Shilpa Ray and Her Happy Hookers

• HorsePower
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Jul 30, 2009

A Lusty Life Of Messes

Words by Sean Moeller, Illustration by Johnnie Cluney, Sound engineering by Mike Gentry

Shilpa Ray told us, while she was here for a recording session two months ago, that she once spent a bit of her leisure time at the site of Rick James' grave and during that visit she snorted a line of cocaine from his tombstone into her expecting nose. It seems like something that the New Yorker might consider doing regularly. She's not normal, or at least not against being abnormal. No, she's not normal. It's best to just leave it there. She wrote a song, which appears in this session recorded for the first time, that is "an apology to my mother for turning out wrong." She's OK with her dysfunction, which includes all kinds of questionable behaviors, but the way she makes them sound in her songs, makes you still love her like you would a non-housebroken puppy dog with bloody ears, fleas and a vicious bite. She makes you want to just pull her closer as if you were her mother, and calmly say in the middle of the embrace, "I still love you honey, even though you make it hard sometimes." She sings on "I'm Not Frigid…Yet" about raw, animalistic sex, about just being in a car with a dude, taking off her shirt, tilting her head and demanding that he fuck her brains right out the window and those are her own words, not cleaned up or toned down. It's a song that's so oddly, but absolutely human. No matter if you're a doctor, a lawyer, a chief executive officer for a Fortune 500 company or a degenerate sex hound, you will think about love-making that way more times than not - just overcome with lust and excitement. Most of what Shilpa Ray and Her Happy Hookers music - on "A Fish Hook An Open Eye" and in these new songs - is about is the acceptance of all the quirks and anomalies in people and how, as she comments, "Humans are mad!" Shilpa Ray is not the only mad one out there. She's just one of the mad people, striking in her twisted, but still timeless way of expressing it so everyone can hear. She insists that she's not a good person, just a good time girl and that must involve a lot of messiness, a lot of comfort and discomfort. And that's life for a freak who snorts the white stuff in cemeteries or anyone else, for that matter.

Shilpa Ray and Her Happy Hookers Official Site
Shilpa Ray MySpace Page

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