Candy J and the Legend of Sweet Pussy Pauline

For three decades it’s been a rite of passage for underground dancers to have their ears scalded by Sweet Pussy Pauline. Sampled on innumerable records, her swaggering, hypersexual monologues move from withering insults to cartoonish ecstasy, employing a full range of surreal dick metaphors – from anteaters to table legs and toothpicks. A generation of gay men can quote her verbatim, unconsciously or no, from “Wake up, smell the coffee, and realize you are not the tea” to “It’s what’s up front that counts!” – all capped off with a motorboating “blblblbl!”

Sweet Pussy Pauline’s late 1980s records – “Desirable Revenge (The Saga of Sweet Pussy Pauline),” “Sweet Pussy Pauline A Cappella,” “Hateful Head Helen” and the original Sweet Pussy Pauline remix, “Work This Pussy,” by Junior Vasquez – are the epitome of bitch tracks, scolding reads set to dance beats which served to soundtrack vogue balls and drag numbers as well as set more mainstream dancefloors aflame.

The form draws from classic soul chastenings like Shirley Brown’s “Woman to Woman,” raunchy R&B and early hip-hop diss tracks. Its contemporary form can be traced to an improvised monologue delivered by Loleatta Holloway at the Better Days club in 1985, secretly recorded by DJ Bruce Forest, and transformed into a massive club a cappella hit by Vasquez called “My Loleatta.” (Sweet Pussy Pauline knew her history, too: The phrase “It’s what’s up front that counts” is a direct lift from Holloway’s 1976 track “Dreamin’,” just one of the live samples she wove throughout her scandalous output.)

There are other classic bitch tracks like Frankie Fuentes’ “Tyler More Mary,” George Morel’s “This is My Party (Bitch Get Out),” and “You Used to Hold Me” by Ralphi Rosario and Xavier Gold. But Sweet Pussy Pauline was something else. Nobody had heard language like that in a house club, which was not only hilariously explicit, but centered black women’s sexuality in a way that was missing in the (mostly) man’s world of early house music.

But just who was Sweet Pussy Pauline? “People make up whole histories of who she is. She’s from the streets, she’s from a penthouse, I don’t know what they think!” Vocal house pioneer Candy J, Sweet Pussy Pauline’s creator, was speaking over the phone in that unmistakable voice, breaking down the legend. “Right now, she’s the talk of the town again, since Kanye stole the ‘Work This Pussy’ sample for Teyana Taylor’s new album. There’s a whole new level of notoriety, and people are reaching out.”

Candy J was taking a break from her current project, rehabbing beauty shops and houses as an interior designer. It’s the latest transformation in a life full of hairpin turns and stretches of international success. Originally from Detroit, she moved to Chicago in the early ’80s to model for the Ebony Fashion Fair. After that she became a car broker. Her entrance into the world of house music was almost on a whim. “I was sitting at my desk listening to the radio, and I told my boss, ‘Oh my God, I can sing better than that!’ And he said, ‘Well, why don’t you?’ So that’s what I set out to do.”

In 1986, Candy recorded early vocal house classic “Why Are You Wasting My Time?” on the Fierce record label, a subsidiary of DJ International. “It came out overseas and was a mediocre hit at the time. But it became a calling card to the business,” she said. That record was followed by “Desire” and a jump to the Hot Mix 5 label. Writing credits on “Don’t Want It” by “Jammin” Jason, Fast Eddie, and Paris Grey and Full House’s “I Remember,” as well as a breakthrough pop-oriented record, “Somethings They Never Change,” came soon afterwards.

By this time, Candy J had built up a live following, her vocal style a Sylvester-like soprano augmented with sassy growls that struck a chord on house radio stations and, especially, gay clubs. Vocal house music had reinvigorated a gay club touring circuit that had been decimated by the early years of AIDS, and even though the gay community was still in the throes of the epidemic, crowds turned out for a good diva who knew how to work the crowd.

It was right around this time that Sweet Pussy Pauline was born, neither from penthouse nor pavement, but censor-baiting experimental art. “The truth is, I was listening to that song ‘Tales of Taboo’ by the artist Karen Finley, which was a hit. And I told my good friend [Philadelphia house DJ] Phil Dickerson, ‘I don’t think she’s doing it right. I should go up there and tell the truth! So I turned my keyboard on and I just started talking. That was it.”

The result was “Desirable Revenge (The Saga of Sweet Pussy Pauline).” “Somehow we recorded it, and I sent a copy to Junior Vasquez,” Candy J said. “I was in New York for the music conference they had every year, and it was playing. And I said, ‘Oh my God, that sounds like me, OH MY GOD! At that time I was doing more Top 40-type music. But my friend told me, ‘What you need to do is put on a blonde wig and some dark sunglasses, and go make that money!’ Junior Vasquez paid me $6,000 to perform that song at his club and nowhere else for three months – and not to give a copy to Tony Humphries. That was his primary request. I didn’t know about the politics behind the music back then.” Sweet Pussy Pauline was an instant hit, but Candy J was still pursuing a mainstream singing career. “I would go up onstage and sing my songs and people would be like, ‘OK, OK that was cute, now bring out the dirty talk.’ I started to feel like, ‘Do they want the music act or the comedy?’ I never considered myself a comedian, but Sweet Pussy Pauline took on a life of her own.”

Success led her away from Chicago to New York, where she says audiences embraced her more. “People probably don’t know I was the first person MC Lyte ever opened up for. I performed at Paradise Garage. I went in there and all I saw was just a big black club, and I thought, ‘I’m not that popular, why am I performing here?’ They paid me $3,000, and I said, ‘Cash?’ It was a scene. It was the first time I saw a performer get booed onstage. I turned to my manager and he said, ‘Do your show, Candy, just do your show.’ So I went out there and just started talking, and everyone started laughing.

“I didn’t know what I was doing. I called one of the dancers up, one of the best dancers in the club. I’m tall, and he was short, and he started going all between my legs and around my body. I said, ‘Girls, when you got a man like this, you need to take him to the wall. Put his hands up against the wall, and just work the motherfucker.’ All they saw from the stage was ass and hair, and the club went absolutely berserk.

“I performed there I think four times. When I went on tour, I was playing major clubs like the Trocadero in San Francisco. The places would be absolutely packed because people would want to know, ‘Who talks like that?’ It was crazy. I cut another record called ‘The Walk.’ People were sampling me, I was on so many records. I’ve been to Africa, Australia and China talking about dick, honey.”

As a writer and performer at that time, how did she navigate the ever-shifting, DIY environment of the dance music scene? “I had Grace Jones’ manager, Bob Caviano” – who also managed the Village People and KC and the Sunshine Band and started Lifebeat, the music industry’s organization to fight AIDS, before succumbing to the disease himself in 1992. “He said, ‘Candy, you don’t want to be an artist, you want to be an act.’ I didn’t really know what that meant. But he said, ‘You want to be the type of person that don’t need a record out to perform.’ He said, ‘I can book Grace anywhere, and she’ll pull a crowd.’ And that’s what I strived to do. He called me a few years later and said, ‘Congratulations girl, you made it.’ And I felt so good.”

While Sweet Pussy Pauline’s raunchiness took center stage, Candy J’s music had turned to darker subjects like obsession and abuse, with records like “Hurt Me! Hurt Me!” and “Shoulda Have Known Better.” “I donated tens of thousands of dollars to domestic violence programs,” she said. “It was my cause.”

Then, another turn: Sweet Pussy Pauline became a UK pop star as part of the Candy Girls, scoring Top 20 hits with sugar-rushes “Fee Fi Fo Fum” in 1995 and “Wham Bam” in 1996. Pauline had lost none of her edge (“Fee Fi Fo Fum, look out throat, here it comes” was a chorus), but now she was at the forefront of the handbag house movement, a sped-up, pop-accessible genre that helped bring broader gay club sounds to the charts in the late 1990s. “At first it was just a payment for a sample,” Candy J said. “They had no idea how big it was going to get. Then I got in more on the next record” – videos, a publishing contract, appearances – ”and between that and another European hit called ‘Climb Up On Top of Me,’ it paid a lot of bills. It was a lot of fun, too.”

Candy J left the music business behind some years ago, but she’s not completely out. Besides counting house diva CeCe Peniston as her best friend and maintaining friendships with Crystal Waters, Boy George and Inaya Day, she lets Sweet Pussy Pauline come out to play on occasion, including recent performances in Atlanta and at Pulse nightclub in Orlando.

“I was down in Atlanta and I came out and and they introduced me as Candy J. Everyone applauded nicely,” she said. “And I said, half of you here probably know me as Sweet Pussy Pauline. I had to wait five whole minutes for them to stop screaming and hollering. To my surprise a lot of people never associated the two. People actually bowed to me and said, ‘Oh my God, my grandmother used to listen to you!’ And I was like, ‘OK, thank you, I think.’”

Candy J continued: “Life has been real good. I’m still here, looking gorgeous. Just make sure to put down that I’m single in the interview, in case any of your boys want to hit me up.”