In the brothels of Buenos Aires tells the story of a prostitute, and the man who falls in love with her. First there is desire. Then, passion. Then, suspicion. Jealousy. Anger. Betrayal. When love is for the highest bidder, there can be no trust. Without trust, there is no love. Jealousy, yes jealousy, will drive you mad!
— Moulin Rouge!, intro to "El Tango de Roxanne"
A song about the life and times of a lady of the night. The narrator could be a male admirer who is in love with her and wishes she'd leave the profession behind to be with him, but the song can also be neutral and might simply be about her struggles and decision to walk the streets. If the artist is a woman, the song might be from the perspective of the worker herself.
The song is rarely upbeat, as her life isn't exactly celebrated, but it usually stops short of all-out tragedy. Its main goal is to humanize sex workers and put a person behind the alluring face and body, hence why many of these songs are named after the woman in question.
While prostitutes are the most common subject for this song, it can also be about a stripper, dominatrix, etc. Sub-trope of Job Song and Bad Girl Song. Can overlap with Intercourse with You if it gets graphic, or Bawdy Song if it's Played for Laughs.
Examples:
- Played for Laughs in a Mad TV skit about two couples on a double-date at a Mexican restaurant. The restaurant's gimmick is a Mariachi band that comes up with (secretly-insulting) songs about the patrons, and one of the women notices that the song for her paints her as a prostitute.
- Flight of the Conchords "You Don't Have To Be A Prostitute" is a parody of "Roxanne" by The Police.
Music
- "Roxanne" by The Police is about a man who is in love with a prostitute and wishes she would leave her dangerous career for him.
- "What Would You Do" by City High is about a man who runs into a friend from high school who now works as a stripper to support herself and her son. The song is a back-and-forth conversation between the two where he says she can do better with her life, while she shoots back that he doesn't know her life.
- "Dirty Diana" by Michael Jackson is about a notorious groupie (many of whom are paid for their services) whom the narrator is trying to resist because he's spoken for.
- "I'm in Love (Wit a Stripper)" by T-Pain is self-explanatory, though the lyrics make it clear that the "love" he feels is entirely superficial.
- "Brenda's Got A Baby" by Tupac Shakur is mostly about a Teenage Pregnancy, though she resorts to prostitution at the end and is murdered because of it.
- "Jezebel" by Sade is from the perspective of a female friend, whose tone is more of concern rather than the usual pity and/or infatuation.
- Tina Turner:
- In "Private Dancer," she sings as a sex worker so jaded that she does not think of her clients as men, just a source of income ("You don't think of them as human / You don't think of them at all / Just keep your mind on the money / And your eyes on the wall"). The video changes the context to taxi dancing, though it's strongly implied to be a metaphor for prostitution.
- "Acid Queen," from The Who's Rock Opera Tommy, tells the story of a prostitute employed to see if she can restore Tommy's senses through sex.
- PJ Harvey's "Angelene
," sung from the POV of the sex worker.
- "Killer Queen" by Queen is a song about a High-Class Call Girl. Freddie Mercury explained that when he wrote the song he was trying to say that classy people can be whores too.
- "Call Me" by Blondie is a gender-flipped example. It was the theme song to the 1980 movie American Gigolo and the lyrics are written from the perspective of the movie's main character, a male escort.
- Iron Maiden introduced "Charlotte the Harlot" in a 1980 song of the same name describing her life on the job. Charlotte would become a recurring character for the band, appearing again in the songs "22 Acacia Avenue" in which the narrator tries to persuade her to give up her dangerous lifestyle, and "From Here to Eternity" which sees her taking a fateful motorcycle ride with the devil.
- "Cross-Eyed Mary" by Jethro Tull is a song about an impoverished girl who works as an underage prostitute. Most of her clients are poor old men, even her occasional wealthy clients only feed her "expense-accounted gruel," and the person who drives her to school every day is a jack knife barber, an old term for someone who performs illegal back-alley abortions.
- Stan Ridgway's "They Can't Stop The Show" is sung from the point of view of the manager of a strip club, who treats it purely as a job and complains about obstreperous customers, flaky strippers, and cops constantly hassling them to make sure they aren't offering actual prostitution.
- Joni Mitchell's "Raised on Robbery" tells the story of how a woman who made bad life choices ends up trying to pick up a guy in a hotel bar who'd rather watch the ice hockey on TV.
- "Old Compton Street Blues" by Al Stewart is about a woman who moved to London chasing dreams of stardom and instead ended up becoming a streetwalker in Soho.
- Garbage:
- "Queer" is from the POV of a prostitute who is hired by a father to "make a man" out of his son; the lyrics imply that the father is also one of her regular clients.
- "Sugar" is from the POV of a prostitute regretting the absence of true love in her life.
- One of the main characters of the Rock Opera Operation: Mindcrime by Queensrÿche is Sister Mary, a former prostitute who is now a nun, although she's still being sexually abused by the corrupt priest who "rescued" her from the streets. Her backstory and the protagonist Nikki's feelings for her are primarily explored in the songs "Spreading the Disease," "The Mission," and "Suite Sister Mary."
- "Salamander Street" by Callum Beatie is rather circumspect as to the exact nature of the circumstances that makes the woman he's singing about "the saddest one of all", but if you know that Salamander Street is Leith's red-light district, it's pretty clear.
- "412/724 Whore" by Sharon Needles is a comedic song about being a prostitute in Pittsburgh (the video was filmed long before she appeared on RuPaul's Drag Race, hence its amateurish quality).
- The aptly-titled "Lady of the Night" by Donna Summer is about a working girl who treats sex work like any other job and how she deserves respect rather than pity or derision. Averted with "She Works Hard for the Money," despite its Memetic Mutation as one, mostly owing to a line about the female subject "waiting for her clientele." In reality, the song was inspired by a restroom attendant Summer encountered at a party, who fell asleep on the job after working long hours. The song mentions her by name (Onetta), and the music video is about a woman who works several blue-collar jobs, but very much not sex work.
- "The A Team" by Ed Sheeran is about a sex worker addicted to crack cocaine.
- The Corrs has "Somebody for Someone", a heavily-metaphored song about a sex worker ("selling sugar for money in the dead of the night... and she's crying with a stranger for someone to love") and a passerby watching her ("watching sugar sold for money to the dead at night, and he sees in her an angel in the cruelest of worlds").
- Alex Cameron's "Far From Born Again" is a rare out-and-out celebratory version of this type of song, an ode to independent female sex workers. Rather than portraying them with the usual "sympathetic" angles (i.e. framing them as victims of tragedy putting up with a humiliating, degrading profession), Cameron describes them as deserving respect for their hustle in a grueling business that unfairly provokes very little; that sex work is still honest work, and they should be proud for doing what they can to earn a healthy living and take control of their lives.
- "Shaking Hands" by Nickelback is about a high class stripper who has politicians, judges and other powerful men as her clients, allowing her to live an expensive lifestyle.
- "When the Sun Goes Down" by Arctic Monkeys is a song about the grubbiness of street prostitution sung from the point of view of a third-party observer.
- "Magdalena" by Freddie Aguilar is about the titular girl who got into prostitution to make ends meet. The singer pities her due to the nature of her job, which earns the derision of people around her.
- "Magda" by Gloc-9 has a story of a man looking for his eponymous childhood friend who left her village to look for love and a career only for him to find her at a strip club.
- Clean Bandit's "Rockabye", featuring Sean Paul & Anne-Marie, is about a Single Mom Stripper taking care of her six year old son, while also making ends meet at a strip club.
- "Rent" by Pet Shop Boys is sung from the perspective of a paid mistress.
- "Novocane" and "Pyramids" by Frank Ocean are about dating a woman who does porn (while studying to be a dentist) and a stripper respectively.
- "53rd & 3rd" by The Ramones is from the point of view of a male prostitute working the titular corner, which may or may not have been autobiographical by Dee Dee Ramone.
- "Keisha's Song (Her Pain)" by Kendrick Lamar is a tragic cautionary tale about a prostitute who is stabbed and killed by one of her clients. Also a sort of Morality Ballad, as Kendrick says he played the song for his sister to ensure she'd never become a prostitute. (The song doesn't condemn Keisha for being a sex worker, more commenting on the dangers of being an impoverished woman in the sex industry).
- "Out Tonight" from RENT is Mimi's solo song. On paper, it's just about having a night on the town, but the musical and especially the movie frame it in the context of her working as a stripper. Unlike the usual tone of these songs, Mimi enjoys her line of work.
- "Another Suitcase in Another Hall" from Evita is sung by Peron's Mistress, said to be a teenager, after his future wife Eva kicks her out. She goes unnamed, but her sad song about her unsure future humanizes her and serves as A Day in the Limelight, while also framing Eva as a cruel social climber. Some productions more sympathetic to Eva, including the film version, have Eva sing it or sing along with it to humanize her.
- "I Dreamed a Dream," "Lovely Ladies," "Fantine's Arrest," and "Come to Me" from Les Misérables trace the fall of Fantine after she is fired from her factory job in 19th-Century France, forced to turn to prostitution to support her young daughter born out of wedlock. She develops tuberculosis and dies in a hospital.
- "There's Gotta Be Something Better Than This" from Sweet Charity is slightly more cheerful version, sung by three "taxi dancers" (which some interpret as The '60s code for prostitute, others as just one step up from it) as they express their determination to get out of the business. It is the fact that their dreams are all relatively modest (hat check girl or receptionist) that make it somewhat sad.
- From The Threepenny Opera, "Zuhalterballade" (Pimp's Ballad), euphemistically translated as "The Ballad of Immoral Earnings", is a nostalgic duet between Macheath and Jenny telling how the former was the pimp of the latter, including things such as domestic abuse and backalley abortion.
- 'The Girls Of The Night' from Jekyll & Hyde is a heart-tugging duet between Lucy and Nellie, two sex workers, as Nellie tells Lucy to give up on chasing empty dreams.
Webcomics
- Unsounded: The prostitutes of the Deadly Nevergreen have a song, the "House Special", they sing to prospective clientele about their job.
