Both strip clubs and movies use music as a utility; one that's either unobtrusive enough to serve as background or that can create an immediate shortcut to a strong emotional response in the audience. While a film can be made without music—or even sound—a stripper cannot strip without music. The one thing a dancer needs besides a corporeal form is a beat to which he can dance. The dancer can dance without a costume or makeup or a stage, but without music, a stripper is just a sexy mime in a thong.
Magic Mike was soundtracked heavily with classic rock and downbeat atmospheric indie—Toro Y Moi, Cloud Control, the Unknown—and the dancing wasn't as integral to the plot as it is to Magic Mike XXL. It had a movie soundtrack, where MMXXL has a strip club soundtrack. The first ends with Foreigner's "Feels Like the First Time" and the latter with DJ Khaled's "All I Do Is Win", and they, like Dallas Rising and Rome, the two different club impresarios from each film, come from different stripper eras, as much as the dancing and the music do.
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Ditching the previous soundtrack format was as good a move as losing Alex Pettyfer and Cody Horn. It benefited from what looks like pretty extensive research on the part of the music supervisor and some input from the actors. In the interim, Joe Mangianello made La Bare, a documentary about a Dallas strip club, and perhaps learned a bit about the type of music one actually hears, which is intended to pump up a crowd—and that's what the MMXXL music did.
MMXXL functions more like a musical in that it uses the dance sequences deliberately to advance the plot; Mike doesn't talk about wanting to get the band back together, he dances about it when "Pony" comes on in his workshop. Big Dick Richie finds the heart of his stripper character dancing to "I Want It That Way". Malik challenges Mike to "Sex You". And ultimately, they all find out something about themselves when they create new routines to new songs for the finale. It could transition seamlessly to the stage. They're even already acting out the lyrics, which are for the most part of "this is what I want to do to you" tradition of R&B.
The film gets at the heart of strip club culture with its scenes at Domina, the exclusive club run by Mike's former lover and working partner, Rome. All the best strip club ideas come from black clubs, specifically those in the South. Every good innovation in strip club dancing, music, and costume styles started in Atlanta or Houston or Miami clubs. The way the Florida dancers feel when they walk in and see Augustus, Andre, and Malik outdance and outperform them is exactly what it feels like to walk into Magic City from the Cheetah. Here is the future, here is how far behind it you are with your fireman routines and Kiss songs.
The guys all work together to pull off their grand finale, with Malik and Andre joining the troupe and helping them create their new showstopping routines, but it's obvious what just happened was straight co-option of their superior routines. That co-option extends to the audience. The physical act of making it rain, showering dancers in bills? Not so long ago there were clubs where this was frowned upon as a less gracious means of giving strippers money than the dignified move of tucking it into their thongs or garters. We are all better for it that Fat Joe and Lil Wayne put it into the vernacular and helped the practice spread.
The songs playing during Malik and Mike's Domina scenes are appropriately by two Atlanta artists, Bando Jonez and Jacquees. The importance of Atlanta strip clubs in hitmaking is well-documented; Atlanta's strip club DJs have a collective that helps decide what gets into the rotation every week and have been profiled in Billboard and GQ. If you've ever been in Magic City when a new track gets thrown on, the interdependence of the dancers on fresh music and artists on strip club exposure is as clear as can be.
It also makes room to pay tribute to two of the greatest stripper songs of all time, "Pony" and "Closer". Their beats are instantly recognizable and both were at the cutting edge for their time, "Pony" as one of Timbaland's first massive hits, and "Closer" as what is arguably the most popular industrial song of all time. They've never sounded dated, perhaps because I've heard each one at least twice a week at work for as long as they have been out.
This is not an exaggeration. My very first stage performance was to the Revolting Cocks' version of "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy" and Nine Inch Nails' "Closer", about a month after it had come out. It is one of those songs strippers fight over performing to because it's that good and gets such a crowd response. "Closer" might as well be strip club furniture. I can't even accurately tell you if I like it or not, just like Richie couldn't tell if he liked "Hotter Than Hell" because it had always just been there.
"Pony"'s place in popular culture is obvious. There was a whole Tumblr devoted to people making YouTube videos of themselves dancing alone to it, Ginuwine guested on "Parks and Recreation", and a "clean" version was even sung on "Glee". "Closer"'s place is not so easily discerned, although the influence of its video is everywhere from the opening credits of "True Detective" to Professor Snape's whole aesthetic in the Harry Potter movies. It was half of a popular mashup with "In Da Club" when mashups were big. But my outsized joy at hearing that instantly recognizable beat during Big Dick Richie's solo was due entirely to its place in the strip club musical canon. For 21 years it's been played in strip clubs without a gap, this I promise you, and it was my excitement over the nod to its stature rather than any actual enjoyment of the song that prompted me to send the only tweet I have ever or will ever send from a movie theater.
That's exactly the kind of response the great use of music will evoke in a strip club, be it excitement hearing a brand new hot track or the sentimental impact of an old favorite. Whether the intent is to arouse, to agitate, or to charm, 10 seconds of the right song can do more than 10 minutes of dialogue. Eight bars win customers over more effectively than walking on your hands for eight yards. It's the one thing strippers simply can't do without, after everything else has been torn away.
