A Quote by Jennifer Holliday
I had ballooned out to close to 400 pounds at one point. And in the '80s, we were just beginning to get on video and disco. So therefore, I did not fit in, and my record company let me go because they said, 'Look, you're just not marketable enough with the weight problem.'
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When I was with Geffen Records, I weighed almost 400 pounds. The label told me that I had a great voice but wasn't marketable having a weight image.
My natural body weight is about 183 pounds. I've just always tried to keep 10 pounds of muscle on me because the bigger you were before, the more money you made. I always tried to cut at least five pounds to get to 185.
I had started losing weight. I mean he didn't know anything about the journey that I was on at that point obviously but from my highest weight of just over 300 pounds I lost about 45 pounds.
Kaputt was just a record that did really well for us, and therefore our record label and our booking agent said that we should go out and take our message to the world.
My contract with mercury PolyGram Nashville was about to expire. And I never had really been happy. The company, the record company, just didn't put any promotion behind me. I think one album, maybe the last one I did, they pressed 500 copies. And I was just disgusted with it. And about that time that I got to feeling that way, Lou Robin, my manager, came to me and talked to me about a man called Rick Rubin that he had been talking to that wanted me to sign with his record company.
I did four movies where I gained, like, fifty pounds. I had curly hair, and I had all of this facial hair. I had put on all this weight for these movies, and I did four or five of them back-to-back. Then I cut the weight and I got fit again. I cut my beard and I took away the mustache, and people were like, 'What are you doing?'
The 1980s were such a shock for me. I was really young, obviously, and The Slits were just mutilated. We were totally sabotaged to such a point that we were put out in exile. So that was the best way for me to spend the '80s: in the jungle, naked. Maybe there are more options now, and there's more girl groups. The only thing good that came out of the '80s was breakdancing.
You look at the violence that is there in entertainment, in video games, and don't just go say, 'We're going to do an assault weapons ban, and that's going to solve the problem,' because it is not going to get to the root of the problem.
I've never had a relationship with a record executive. I always went to the record company by someone that liked my playing. Then they would get fired, and I'd be left with the record company. And then - because they got fired - the record company wouldn't do anything for me.
I get an abundance of e-mail every day, some say 'dear Richard, can you call my husband, he weighs 400 pounds...' or 'my 14-year-old is 200 pounds...' or 'I just got divorced, no one wants me, I am 500 pounds.' So I pick up the phone and I call people.
I think that's where the music business is where it is today because at one point, we were just splurging so much money and it was just extra. Everything was just extra and over did. Now, people are being as creative as they were but they're not spending $500,000 or a million on a video.
My pregnancy was a free for all. I had no boundaries. I just ate, ate, ate. I just said, 'This is my time, these are my nine months; I can just have fun. How big can I really get?' Sixty pounds! I gained 60 pounds!
I think the first contest I did, I was somewhere just over 300 pounds. With my frame, I needed to add more weight and put more muscle on to get better leverage and be more successful. Just to get stronger, really. I had to work really hard.
We had to learn that in London and in Rio that we just weren't enough at that point. Did we believe it in that moment? Absolutely. We had to go one extra step to figure it out.
I hate those unrealistic goals that people place on women. It's just not right. It took us nine months to have our babies and put on this weight. I gained 55 pounds with my daughter, so I get it. It's tough. But you can't just pop out a baby and expect to be the size you were before. It just doesn't work like that.
In the beginning, me and my bandmates just did stuff on our own - we had smoke bombs, we'd dress as crazy and as weird as we possibly could, just to give ourselves a different ambience. But when we started making money, of course, the ideas started getting bigger. We were big fans of Broadway; we were like, "Man, when you go see a Broadway show, you just get pulled right out of reality; you're into their world for a two-hour period. It would be nice if we could do that onstage with a music concert".
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