DIRTY ANGEL’S FAVORITE FOLKS
(NYC EDITION)
Featuring BIG AL of SPIC’N SPANISH
By Khalid Strickland a.k.a. Dirty Angel
Party like a rockstar…
New York’s local television has been known to spawn huge hits. Cult followings have turned into national audiences. Controversial shock jock Star of Star & Buc Wild once had a popular show on public access cable TV before moving on to MTV and major radio stations. Video Music Box (the seminal video show founded by hip-hop legend “Uncle” Ralph McDaniels) has helped to break talented artists like Public Enemy and Wu-Tang Clan for a quarter-century on Channel 25, a local TV station.
For the past 12 years, a raunchy, comedic variety show called SPIC’N SPANISH (hosted by a charismatic and hilarious Puerto Rican dude named Big Al) has held down a hallowed spot on the local TV scene. SPIC’N SPANISH, voted Best Public Access Cable Show by the prestigious New York Press in 2005, has a die-hard, rabid following that has stuck with the show religiously. That cult has expanded to include the likes of rap’s original gangsta Ice-T, Brooklyn’s queen bee Lil’ Kim, Terror Squad leader Fat Joe, adult-film auteur Seymore Butts and voluptuous model Gloria Velez; all of whom have made multiple appearances on Big Al’s program over the years. In fact, the aforementioned Star invited Big Al to join him for an episode of his Star & Buc Wild radio show back when it was still on NY’s #1 hip-hop station, Hot-97 FM. In the show’s beginnings, Big Al would take to the streets of NYC, cameraman in tow, and get lovely ladies to answer all kinds of candid questions at parades, parties or just on the humble.
“Back in (Brooklyn Technical) high school, me and my friends used to listen to (famed shock jock) Howard Stern a lot,” explains Big Al during an interview with Insomniac. “A lot of (SNS) goes back to that. Back in high school, we used to be in the audio-visual communications class so we had access to the video cameras and stuff. So we would go around the school, this was in our senior year, just talking to girls; hot girls, just interviewing them. But it was an excuse just to get close to the hot girls. And a lot of it was based on what Howard and his cronies used to do on his show with strippers and porn stars and all that. Even if it was subconscious, it was based on that m**********r. After that, I had all this footage that I taped back in my high school, which I still have. And then a friend of mine said, “There’s this thing called public access (TV). Maybe you should throw some of that footage on TV so other people can see it. Its funny stuff and its stuff you don’t see on TV’. You still don’t see Latin people on TV. Not much. Back in the mid-90’s it (was) even less.”
SNS has since evolved from a funny interview show to a late-night program inhabited by adult-film stars, exotic dancers and average female exhibitionists in the city streets. One thing remains the same, though: the women in the SNS universe are always supernaturally gorgeous, whether they’re a skin flick starlet or a plain Jane out on the town. For a little while now, SNS has filmed episodes at a Bronx strip-club known as The Bada Bing (yup, the same name as the joint in “The Sopranos”). The club can contribute a huge measure of its increasing success to its eye-popping appearances on SPIC’N SPANISH.
“A bouncer working at the Bada Bing recommended me to the owner. He told the owner, ‘You should let this guy come by the club and videotape because the club was just starting out. The Bada Bing has been open less than a year. You’ll get free advertising, you’ll get your club on the show’. The owner was like, ‘fine’. And that’s how it was. It was that easy. It goes back to that bouncer, his name’s Tad. So I’ll always be indebted to Tad. He doesn’t even work there anymore. But I’m still there. Luckily the owners a nice guy, ‘cause most owners have told me in the past, ‘Hell no. You’re not coming into this strip club with a video camera’. And also a lot of dancers don’t want it. For some reason at this place, The Bada Bing, the owners are cool and most of the dancers there love the camera. All the stars aligned, everything’s perfect. Some of these dancers love the camera… they get pissed if I don’t get them on camera. It’s great.”
But there’s more to SNS than flesh-peddling, even if female jiggly parts are the dominant theme. The spicy scenes are punctuated with timely comedic interludes, movie clips (Big Al’s a real film buff), and a Kermit The Frog puppet who talks just like Jim Henson’s Kermit, except with much fouler mouth. Big Al’s famous crazy interviews are still a cornerstone of the program. Big Al is an artist and there’s a method to his madness.
“A lot of people think my show is just T&A. But, it’s more than just T&A because there’s a lot of creativity that goes into my show, as hard as it may be for some people to believe. There’s the interviews, there’s the comedy, there’s those little movie inserts and the little Kermit The Frog inserts that I splice into the footage; so it looks like whoever is in the movie or TV show or Kermit or whoever is reacting to something that just happened on (SNS). That’s called wit, you know? It’s clever. It shows that time is being put into this. As opposed to just the random shots of girls’ a***s, make 30 minutes of it and send in the tape. I would never do that. To me, that’s f****n’ boring.”
In the U.S.A. the sex industry is a multi-million dollar operation. That’s why Jenna Jameson has pretty much become a household name and even has a bestselling book in the stores. Though they probably won’t admit it, more than a few people know exactly who Vanessa Del Rio, Janet Jacme, Tiffany Mynx, Sean Michaels and Olivia O’Lovely are. The sex industry (even beyond skin flicks) is the one of the only businesses that continues to make incredible amounts of cash no matter how bad the economy is and its only growing. That’s not exactly a niche business. Then why is the general population afraid of anything bearing the letters S-E-X? Big Al thinks he may have the answer:
“I think it has a lot to do with this country. This is a puritanical country. It still is. Obviously not as much as it was fifty years ago, but we still treat sex as if it’s dirty. And if you got to Europe, it’s not like that. In Europe you’ll see nudity during commercials and no one freaks out. In this country, Janet Jackson shows a nipple… whether it was accidental or intentional I’m still not so sure… but it was just a nipple. It was a second. And the country flipped out like it was the biggest thing since 9-11 when Janet showed her nipple at the Super Bowl. That just goes to show you. For whatever reason there are people who say, ‘Ewww, sex! We can’t talk about it. We shouldn’t show it. It’s just… ewwww!’ Then there are other people who do love it, but don’t admit it because they’re afraid of the backlash from the other people who are like, ‘sex is evil’. And then you have people like me, who are the minority, who do love it and don’t give a f**k what everybody else thinks. This country is made up of those three kinds of people when it comes to attitudes towards sex. My kind of people, we’re the minority. And as long as we’re the minority this country will always have that attitude of ‘porn is dirty, porn is evil, blah, blah, blah’. I think it all goes back to this country being founded by Puritans.”
Although SPIC’N SPANISH is more popular than ever, Big Al says he will end the show’s 12-year run in December 2007. The eyes of many an SNS fan are misting up, but like football greats Jim Brown and Barry Sanders, Big Al wants to go out on top. Besides, he’s in the process of broadening the franchise so that folks worldwide can experience what New Yorkers have been fortunate enough to enjoy for over a decade.
With a “Live from the Bada Bing” DVD in the works and his website, SPICNSPANISHWORLD.COM rapidly picking up droves of new online fans, Big Al seems to be following the advice of the great philosopher Tony Montana, who once theorized, “The time has come. We’ve got to expand the whole operation. We’ve got to think big now.”
For more information on Big Al and SPIC’N SPANISH visit www.myspace.com/spicnspanish and www.spicnspanishworld.com.
For more stories and work by Dirty Angel visit www.supremearsenal.com and www.myspace.com/blackpacino.
