To clarify, the first video (the rotoscoped Cab Calloway) is “St. James Infirmary Blues” from the Betty Boop film Snow-White (1933). Vices mentioned: gambling with dice (“give me six crap-shootin’ pall-bearers”), alcohol (“hand me over another shot of that booze” – this was shortly before the repeal of Prohibition, btw), jazz (yes, that was a vice, at least in some circles; incidentally, the fastest way to hate and completely swear off critical theory is to read what Adorno has to say about jazz; I strongly recommend you never ever do that to yourself).
While the gifs are from Minnie the Moocher (1932). Vices mentioned: sexiness / sex work (“she was a red hot hoochie-coocher”, generally meaning dancer, um, with benefits), cocaine (“she loved him though he was cokey”), opium (“He took her down to Chinatown and showed her how to kick the gong around”), and, in the last two verses, a string of classics like greed (“a home built of gold”, “a diamond car”, “a million dollars”), gluttony (“each meal was a dozen courses”) and more gambling (“racing horses”), all assumed to be the result of hooking up with a sugar daddy (“he gave her things that she was needin’”).
HOWEVER, these two verses don’t tell us what Minnie has, they tell us what she dreams. In the film, Betty Boop forays into the exciting perils of the underworld and then flees back to her repressive but safe home. In the song, Min is of the underworld, dreaming luxuries she can’t have. Not unlike the Little Match Girl lighting a match, or Pirate Jenny, who’s not really a pirate, looking out a shitty brothel’s window and waiting for a ship that’s not there. That’s why the song is so funny and at the same time so dark, not because it lists “vices”.
See, Minnie the Moocher was a real person. Her name was Minnie Gayton, and she was a homeless beggar in Indianapolis, around 60 years old at the time: “she acquired the quaint nickname of ‘The Moocher’ by regularly begging food from grocers and carting it off in a baby buggy. She slept on doorways, on porches and in garages.” And she died about 20 years later, during a terrible blizzard, from exposure. They did get her to a hospital, but by then it was too late.
Do you think she ever lit a match, and imagined in its light extravagant meals and sacks of money and cars and booze and coke, and some sweet love to fight off the cold? Do you think she liked the song? Do you think it cheered her up? God I hope so.
Hi de hi de hi de ho
Poor Min, poor Min, poor Min
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