Jesse Bloggs

On Saturday night I ended up at the dance club Barcode, and unfortunately, so did Girls Gone Wild. The whole experience left me disgusted with the club and the Girls Gone wild “brand,” as the company insists on describing its products. I was going to write an angry post on all of this, but on further reflection I realized my feelings for both the club and the brand are more complicated.

In the case of Barcode, which until recently was called The Rage, my feelings for the club mirror my feelings for Sacramento in general: contradictory mixtures of comfort and embarrassment, love and loathing; the sort of feelings usually reserved for members of one’s family. It is, after all, a dance club in a strip mall in Sacramento County, so it attracts low- to middlebrow day-working suburbanites from the culturally vibrant regions of Arden-Arcade, North Sacramento and Carmichael, ready to buy their party experience the way they would a new outfit at Mervyns.

But then, I too am part of that great unwashed mass, and have many good memories of the club. Back in my Raver days I went on Tuesday nights for “Pure” to hear the DJs spin House and Trance. I’ve been Thursday nights for what is popularly known as “Asian Night,” when those of the Asian persuasion claim the club as their own. I’ve even been on Sunday nights for “Asylum,” or Goth night, where every weekend is Halloween, and although some of the music and outfits are ridiculous, the island of misfit toys vibe is endearing, the knowledge that no one will start a fight is comforting, and it’s one of the few places in Sacramento where you can dance to a mash-up of The Cure’s “Close to Me” and George Michael’s “Faith“.

So after a raucous session of Karaoke with friends Saturday night at Zigatos, going to Barcode for some dancing didn’t sound like that bad of an idea. Plus, we had to drop some of our party off at home in the Arden area, and since it was already after 12:30 we didn’t really have time to drive downtown. So, to the nearest club we went, which also happened to be the location Girls Gone Wild had chosen to film their subject in its natural habitat. When we got there, various “hot” girls were going in and out of the notorious Girls Gone Wild tour bus, where the most racy footage is shot. I put “hot” in quotation marks because I don’t really go for that stereotypical ideal of beauty; the way I see it, if you need that much makeup, hair dye, fake nails and surgical enhancements to look good, you might be a man. We got inside and one of the modern world’s most grotesque tableaus was displayed before us: three skankily clad girls giggling nervously under the hot light of the Girls Gone Wild camera crew, unsure of whether to make out or undress or run as an ever-tightening knot of horny boys pumped their fists in an unconscious simulation of masturbation, chanting, “Tits, tits, tits, tits, tits, tits!”

I was disgusted, of course, but moral outrage at Girls Gone Wild has become something of a cliché. One obvious example is the never-hypocritical Dr. Phil’s coverage of the phenomenon, which damned the show for being immoral while also unabashedly airing some of its most salacious moments. Another is Tyra Banks’s disingenuous, or delusional, denial of Girls Gone Wild creator Joe Francis’s argument that there are similarities between what his company does and what goes on in the fashion industry. Even the current controversy over the underage girls filmed by Girls Gone Wild while in Panama City feels somewhat dishonest; after all, didn’t everyone like Britney a whole lot more when she was not yet a woman?

There are obvious and serious problems with objectification, exploitation and sexism in Girls Gone Wild that I don’t want to diminish, but even honest and intelligent exploration of these problems must take into account their complexity. Ariel Levy does exactly that in her “Dispatches” for Slate on the subject, saying that although these girls “[…] are embracing raunchy aspects of our culture that would likely have caused their feminist foremothers to vomit,” she wonders, “But what if I’m just uptight? What if this is actually fun and these girls get a genuine kick out of being porn stars for 15 minutes?” Certainly, everyone wants to feel sexy in some way, if not to the porn buying public than at least to his or her partner. This seems to be borne out by the brother of Girls Gone Wild, Guys Gone Wild, in which buff, manscaped straight guys cavort sexually before the camera, even though most of them admit their audience is probably made up of gay men. Certainly these guys are embracing raunchy aspects of our culture that would likely have caused their heterosexual forefathers to label them faggots.

And as anyone who’s ever read Andrea Dworkin knows, the most extreme feminist arguments against pornography resemble the most extreme Christian arguments against pornography: sex is bad. A recent “American Voices” feature in The Onion on the finding that “Abstinence Education Doesn’t Work” hilariously undermines these arguments. Construction worker and average American Xander Griffey says, “I find it astonishing that our public schools were unable to beat out the most basic human instinct that perpetuates our species.”

And so, like the rest of the world, my feelings on Girls Gone Wild are also complex. As distasteful as I find it, I can’t deny that their late night commercials raise my prurient interest. I can’t even deny that I watch and enjoy pornography. So is my loathing of Girls Gone Wild partially based in my fear of the new? Probably. Back in my day, we didn’t have Girls Gone Wild. We had something called Playboy, and it was pure: we only allowed sluts and the attention-starved to participate, not the girls next door. Or did we? In their excellent review of The Playboy Book: Six Decades of Centerfolds, The New Yorker quotes magazine founder Hugh Hefner as saying that the ideal Playmate of the Month was “‘the girl next door with her clothes off.’” Perhaps the only objection I can make to Girls Gone Wild and the continuing rise of raunch culture with any certainty is its ubiquity and the media’s repeated insistence that it tell us, as Alan Moore put it, “[…] who to think of when we masturbate. They are the engines of our exhaustion.” They stand about me in an angry ring, pumping their fists and demanding to see my dick and prove that it’s hard.

DJ Shadow’s show last week was like his latest album The Outsider, only in reverse: he started with a set of his heaviest psychedelic electronica, then stopped half-way through and brought out his friend Lateef The Truth Speaker for a set of danceable hip-hop and party music. I love both sides of Shadow’s personality, and the show was amazing. The tacky venue seemed a poor choice for the first set; I wanted to be sitting in a dark room in a comfortable chair to better follow the trip of shadows through my mind. But when Shadow and The Truth Speaker rocked the house, almost everyone was dancing.

Of course, I’m not doing DJ Shadow justice by describing him as some kind of genre schizophrenic. The fact that he’s an accepted, even celebrated, white DJ in the world of hip-hop is just one of the ways he crosses boundaries. Shadow says The Outsider is so named because he doesn’t fit in anywhere, and on albums like UNKLE’s Psyence Fiction he combines the best of two worlds into a seamless blend, countering electronica’s tendencies toward navel-gazing and fantasy with the reality and power of hip-hop, then countering hip-hop’s tendencies towards vapidity and excess with electronica’s bite and intellect. And I’m just talking about two genres here: The Outsider also explores spoken word, soul, blues, punk and guitar-driven pop.

In the fourth edition of their Album Guide, Rolling Stone says, “Shadow’s grooves are all slow-motion tension and release … his best tracks take their time to let the momentum build.” That’s also true of his shows. Rather than just playing his songs straight, the way you’d hear them on his albums, he re-mixed his own work, guiding the audience, Moses-like, through 40 years of wilderness, then finally setting us free in the land of milk and honey with dancing and rejoicing. For his encore, he waited until it seemed we couldn’t clap and cheer for him anymore, then came back out and rewarded us by mixing together two of his most sublime songs, “You Can’t Go Home Again” from The Private Press and “Nursery Rhyme / Breather” from Psyence Fiction. And I mean sublime in the Romantic sense: the songs are as beautiful as they are terrifying, and like the end of a good novel, they closed the concert on a note of hard-won transcendence.

But maybe you can go home again. Shadow, who’s from the area, explained that he was on tour without new material because his last tour didn’t stop in Sacramento. “I used to hang out in Arden Fair mall back when it was just one-story,” he said. “Anyone remember that?” I do.