Getting Head and Blowing People Away: Exaggerated Masculinity in Cave's "Stagger Lee"

The basic plot summary of Cave's "Stagger Lee" could very well have been from a modern day rap song or machismo action movie. Stagger Lee walks into a bar. He uses the word "motherfucker" in some form to describe every male character he meets. He goes on a killing spree; he total body count at the end of the song is three, and one of the slain is the Devil. Stagger Lee shoot the barkeeper first for mouthing off - "Yeah, I've heard your name down the way/And I kick motherfucking asses like you every day." After forcing Billy Dilly to perform oral sex on him - "You better get down on your knees/And suck my dick, because if you don't you're gonna be dead" - Stagger Lee, in a possible act of snuff, shoots him too. "Billy kneels own and slobbers on his head/And Stag fills him full of lead." When the Devil comes to claim Stagger Lee, Lee also shoots him. In the excitement he is also propositioned by a popular prostitute who is so impressed by his masculinity that she offers him her services for free. One of the morals of this song seems to be that being violent will get you women who will give you free sex. The other seems to be that you can shoot your way out of anything, and yet another seems to be that shooting every man that poses a threat to your masculinity is an action that requires four bullets to the head, each.

In Brown's Stagolee Shot Billy, Seale describes Stagolee as a "bad nigger off the block and didn't take shit from nobody"(Brown, Stagolee 214-222). Cave's version of Stagger Lee outlines a new form of the "bad nigger" Stagger Lee/Stagolee/Stack-o-Lee, one with an over-exaggerated masculinity and a penchant for excessive violence. On this, Cave says "I like the way the simple, almost naive traditional murder ballad has gradually become a vehicle that can happily accommodate the most twisted acts of deranged machismo...there seems to be no limits to how evil this song can be" (Brown, "Godfather").

In "Godfather of Gangsta," Cave claims that his "Stagger Lee" is a version of the Stagolee toast he came upon in "a book on urban black folklore." However, in keeping with oral tradition, the article is vague in determining exactly how much of Cave's version is this "original" toast that he read and how much is his own creation. All that Brown presents is that
Cave also gives a nod to another talking blues song with the line "And I'll crawl over fifty good pussies just to get one fat boy's asshole." This line was originally from "Two Time Slim" by Snatch and the Poontangs. Those unfamiliar with this peculiar sexually-named band will be more familiar with one of its members, Johnny Otis.

Two Time Slim, the character-singer of the namesake song,could also be one of the many manifestations of Stagger Lee. The song is sung in the first person, and Two Time Slim says lines such as "The drink I like best/is Hydrochloric acid," "Say baby, do you know who I am...I'm the motherfucker who rode zigzag lightning/ down the middle of the Panama Canal," and "I'm the kind of cocksucker/who'll start an uprising in a motherfucker's ass." Cave is nonchalant about Two Time Slim's influence on "Stagger Lee," only remarking on the aforementioned line, "I've always thought that was a groovy line so I just threw it in for good measure" (Brown, "Godfather").

But this simple remark can not only be the answer. Something about "Two Time Slim" must have stuck in Cave's brain to make him remember not only that line but also the song and the character of Two Time Slim, and then make him recall it when reading about Stagger Lee. The two have a lot in common: Stagger Lee says "Mr. Motherfucker do you know who I am...I'm that bad motherfucker called Stagger Lee" and Two Time Slim says "Say baby, do you know who I am...I'm the motherfucker who rode zigzag lightning/down the middle of the Panama Canal." They are not only presenting themselves; they are presenting a "brand name," a persona. This persona constantly needs to inform others of its presence, much like folk songs need to constantly sung and changed to inform society of their presence.

One of the major changes "Stagger Lee" has is the re-creation of Billy Lyons. Billy Lyons becomes "my man Billy Dilly" - something that Stagger Lee demonstrates possession towards from the very start of when Billy is introduced into the song. Here poor Billy Lyons is completely emasculated before he even physically "shows up" in the song; Stagger Lee introduces Billy to the listener by saying "I'll stay here till Billy comes in...and furthermore I'll fuck Billy in his motherfucking ass." Billy Dilly plays no role in the song and Stagger Lee's life besides being a sexual instrument for receiving Stagger Lee's sexual passions (among other things). In fact, the only sentence Billy utters only concerns the infamous Stagger Lee and sings his praise, "You must be/That bad motherfucker called Stagger Lee." This Stagger Lee is all about dominance over others; it is not enough now to shoot someone to get your hat back. Now you must shoot the sassy, exert sexual dominance over both sexes, and remake religion to suit you.

As mentioned before, in Cave's version, the new "bad nigger" is bisexual, or, at the very least, on the "down-low." In pop culture, a man on the "down-low" is a "straight" man who happens to have sex with men ("Lowdown"). While not admitting to be gay, Stagger Lee is. Again, Cave nonchalantly refers to this element in the song as something he found "especially attractive" with no deeper elaboration (Brown, "Godfather"). Yet homosexuality seems natural in this song. In art, music, and literature the gun is often a symbol of the phallus, and the excessive shooting of the gun can be construed as a metaphor for Stagger Lee's sexual repression and frustration (It is arguable that this song could only be improved if Stagger Lee also had sexual relations with the Devil as well before shooting him).

In "Stagger Lee" Seale's idea of the "bad nigger" taking shit from nobody has been taken to an extreme world where Stagger Lee perceives offense from everybody. Cave's Stagger Lee is hostile to every secondary character he meets in the song, even the Devil. This brashness is not punished but is also rewarded by his cheating death and the Devil. Stagger Lee is so "bad" that he is not even dead yet when the Devil comes into the bar and announces to Lee that he's come to take him down (also notice how the Devil has to make a special trip out of Hell to come get Lee). Immune to the Devil's threats, Stagger Lee responds to him only with an action; Lee gives him the same treatment that he gave to the barkeeper and shoots the Devil four times. One gets the feeling that Stagger Lee would probably shoot God too, if God had deigned to come down to punish him instead of the Devil. Furthermore, Stagger Lee seems to have a magic Colt .45, or at least a special one that allows him to fire nine shots (a normal Colt .45 only holds six rounds) without needing to reload.

However, as invincible as this new Stagger Lee seems, he is not immune to the plague that strikes us all: money. Stagger Lee's economic woes are only briefly mentioned in the beginning of the song, but they are mentioned, "It was back in '32 when times were hard/He had a Colt .45 and a deck of cards...He wore rat-drawn shoes and an old Stetson hat/Had a '28 Ford, had payments on that." Here, Stagger Lee is described as a man with little worldly possessions. His shoes are "rat-drawn" and his Stetson hat, so praised and coveted by others in other versions of Stagger Lee, is described in a word: old. Even his car seems faulty; Stagger Lee gets to the bar "The Bucket of Blood" by walking "through the rain" and "through the mud;" what happened to his Ford on which he is still making payments? This Stagger Lee even has real woman troubles "His woman threw him out in the ice and snow/And told him, 'Never ever come back no more'." Therefore, Cave's version of the "bad nigger" Stagger Lee could be read not as the pimp that owned the block (as in other versions mentioned by Brown in Stagolee Shot Billy) but as a man down on his luck who brazenly commits acts of violence because he has nothing left to lose. This "Stagger Lee brand name" he later presents to the barkeeper, Nellie Brown, Billy Dilly, and the Devil is nothing more than a facade, a front of manhood. It is the person a troubled man wants to be.

In her book Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey Into Manhood and Back Norah Vincent describes every man has having armor; it is ten sizes too big and he desperately wants you not to notice. Cave's Stagger Lee is this "everyman" Vincent describes. Everything known about him is a construct; the folkloric song itself is merely a construct to explain a series of events that once happened. This construct serves a purpose as a coping mechanism. Besides giving a man the bravado to brave the days when he is poor, unsure, and down on his luck it also gives him the ability to make and find a place for himself within the system in which he lives. Brown argues, "Black manhood is conflicted with the norms of masculinity because the codes 'imply power, control, authority,' which were 'denied to black men since slavery.' " It is optimistic to believe that these issues have since been resolved, and at the least, the events of the recent years have given men more to worry about in terms of their manhood. Cave's re-make of "Stagger Lee" may be one of the newer versions in the folkloric tradition of Stagger Lee, but it holds no less relevance in today's society.