Netflix's Tiger King has a lot going on: big cats, murder for hire, head-scratching personal relationships, and the flamboyantly bizarre Joe Exotic (aka Joseph Maldonado-Passage), who also turns out to be a would-be country music hitmaker. The thing is, he did not actually sing those songs featured in the docuseries and compiled on those albums that he sold to the public in his souvenir shop. This should surprise no one who has seen Tiger King.
Joe Exotic's music is included a lot in the addictive, can't-look-away, seven-part story of Tiger King. He sings quietly along to songs billed as his own as he drives his truck, and the audience gets treated to cringe-worthy videos in which he is badly lip-syncing and very clearly not playing the guitar that he clutches. Naturally, the songs are mainly big cat themed.
In Tiger King Joe Exotic supposedly performs the ballad "I Saw A Tiger." The song pleads for mankind to let tigers live freely (a weird position for a man who held hundreds of big cats in captivity and bred them for sale). Then there's the darker "Here Kitty Kitty," which is a direct shot at Carole Baskin, his main Tiger King nemesis. The video for it stars a very convincing look-alike Baskin using tongs to feed a tiger what's meant to be human flesh (openly suggesting she killed and fed her second husband to her own big cats). While these are by no means great country songs, they are executed wonderfully not by Joe Exotic, but by a duo sometimes known as the Clinton Johnson Band.
The voice is so authentic and professional on the Tiger King songs that it seems obvious that Joe Exotic, whose speaking voice is a reedy, nasally twang, could not really have produced those sounds. Those who suspected some sort of Milli Vanilli-like hijinks were right. Not only was Joe Exotic not singing those tracks, he didn't even write them. The songs are the work of Vince Johnson and vocalist Danny Clinton. Per Vanity Fair, Joe Exotic would come up with topics, and the pair would write and record a custom song based off his song pitches.
Sadly, Johnson and Clinton were not paid for their work. Joe Exotic hustled them with promises that the music would be used in a reality show that he claimed to have in development. He told them it was being shopped to Animal Planet, Discovery, and National Geographic, and that exposure from the eventual series would be their compensation. They agreed. The show, of course, never did pan out. But now there's Tiger King, and word is getting out about the musical duo.
Given all the twists and turns in the wild true story of Tiger King, Joe Exotic using ghost singers fits in well with the show's portrait of a self-promoting, fame-hungry con man who values his personal brand above all else. Exotic is currently serving twenty-two years in prison for animal abuse and murder for hire, so maybe he'll use his time behind bars to legitimately give songwriting a go. The blues would be a good place to start.