This came out around 2001, and I was in Angels bar one day with a friend who looked up at the square block TV screen it was playing from and said 'if she's such a bad ass stripper then why does she have to make a song about it?'. It made sense then as much as it did now, yet I felt sorry for Jentina. I still feel sorry for her. I think I was the only one who thought the song was OK. The video seemed a bit naff, but actually, I think it says a lot now about then, now that we have so much shit we consider pop music.
I'm not sure if she has a cult following now or what, but considering how awful pop music is now, I don't think she was all that bad. However, she was deeply unpopular at the time, and I never remember the song coming on anywhere in public except that once in the daytime in Angels. (Angels is now called Sidewalk).
Jentina was marked to be quite successful before the music came out. I used to read The Face and they featured her in there one month, complete with cutting edge picture, red lips and white skin, eyes concealed by the shadow of a hat, everywhere dripping in excessive gold jewelry.
She was marketed as a sort of gypsy RnB pop singer. At first it was hard to understand why she was so disliked; she was good looking, young, and the song wasn't terrible. She could even kind of sing. There was no auto-tune then! Then I thought that maybe it's a reflection on how society feels about travellers. So hated she was, even Horror Queen of the Chavs Lady Sovereign made a cruel mock up parody of 'Bad Ass Strippa' which in her ghetto black twang she rips apart Jentina with bitchy threatening lyrics. Maybe one member of the working class felt threatened by another by their lower position in the league. Whatever the reason, I think Lady Sovereign is an ugly cunt.
Like Princess Superstar's 'Bad Babysitter', I liked this song but as a 17 year old desperately wanting to fit in, I didn't admit I liked it to anyone. I used to listen to it at home because I liked the sound of the music, rather than the words, or her. It's not till later that I sort of realised what I liked about her and the whole package but again that could all be down to nostalgia.
The song takes me back to when I was discovering new music but in a new environment, one where you danced, and people can watch you, and I was learning to understand and like what was me, or what was cool to feel being me on the gay scene. I was fresh popped out of school, I felt I had a whole world to discover, and some of those times it was dirty, urban and frankly quite scary. Thinking of Birmingham back then reminds me of the taste of new chemicals, concrete and solvent, intentional aimlessness. I felt like sometimes I was part of a gang (albeit a very strange one).
I was coming out of an outgrown comfort zone, I was hanging round in Birmingham each weekend and not coming home, I was acting in vain to be tough, I was hanging out with kids who had been kicked out of their homes and lived in a youth hostel in the city, walking and hanging round in places I wouldn't even dream of going near now as an adult, whilst working in a bar illegally and being paid cash in hand, hanging out in front of Angels and Missing, drinking Red Stripe, tempting punters to come inside and forging friendships with the underbelly of the cities outcasts and homeless occupants. It was around this time that I had my first threesome with 2 work colleagues in their council flat.
It was hard to take Jentina seriously I guess. The concept was there, but I suppose the definition of chav was a lot specific back then. These days everything merges together, nothing is that clear in Birmingham. Even what was considered shit back then can have a shine to it now, considering the condition of things. Nothing lasts forever.
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