Voulez Vous?

Remember Kiki "Your Arms Too Short To Box With God" LaBelle?  I shouldn't make fun -- that's apparently a well-respected musical, rich in history, etc.   I'm not making fun of the musical, though.  I'm making fun of Patti LaBelle's chequered career.

It's okay -- I'm sure even she sees the humor in it, now.

"Kiki" LaBelle has a voice that would blister paint.  I mean that in the nicest possible way, actually -- she can really belt.  It's not surprising that, after the band that recorded Lady Marmalade (was that song about a hooker?   Ya' think?  Jeez, I don't know, man) failed to link another, similar success to the chain, the band broke up and she left the pop biz for a while to do stage.  It's a good refuge for people who genuinely enjoy singing, and I have to believe if I had a voice like she has, I'd genuinely enjoy it.

It's just funny to think that she had that little dip in an otherwise illustrious career, back around the disco era, where the best she could do exposure-wise was to be in the road company of a black musical that played the Taft Theater in Cincinnati.  I remember this mostly because my younger brother and I rolled on the floor in front of the TV set and almost peed ourselves laughing over the name "Kiki LaBelle." 

In retrospect, though I doubt either of us knew what a stripper really did for a living at the time, that's what that name sounds like.  If I meet a woman with a name like that, I'm likely to assume she rubs her crotch up and down a fireman's pole in time to bad techno music and lets aging teamsters stuff sawbucks in her bikini for a living.  As Chris Rock once said, on The Daily Show (talking about his spawn) "My job is to raise that little girl up and keep her off the pole.  But, then, he named her something like Autumn -- something equally pole-dancer-ish -- so who knows how seriously he really meant that.

But now, and for the past fifteen years or so, Patti "Kiki" LaBelle's laughing all the way to the bank, because once disco died and mainstream soul-pop was a moneymaker again, some record company was more than happy to hand her several thousand dollars and a studio, and she repaid them by making a couple of kicking albums that sold extremely well.

Sheesh, this is starting to sound like some kind of X-fueled Casey Kasem's American Top 40, isn't it?