Did 'Tiger King' Joe Exotic Really Sing Those Songs?
It seemed to be a classic story: He saw a tiger, the tiger saw a man.
Or did he?
The new Netflix documentary “Tiger King” has murder-for-hire plots, animal-loving polygamists, drugs, disappearances, magic, gubernatorial races and, of course, tigers. But there’s one question it seems everyone watching is wondering:
Did Joe Exotic really sing those songs?
One of the more bizarre aspects of Netflix’s “Tiger King” (which is saying something), is the inescapable presence of zookeeper-entertainer Joe Exotic’s, aka Joseph Maldonado-Passage’s, extensive music catalog.
Throughout the documentary, Joe Exotic’s bizarre songs and homemade music videos pop up again and again. Each has its own weird aspects. In “I Saw A Tiger,” he sings about the big cats while standing on an emergency vehicle with an unnecessarily stormy background. In “Here Kitty Kitty,” he enlists an impersonator to mock Big Cat Rescue CEO Carole Baskin.
Regardless of your feelings about the videos, one universal fact is hard to deny: It slaps. The Tiger King’s got bops.
But does Joe Exotic really have a purrfect voice? Vanity Fair last week let the cat out of the bag.
According to the outlet, musician Vince Johnson and vocalist Danny Clinton are actually behind the songs in the music videos. The pair have customized songs before, and Exotic convinced them to make him some personalized tracks for free, saying they’d get exposure in his now-defunct reality show.
Sadly, according to TMZ, Clinton died in October from heart-related issues. However, Johnson spoke to Vanity Fair about Exotic in an email, saying, “I had no idea he was going to Milli Vanilli the songs”:
It was a couple of months and two or three songs [into the collaboration] when I was on YouTube one night and just happened to look up Joe Exotic. And there he was, lip-syncing and acting like the ghost of Elvis [in these music videos]. I called him up, I was hot … And he bamboozled me about his reality...
