Standing in the way of control
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While we're being punched in the face with explicitly sapphic narratives in pop music - not that I'm complaining about it - I waver back and forth between the feeling of celebration and "where have you been?"
Especially when The Gossip just released a new record (Real Power) and the Indigo Girls just announced another tour, I'm hoping this moment is the gateway to a huge catalog of artists. In the same way that Green Day was to punk or Alanis Morissette was to Ani DiFranco.
In what may be my weird queer origin story, I once saw The Gossip play to maybe 12 people in what had to be the shittiest bar venue in Providence, Rhode Island.
By myself.
I didn't have many friends in town yet who listened to punk or pop or who were queer. But I had to go. Standing in the Way of Control had been released the year prior and if you heard it back then, you'd get it.
Their songs weren't all happy fun times falling in love with girls songs but breakup hits and solidly danceable tracks about resistance. If I'm going to keep saying Not Gay As In Happy But Queer As In Fuck You, that's them. If I'm looking for some pop vibes to remind y'all that the first Pride parade was a riot, I'm probably turning on The Gossip.
Gossip front-woman Beth Ditto's recent interview with Gay Times put this difference between gay and queer in my head (is it ever that far away?) when speaking about how things have changed in mainstream music. The band signed to an all-gay subsidiary of a major label in 2007, leaning into being pigeonholed as a gay band, while acknowledging that they weren't the flag waving type.
"There was a gay mainstream and then the rest of us. It was a subculture of a subculture. It’s so interesting how, now, everyone is flying a flag."
And while some of their songs do wear it more on their sleeve, you might not clock the queerness from the lyrics alone. I don't have to know the lived experience they're coming from but when I do, that context just makes it resonate more. I keep thinking about this comment from Ditto in the interview:
...when you make a record as a queer person, every love song is a queer love song. I always take it back to when you find out when [artists are queer] after they come out of the closet later in life. You hear these songs that they wrote and realise how much differently it sounds knowing that they were speaking from a queer perspective. It could literally be a song about doing the dishes, but it’s still a queer experience!
::cue my entire discography::
I do think that some artists employing stealth lyric writing comes from a place of just wanting to write about exactly that - doing the dishes or experiencing loss or falling in love just like anyone else. However, it has absolutely been much easier throughout the past 20 years to not hit people over the head with it in order to avoid being pigeonholed as a Gay Band or discredited as such, or just hated by the general populous.
I LOVED Bloc Party's Silent Alarm but I can't even fathom how many more mixtapes I would've put This Modern Love onto had I known that it is, in fact, a queer song. To be lost in a forest, to be caught adrift... to be out of the closet. ::gay sigh::
I'm glad I get to be out, and y'all know where my music is coming from, but I hope some folks do some more digging into "queer music" now that some of our mainstream favs have finally made spicy sapphic themes no big deal.
I hope you find some songs about moving into a new apartment or missing your partner or the moment you take all the pictures off your wall that make you feel seen and heard and validated. The songs about losing friends or speaking truth to power and being very angry about it. The ones that run the gamut of this subculture of a subculture.
That kind of music is the absolute best. That's what I look for. That's why I keep writing.
Leave your favorite stealth queer song in the comments and I'll turn them into a playlist.
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