Who is Vanity? A tribute.

Recently I was fortunate enough to watch the film Action Jackson - thanks to thesubstream.com including its final scene on a list of the worst action sequences of all time. It's a supercop action film starring Carl Weathers - its stupidity knows no bounds. But amidst the rough there lies a diamond, and her name is Vanity.

Vanity? Yup. Soak it in.





Probably most infamous for being Prince's girl but she started off as a pop star, explaining her drawn-out musical numbers in Action Jackson and The Last Dragon (maybe her biggest movie). Seems she ended off doing too many drugs, so now of course she's born-again and has renounced her Vanity period. Here's a passage from the autobiography Blame it on Vanity by Denise Matthews (her real name):

"The devil’s perversities snatched up what little strength that lay within me [...] i lowered myself to that of a squatting dog, dare i say sucking up his own vomit."

To illustrate her point, here she is naked in a lusty triangle with a man and a monkey... in Tanya's Island. (sorry, video removed)

Maybe you've known and seen all this already, and Vanity is just another blip in the pop culture landscape. But it boggles my mind to think that at some point people were accustomed to Vanity's existence. And I think it's different with contemporary passing B-stars like say Ashanti or JWow or whoever. Perhaps the only difference is in degree or excess, but nowadays everything is so controlled that even though Snooki or whoever could be crazier than Vanity, twenty years from now one will look at their context and clearly see the choreography, the strings being pulled. With Vanity, it seems aimless, chaotic.

Only in the 80s I guess.