entwistle’s whore, she more likely will roll her eyes and kick the knight out on his armored ass, red light reflecting the metal.