32 Queer Covers Of Songs by Straight Artists Because Everything’s Better When It’s Gayer
This post was originally published in September 2014 and has been updated and re-vamped with new artists and songs in February 2021.
My friends, I love a cover. I love covers so much I watched every season of Glee. But most of all I love queer covers, aka queer people covering songs. Give me a gay cover! Let us share in this love together? I attempted to only pick songs that had videos where things happened, like people singing for example, but some covers were too good to skip even though their video was audio-only. ALSO I was looking for songs usually by male artists about women so we could have some pronoun fun but also there are exceptions to that as well because of goodness and my personal desires. I also was looking for covers of songs by straight artists but I have indicated where that premise was slightly compromised. Lez begin!
Miya Folick, “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” (Death Cab for Cutie)
Tracy Chapman, “Stand By Me” (Ben E King)
Alex G, “Perfect” (Ed Sheehan)
Joy Oladokun, “My Girl” (The Temptations)
Marika Hackman, “Between the Bars” (Elliot Smith)
Be Steadwell, “Use Somebody” (Kings of Leon)
Brandi Carlile, “Wildflowers” (Tom Petty)
https://youtu.be/ZPRkpyHUpJU
Julia Nunes & dodie & Orla Garland, “God is a Woman” (Ariana Grande)
(as far as i know, orla is not queer, but the other two people in this are!)
Hayley Kiyoko, “Mr Brightside” (The Killers)
Rebecca Black, “Love Me Two Times” (The Doors)
Note: Jim Morrisson may have been bisexual.
Jessica Betts, “I Kissed a Girl” (Katy Perry)
Japanese Breakfast, “Head Over Heels” (Tears for Fears)
King Princess, “Happy Together” (The Turtles)
Joan Jett, “Crimson and Clover” (Tommy James)
https://youtu.be/mHZBBNRrano
Janelle Monae, “I Want You Back” (The Jackson 5)
Sara Ramirez, “Chasing Cars” (Snow Patrol)
Unfortunately she is not the only singer on this track but we have what we have
Demi Lovato, “Take Me To Church” (Hozier)
Kai Mata, “Riptide” (Vance Joy)
k.d. lang, “Crazy” (Patsy Cline)
Katie Melua, “Just Like Heaven” (The Cure)
Melissa Etheridge, “Brown Eyed Girl” (Van Morrison)
Indigo Girls, “Romeo and Juliet” (Dire Straits)
Holly Miranda, “Lover You Should’ve Come Over” (Jeff Buckley)
Me’Shell NdegéOcello, “Who Is He and What Is He To You” (Bill Withers)
St. Vincent, “Lithium” (Nirvana cover, performed with surviving members of Nirvana)
Note: Kurt Cobain was possibly bisexual but this has not been definitively declared. Also Pat Smear is bisexual.
Lily Brown, “Rude” (Magic)
This song is actually unbearable in its heterosexual version but delightful when it’s gay.
Mary Lambert, “Teenage Dirtbag” (Wheatus)
Tayla Parks, “What’s Going On” (Marvin Gaye)
Halsey “Sucker” (Jonas Brothers)
K’s Choice, “Yellow” (Coldplay)
Tegan & Sara, “Dancing in the Dark” (Bruce Springsteen)
Santana Lopez and Brittany S Pierce, “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” (Whitney Houston)
It’s Chika 1, Rap Industry 0 With Her Debut EP “Industry Games”
“I’m about to change the world/ … I hope this music makes you think,” begins Jane Chika Oranika, better known as CHIKA, on “Intro,” the first track from her debut EP, Industry Games, out today. It’s a provocative mission statement, to be sure — and the six songs that follow genuinely bear it out.
Chika’s sonic and lyrical mainstream peers are J. Cole and Chance The Rapper, and to a lesser degree Rapsody and Kendrick Lamar. Like them, Chika toes the line between “conscious” and “corny,” (more successfully than Cole or Chance, in my opinion), attempting to inspire over bombastic, maximalist beats, chopped-and-screwed gospel and oldies, and pleasantly arranged strings and bells. She has the typical boasts — title track “Industry Games,” for example — but it makes sense to me that, in my opinion, it’s the weakest track on the EP. Not coincidentally, it’s also the trappiest. I don’t feel like that’s Chika’s lane.
Her first viral fame came from a hard-as-fuck freestyle takedown of Kanye West. He’s clearly a major influence, especially on songs like “Crown,” which could have easily fit on The College Dropout (and it’s about … dropping out of college but still having self-respect and chasing success). The biting, incisive commentary of that freestyle — her rapid-fire, chameleonic flow, and her thoughtful, critical, uplifting lyricism — are where she shines and stands out. And that’s not just among the women in the field. Much of mainstream rap right now seems to be mumblers riding the trap wave and/or rhymes written exclusively in couplets and punchlines, and that’s not Chika’s style (though she does have excellent ones: “They doin’ shit I ain’t fonda/ It’s like my name isn’t Jane“. I gasped audibly at that one.)
She’s at her best when she’s rapping about real-ass shit. “Songs About You” and “Balenciagas In The Bathroom” both temper boasting about her success — which is fair — with an honest takedown of her struggles with handling that success and fame. On “Balenciagas”:
“The whole world is conversating ‘bout your waistline/ And mental health days make you guilty ‘cuz you waste time/ I’m fighting everybody demons but can’t face mine/ Baseline use all that pain and anger and just make rhymes/ How I’m uplifting your whole life but still I hate mine?/ How I get rich but still get pissed about the money?/ Now everybody wanting me to wear a fake smile/ How I’m supposed to fake a laugh when ain’t shit funny?”
Chika’s other lane? Lovely songs about women. Chika’s lesbianism is, refreshingly, both simultaneously front and center and incidental. I put her “Can’t Explain It” on my Best Lesbian Love Songs of 2019 list. But I didn’t know about “Want Me:”
Neither of those delightful love songs is on Industry Games but “On My Way,” a heart-filling piano and soft drumbeat ballad, is:
“I wanna thank you for being my person/ You say that you need me/ and that feeling is mutual/ I’m so glad that you see me as beautiful/ I think you one of a kind/ I promise all day you done been on my mind/ … I love your energy/ you and I we got synergy/ And it’s like we the same/ They don’t fuck with you?/ Then they just made two enemies.”
There are no pronoun games here, but Chika doesn’t make being gay a big deal. There aren’t any songs about homophobia or lesbianism to be found here. There are many schools of thought on this; some people want queer artists to be super out and to explicitly discuss sexuality in their music, while others feel like normalization is the key. I think Chika rides the latter wave, and that’s her right.
And while Chika’s songs can be sexy — see “Want Me”— she’s never objectifying or disrespectful. There’s a time and place for lesbian fuckboidom (well, Young M.A’s got that lane pretty occupied) but that’s not Chika’s speed.
Overall this EP is excellent. Taken along with her singles — “High Rises” and “Can’t Explain It” especially — this is an incredibly auspicious start. Chika has announced herself with a major bang; with luminaries like Erykah Badu, Cardi B, and Missy Elliott counting themselves as fans, she is about to blow up big time.
And I can’t wait. We’re in a golden age of women in rap right now, and Chika adds a much-needed conscious, thoughtful, craftsperson-ly lyricism and return to blustering, pre-trap positivity that the industry needs. I hope she leans even further into what she does best, and that the industry doesn’t play any games with her.
Industry Games dropped today, stream it now.
VIDEO PLAYLIST: These Bangers from Rhythm + Flow’s Lesbian Rapper Londynn B
When Netflix debuted their three week “reality music competition event” Rhythm + Flow earlier this month, it was clear right from the start they were pulling no punches.
The ten-episode rap series is modeled a bit after The Voice or American Idol, with undiscovered rappers vying for their big break under the guidance of judges Cardi B, T.I, and Chance the Rapper. It keeps all the best parts of its predecessors (heartfelt stories about dreams of stardom, watching career growth and high stakes in real time, soundtracks that make you want to leap on Spotify) while also doing away with the worst of them (gone are months long audition reels and cheaply done covers of ‘80s ballads — every rap spit is a bonafide head bangin’ original). Throughout the series there are cameos and “guest judges” from some of hip hop’s most iconic stars — Snoop Dogg, Rhapsody, Killer Mike, Fat Joe, Lupe Fiasco, Anderson.Paak and the late, great Nipsey Hussle to name a few. When it premiered at the start of the month, Time magazine named it “the best music competition show in years.” And they were damn right.
Yes, Rhythm + Flow is a lot of fun (and seriously, surprisingly good!) if you love rap music, but what nearly killed me dead was that it’s also surprisingly gaaaaaaaay. There’s two queer men and three queer women rappers who make it out of the audition rounds into the the Top 30. Two of them make it to the TOP EIGHT — shout out to Chicago’s Big Mouf Bo! — and one of those lesbian rappers, Atlanta’s Londynn B, makes it to the FINAL FOUR!
There’s no denying Londynn B is the complete package from the first time she picks up the mic. She’s a lesbian Cardi B by way of Grace Jones — all charisma, swagger, and sex. With the bars to back it up. She has a wife, a young daughter, and she’s taking no fucking prisoners.
As of last week, all of Hustle + Flow is now available on Netflix, so if you want to find out if the queen takes her crown, you’ll have to watch on your own. In the meantime, we here at Autostraddle wanted to congratulate Londynn on making it to the finals with a look at her most iconic performances.
Episode 6: Rap Battles — Londynn B vs Inglewood IV
Before the battle began, Inglewood IV complained to the cameras that having to compete against a woman put him at a disadvantage because he couldn’t call her bitch without being unfairly labeled as sexist — which is first of all ridiculous, because this is rap music we’re talking about. Second of all, if you have to make excuses from the jump, boo-hooing about why you’re going to lose, then you deserve to have your whole ass sent packing back home. Of course Londynn delivers.
“I’ll take your baby moms and let her eat my butt.” — An icon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFB2cogPap8&feature=youtu.be&t=12
Episode 7: Music Videos — “I Can’t Change”
When this video aired, Chance the Rapper declared “I Can’t Change” the best song in the entire competition up to that point. I could watch it forever, and I dare you to get its infectious chorus out of your head from the first time you hear it. A true bop for the ages.
https://youtu.be/Re943syZE6M
Episode 9: Collaborations — “Rose in Harlem” with Teyana Taylor
Netflix dropped some behind-the-scenes footage of the first time Londynn met R&B star Teyana Taylor (along with her adorable daughter!). Londynn described herself as a longtime fan of “Rose in Harlem” and Teyana’s work. “I was a fan because for one, we’re both moms. And two: everything that gets done by women is always downplayed and when I heard the song, I felt that.”
I felt that, too.
https://youtu.be/dz8L_xge9FE
Episode 10: Finale — “Only One”
Some artists focused on creating just one single for their finale performance; ever the overachiever (because black women have to work three times as hard to be seen), Londynn performed a medley of three tracks. And honestly? Any one of them could be a Billboard hit this winter if she wanted them to be.
You can listen to Londynn B’s greatest hits from Rhythm + Flow on Spotify, Tidal, or Apple Music. Don’t forget to follow her on Twitter or Instagram. Congrats again, girl.
Tegan and Sara are Just Like You on Their Excellent New Album
“So what if…” *hits blunt* “…you went back to high school, but with all of your current memories and all of the lessons you’ve learned still intact? Would you do it?”
While you can learn a bit about someone’s experience of adolescence by measuring the fear and anxiety that registers in their eyes upon hearing this ubiquitous modern koan, it’s a pretty meaningless hypothetical — unless you’re Tegan & Sara.
That’s because while researching their new memoir, High School, by excavating and then presenting for consumption their teenage lives as young lesbians in Calgary, Canada, they came across a sizable archive of old demos they’d written and recorded at the time. Those songs form the basis of their excellent new album Hey, I’m Just Like You.
It’s full of adolescent heartbreak, teenage angst, and nascent queer identity exploration — not too distant from the themes present in all of their music, to be honest. And it’s also exactly what you’d expect musically — harkening back to the acoustic folk-rock of their classic first few albums, but with the shiny veneer of the pop rock they’ve perfected in the years since.
But in a crucially unique opportunity — like finding one’s old diary and reinterpreting long-forgotten memories with the wisdom of the present or, of course, getting high and imagining how, via some sort of time travel, you’d re-do high school if you had double or triple the life experience and its concomitant wisdom — they’re able to grapple with their own selves, in the form of those old demos from decades past, and warmly examine, process, and then reinterpret them. For our benefit!
I first heard Tegan & Sara’s music when I was about 16, and for some reason remember exactly where (this is incredibly unusual for me; I do not have a vivid memory). I was in a high school friend’s spare room with another friend, and they were listening to a mix CD she’d made for him. “Check this out,” he said, “it’s two lesbian twin sisters.” He put on “Walking With a Ghost.” This was about 2004, so So Jealous must have just come out (one of these friends was that “cool alternative friend” in high school who knew all the cool bands; I aspired to be just like her). I didn’t like it, though; I thought it was repetitive (it is).
It wasn’t until way later, during my emo years, that I discovered The Con in between Bright Eyes marathons, and then went back to So Jealous, which is now one of my favorite albums of all time. Whenever I want to bask in the nostalgia of those days, now 15 or so years later, So Jealous and The Con are some of the first albums I cue up (Bright Eyes is virtually unlistenable to me now; go figure).
Nostalgia is almost always popular, but maybe never more so than now: retro-style and classic remake video games are currently experiencing a renaissance on platforms like Nintendo Switch and PC, many of us who lived through the ’90s are seeing its fashion make a comeback, and the synths and gated reverb-heavy drums of the ’80s are the foundation of music by current pop queens Carly Rae Jepsen and Taylor Swift.
But Hey, I’m Just Like You doesn’t feel like nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. Sure, it’s a cute and buzzworthy project, especially in conjunction with the pair’s new book. But they’re refreshingly candid about what they’re doing: “[W]hen you think back to the things you did 20 years ago, you imagined you’d cringe,” explained Tegan to Apple Music. “But the more I listened to the songs, the less I cringed and the more I thought, these melodies are great!”
While I’m not a famous lesbian pop star duo, I am a lesbian who’s been casually writing and recording acoustic guitar songs since I was a teen. I was curious about their experience, because I cringe at the things I did 20 minutes ago, let alone 20 years. So I did some soul- and some internet-searching. I wanted to see if Tegan & Sara’s experience could be similar to my own.
And, reader, I found recordings of my teenage folk pop songs. Much to my simultaneous delight and chagrin, they were hosted on MySpace, and you can find that MySpace account here. But before you get too excited about the potential schadenfreude, or whatever the feeling is that allows people to enjoy the secondhand embarrassment of watching the first few episodes of reality TV singing competition shows, I lucked out — MySpace “lost” 50 million songs during a 2018 “server migration,” and these songs are now gone. I scoured through old hard drives and found recordings of songs going back to 2013 — but nothing from my teens.
No, “Eric” is not my deadname. I don’t know why my “band” was called that. It’s very disorienting looking at those song titles; I remember that they were all actually written in college, when I was about 18 or 19. I remember what some of them referenced: “She Joined the Army” was about my high school girlfriend, who broke up with me almost immediately upon meeting the boys in her college dorm, and also briefly joined her school’s ROTC. While I don’t remember the lyrics or chords to any of these songs, I do remember the chorus of this one: “She joined the army/ for the red, white, and blue/ she’s stomping and marching/ like she’s always wanted to.” I really want to not cringe, y’all. I hope the melody was great, but I have my doubts.
The rest are mysteries to me. I know that “Coffee” and “Audrey” were both written about girls I met in college. Audrey was a toxic “friend” who refused to define whether we were an “item” and constantly pined to me about her long-distance, equally toxic maybe-ex-boyfriend, and convinced me not to study abroad in Buenos Aires my second year of college because she’d be lonely — one of the biggest regrets of my life, to be honest. And I have no idea what “The Trees in Aberdeen” was about. I don’t know what the trees in Aberdeen are like — or honestly, where Aberdeen even is without looking it up. I also am sure I didn’t at the time. I assume it’s another sad song.
Honestly, I hope those songs are lost forever and I can remember them with fond nostalgia — as better than they likely really are. Reality has a way of delegitimizing the rosy fantasy with which we can, from a safe distance, observe the past – which is the whole point of nostalgia anyway, right? The past is better left where it is. We’ve learned from it, grown from it, and hopefully processed it in therapy. The lesson for me in this is: this kind of project is better left up to the experts. Tegan & Sara clearly are.
Imagine finding out, twenty years later, that you once wrote a song about how much you love your best friend, bandmate, and twin sister, and how that relationship guides and sustains you. And to find that it still rings true enough to revise and record it, together with that person!
Tegan and Sara have mined through their pasts, found the gems, like the one above, and put together a poignant ode to their past selves. And for that I’m thankful; it’s like they went through it so we don’t have to! We can just live vicariously through their public vulnerability and imagine — without evidence — that if we did the same, we’d be charmed, rather than horrified, by what we found.
Because I’d never go back to my teens, especially with what I know now. It was a very difficult, confusing time, and the blunders I committed then have laid the foundation for all of the progress I’ve made since. Except, maybe I’d have said goodbye to Audrey and flown to Buenos Aires for a year instead of sticking around, being miserable, and writing a song about it. Because I wish I had those memories instead of the song. But I don’t have the song! Just the title. Because of this album, I can enjoy Tegan and Sara’s process — and progress — and see myself in it without having to mine my own past for my own skeletons. I think that’s a blessing.
Songs to Make You Cry in the Grocery Store, as Ranked Compared to “Fast Car”
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, you have cried to “Fast Car,” by queer musician Tracy Chapman. There’s a strong chance you have even cried to it in a public place, given that for some reason it’s often on rotation in the pre-packaged playlists of grocery stores and CVSs, a weird choice given that it is one of the most emotionally devastating pieces of art in recorded history. It’s like playing “My Girl” on repeat on the TV in the dentist waiting room. Better to engage with in the privacy of your own home! I am reminded of this deeply resonant tweet:
https://twitter.com/jpbrammer/status/1102237846029692928
It is a sentiment apparently so widely shared, this unique terror of having to emotionally process “Fast Car” unexpectedly and in public, that it was actually almost impossible to find that above tweet because this is such a widely shared sentiment.
i did not even include ‘crying’ as a search term to find this, literally just ‘fast car’ and ‘store.’
While clearly “Fast Car” in particular has struck a chord with us as a species, for reasons that I feel we all intuitively understand without having to articulate them, it is not alone in this genre; I’ve been noticing more often recently how I think of some songs in the specific context of “wow I really hope I never have to hear this while I’m around other people, like say while I’m trying to pick out toilet paper on sale,” and yet also seem superficially benign and mainstream enough that they might plausibly get played inside a Walgreens or Cub Foods, like when I listened to Hootie and the Blowfish’s “Let Her Cry” while buying moisturizer last week. I live in fear of that moment. Here are some of them!
“Fast Car”
What is there to say about the power of Fast Car that hasn’t already been said by everyone and also your own heart? When we talked about our favorite songs by LGBT artists for LGBT History Month, “Fast Car” was prominently featured, and for good reason. I would accept arguments that a number of other Tracy Chapman songs could also take this slot, perhaps most notably “Give Me One Reason” or “Baby Can I Hold You” if I’m voting personally, and I am. Regardless, as the foundational example of this genre, “Fast Car” gets:
5/5 Fast Cars
“Party of One”
Full disclosure, this song is the entire reason I am writing this list. I put this album on unthinkingly while puttering about the house because I was dimly aware she had a new record out and all of the sudden this song is playing and once the lyrics actually penetrate my brain I’m like, sobbing into a sink full of dishes? There should be an FCC rating for this song specifically. Let’s not even talk about the video, I can’t deal with it. If anyplace I was patronizing played this song, I would not only have to leave immediately and never come back but cross the street when I walked by it for the rest of my life. I’m distraught just thinking about this. I just listened to this song again to write this and I feel like I was hit by a train.
4.5/5 Fast Cars
“Landslide”
Although not gay in conception or original execution by Fleetwood Mac (although writing an emotionally manipulative album about heartbreak while the entire band, composed entirely of couples, was breaking up was a very culturally gay thing to do) it became gay when Brittney and Santana performed it, obviously. Whichever iteration of this song and corresponding emotional landscape you are brought back to when hearing it (for me it’s actually the Dixie Chicks cover I find most devastating), we can agree it is not an appropriate choice for public spaces!
3/5 Fast Cars
“Hallelujah”
This song as an entire concept is like a reverberating hall of mirrors of upsetting emotions. The Leonard Cohen original is very sad; the Jeff Buckley cover, obviously extremely depressing; the Rufus Wainwright cover really tugs at the heartstrings; obviously for the purposes of our audience the kd lang version will really fuck you up. Regardless, again, of our unique and personal relationship we have with the secret chord that David played to please the Lord, it is not one that we should be navigating while trying to purchase tampons or a bag of Tostitos™ hint of lime chips.
4/5 Fast Cars
“River”
Although this seems, again, to me like a choice obviously ill-suited to a breezy afternoon shopping or buying toothpaste, I feel like it gets some play around Christmas because it’s a ‘winter’ song that doesn’t specifically reference any religious holidays. While the Joni original is, of course, heartrending in its quiet way, something about hearing it sung by lesbians is uniquely emotionally paralyzing. Something about the kind of self-loathing and self-reproach embedded in looking back at a failed relationship is very gay and something that it’s just almost effortless to spiral into while spending 20 minutes in a Target trying to pick out a Christmas card for your parents who still call your girlfriend your roommate.
3.5/5 Fast Cars
“Breathe”
I was torn about which Melissa track to highlight here but Riese correctly indicated that the answer was “Breathe” — “the one that goes ‘it’s alright it’s alright, it only hurts when i breathe'”. Strong point made!
3/5 Fast Cars
Obviously this is a limited and highly subjective list; please feel free to add to it by sharing the songs that you feel personally there should be a ban on playing in public. This is a safe space etc.
Monday Roundtable: Hey DJ Play That (Gay) Song
Before we had Hayley Kiyoko serenading pretty girls in a rotating wardrobe of cage bras and oversized shirts or Kehlani and Demi Lovato climbing on top of each other on stage, God bless them, the landscape of gay music looked a little different. The first musician or song that you felt in your heart and brain was gay was a big moment for many of us — here are the gay songs we first knew and loved.
Heather Hogan, Senior Editor
My favorite gay song is the Indigo Girls’ cover of Dire Straits’ “Romeo and Juliet” from their iconic 1992 Rites of Passage album. Obviously the Dire Straits version is amazing; the song’s been covered a zillion times. But there is something breathtaking about Amy Ray singing it to another woman with a heart full of rage and heartache. And I dreamed your dream for you and now your dream is real — so tell me, honey: how can you look at me as if I was JUST ANOTHER ONE OF YOUR DEALS? I knew it was gay because I knew the Indigo Girls were gay. I was too scared to buy their music, of course, but my sister loooved them so I would borrow her CDs sometimes and drive around listening to them because, like Amy Ray here, I was in love with a lot of straight girls who gave me all their time and attention until Romeo came a-callin’ and they were reminded they used to have a scene with him. I listened to this song just now, 39 years old in my New York City home I share with my partner of eight years, and it was as much of a soul-stabber as it was when I was 16, Georgia backroads, windows down, scream-singing about my best friend.
Rachel Kincaid, Managing Editor
I grew up with a lot of gay women’s folk music being played, a lot of Lilith Fair vibes — my mom was a recently divorced white woman in the early 2000s, there was a lot of Indigo Girls, Melissa Etheridge, Annie Lennox and Sarah McLachlan. The crown, I think, has to go to Tracy Chapman, who is maybe the only one of that era of artists I return to now and still get something as powerful (or maybe even more so) as I did when I first heard it, rather than just nostalgia and the reminiscence of what they first meant to me (doesn’t mean I won’t still crank out a solid cry to Rites of Passage!). I don’t know that I knew in a literal sense that Chapman was gay, but I definitely stored her in that special locker in my brain for things that were intriguing in a way I couldn’t describe and would later realize was queerness. One of my first gay friends (before we knew what that meant) was an effeminate boy I had grown up with and as part of a kind of effort to normalize himself, he was on a mission to find male musical artists he liked rather than just female vocalists. At first he assumed Chapman was male based on, I guess, her voice, and when we later realized she wasn’t she held an alluring kind of gender deviance for me as a little tomboy.
Anyways the point is, “Fast Car” can and does still absolutely devastate me every time. I think I heard it first in my mother’s car — a lot of my first music memories are from the radio in my mom’s car — and I remember connecting the dots between the literal narrative of the song (I have to get out of this city, you have a car, we could make this work) to the implied one — (I’ve never had any options and this is my one shot at happiness, when I was with you was the only time I felt like I could be someone, please say yes). The vulnerability in the repression, the aching fixation on the small gesture — your arm felt nice wrapped ’round my shoulder — feels so specifically gay! She has an entire (sad! flawed!) life planned out based on your arm felt nice wrapped around my shoulder! That’s fucking gay (and like, attachment issues, which, also gay)! And something about the structure of the song makes the conclusion so tragically foregone — don’t you know as soon as you hear her ask in the first verse that it’s futile? Have any of us ever said “you gotta make a decision” to someone without knowing already, with a sinking feeling in our hearts, what their decision would be?
[Runner up is “Give Me One Reason”; honorable mention also for “Baby Can I Hold You.” Actually everything — “The Promise” is fucking me UP if we’re being honest.]
Carrie Wade, Staff Writer
“You Don’t Own Me” by Lesley Gore, which combines two of my central interests: the Brill Building sound and telling men to step off. I had no idea Lesley Gore was a lesbian when I first heard this song, but that fact only makes it better as far as I’m concerned. She literally tells the guy not to parade her around when they’re out together — a feeling very familiar to closeted teenage me, who sat through many uncomfortable dates I didn’t actually want to be on. “It’s My Party” is fine and everything, but without “You Don’t Own Me,” you’re missing the essentials.
Erin Sullivan, Staff Writer
I don’t remember the first time I heard “Closer to Fine” by the Indigo Girls, but my guess is when I was a freshman in college back in 2004 (yikes) as that is the year where I found myself surrounded by the kind of older lesbians who have fire pits on their decks. That means this song and its band were played non-ironically at parties and in cars, which was great, because everyone knows this song bangs. If you watch the video for this song, you can see Amy and Emily absolutely wailing on their guitars from the moment you press play until the moment you press replay. I mean, they are really going to town on the strumming, to a point where I don’t even think they know what song they’re supposed to be playing. Rock on, girls!
Creatrix Tiara, Staff Writer
It’s hard to narrow down anything from Savage Garden but if I had to pick one I’d say To The Moon & Back. I didn’t know Darren Hayes was gay when I first heard it (especially since he didn’t come out till like 2006) but looking back IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW. I’ve loved this band since I was 12 and every damn song fits so well into the soundtrack of my life. To The Moon & Back in particular fit well with my lonely, not-really-connecting-to-family heart, the one that just needed somebody to really love her for who she was (especially after an extremely torturous primary school experience).
Alexis Smithers, Staff Writer
It very well could be common knowledge that Lesley Gore was a lesbian but I didn’t know for sure til I checked for this roundtable and IN MY SPIRIT I KNEW !!! I KNEW SHE HAD TO BE GAY!!!! NO ONE CAN SING A SONG LIKE THIS AND NOT BE GAY. I can’t remember when first I heard it but it reminds me of one of my favorite Rizzles fics set in the 1950s that I’m 99% sure is unfinished and that hurts but I’m holding out for a hero to come back within thirty years and wrap things up and this song constantly plays in my head when I read it. Not to mention It’s My Party? I Don’t Wanna Be A Loser? Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows?? My girl is giving all kinds of lesbian heartbreaking hits!
Sarah Sarwar, Design Director
I would play the song “Slide” by Ani DiFranco on a loop my senior year of high school and think about my straight best friend and feel SO MANY GAY FEELINGS! It’s all about those long, drawn out unrequited crushes that linger and take up space in your mind — crushes that are ultimately fucked up but you’re like “Let’s do this some more!”
She laid down in her party dress and never got up
Needless to say she missed the party
She just got sad
Then she got stuck
She was wincing like something brittle
Trying hard to bend
She was numb with the terror
Of losing her best friend
Aside from the lyrical bangers and the perfect pacing, “Slide” was just SO relatable! I really was scared of being honest about my feelings and losing my best friend! The entire song is how riding a bicycle in the rain will make you slide out of control. That’s how my unrequited crush felt. Wet… and out of control. lol. I remember I used to meaningfully belt out the lyric “And my pussy is a tractor / And this is a tractor pull” while developing photos in the darkroom! It’s how I felt!
“Slide” named my lust in a way that I could bellow in the darkness.
Alaina Monts, Staff Writer
Every time I hear “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman I flash forward to a utopic future where I and my hard-working partner have four foster kids and are hanging out on our back porch watching them play with the dogs. My only real memory attached to the song is hearing it around 12:25 and 3:25 during the lunch shifts at this restaurant where I hosted.
Valerie Anne, Staff Writer
This is extremely rude because I have a whole Songs of Sappho playlist for songs just like this and there are too many to list, so instead of going with ‘pure favorite,’ I’m going to go with one of my faves that is lesser known. Because I could tell you my favorite Hayley Kiyoko or Halsey or Be Steadwell song or that Jenny Owen Youngs’ cover of Hot in Herre gives me life but instead I’m going to tell you about Fay Wolf. I discovered Fay Wolf’s cover of I Wanna Dance with Somebody after Glee had already gayed it up and no version (except the original obviously) would ever be good enough for me, but this song came on my Discover Weekly and it was soft and slow and I just let it ride. So then when it gets about 3/4 of the way through the song and she says, “I need a man who’ll take a chance…” and then there’s this sweet little, “or” that I love so much. You can almost hear her smile a shy smile like she knows she’s about to rattle your expectations, and then sings with confidence, “I need a woman.” And rattled I was! I think it was the first explicitly bisexual song I’d ever heard. Like I’d heard songs with the pronouns changed (or not changed!) to make it a lady-lovin-ladies song, and I’d heard totally gay songs, but I liked that this queer artist took this song and not only put her own musical twist on it but put her own personal stamp on it. It was a pleasant surprise the first time I heard it, and that little “or” makes my heart skip a beat every time.
Riese Bernard, CEO
Sometimes at the end of a concert that isn’t an Indigo Girls concert, when everybody’s clapping for an encore, I will yell PLAY CLOSER TO FINE and maybe one other person — usually zero, but sometimes one — will get the joke and smile in my direction. See, The Indigo Girls always play “Closer to Fine” as their encore song, and there is no concert I love like I love an Indigo Girls concert. The Indigo Girls have been around for a minute, so the part where they play “Closer to Fine” feels like a sacred lesbian ritual we’re all participating in together. The goddesses leave the stage, we cheer and roar, raining devotionals upon them from the depths of our sapphic souls, and we call out to them, come back to us, come back, and we know they will. We know what will happen when they do. They’ll play “Closer to Fine.” But we do it just the same, because ritual. Because there is power in the ritual. The topic of the song is how we mess up over and over again, not just within lifetimes but across them, and how we wanna figure out why we do what we do or what the point of all of it is, not because we think we’re gonna get better, but ’cause we hope we might one day become, you know, fine.
ROOM 25: I Swear Noname Look So Regal
feature image via The FADER/Chantal Anderson
You got different people you go to that raise you up in particular ways. I go to Toni Morrison when I need family explanations and usually family curses. I got to Beyoncé for the the little black femme in me that I gotta smush down. I go to Noname when I want to be powerful and overflowing and strong enough to look my memories straight in the face. I go to Noname when I don’t want to pretend like institutional racism and the constant violence against and death of black people hasn’t fucked me over. I go to her to to learn how to tell the truth in all its messy, often bloody glory.
Fatimah Warner’s aka Noname’s new album, ROOM 25, is BLACK black blk blackity black and we are blessed. Two years after her first album, Telefone, (listed in Carmen’s 7 Albums By Women That Got Me Personally Through 2016), Noname brings an independently created project that was announced earlier this week on Instagram and Twitter and linked to a site that unlocked around midnight last night.
from noname’s instagram
a few days before the album this is what nonamehiding looked like
In Telefone, we were getting an introduction to Noname; in Yesterday she raps:
Who am I? Gypsy rap, Gypsy need her dollar back
And all of that, my devil is only closer when I call him back
[…]
Everything is everything, me Noname, you n*ggas doin cocaine
Me missing brother Mike, like something heavy
Me heart just wasn’t ready, I wish I was a kid again
— knowing that even though she’s being vulnerable with us, she knows she’s got to keep her guard up (“And I know the money don’t make me whole / magazines drenched in gold,/the dreams of granny in the mansion happy / the little things I need to save my soul”), and with the way people have come at her expecting her to ride on the coattails of friends who happen to be famous, she was right to do so.
ROOM 25 brings a Noname more sure of herself, secure in the knowledge that she can’t be anything other than who she is, and if you don’t rock with the first few lyrics, you’re more than welcome to leave. In the first song off the album, Self, she raps:
“My pussy teach ninth-grade English
My pussy wrote a thesis on colonialism
In conversation with a marginal system in love with Jesus
And y’all still thought a bitch couldn’t rap huh?
Maybe this your answer for that good pussy”
SHE STARTS THE FIRST SONG TELLING US WHAT HER PUSSY IS ABOUT AND WHAT HER PUSSY DOES. She doesn’t even do it on a purely pleasure level (which is still cool), she’s showing us her pussy got life in all kinds of places and we gotta respect the work it does everywhere. If that is not an anthem we all need then I can’t help you here. She got me so hyped about this I’m trying to write odes to my own pussy (which isn’t easy for a black nonbinary butch).
The rest of the album follows suit, calling Noname nothing but herself and that kind of honesty convinces the listener they’ve got to try to do the same. She questions whether anyone will remember her especially the best parts of her, berates the systems holding her and her loved ones captive, tells us about a love she wanted but understands doesn’t want her anymore and how she knows she’s got to stop looking outwards for someone to take better care of her.
With Noname, all the instruments lull you into a place where you’re in easy listening mode, but her lyrics make listening anything but easy. And that’s not a bad thing. It’s an amazing thing to have listeners studying your Genius page to get their own lessons in internal rhyme, clever wordplay, and fire delivery. Fans of Telefone will be happy to know that the lyrics and rap delivery get even better, possibly even faster.
As I said before, it just feels so black. With artists who seem to tiptoe around issues pertaining to race, Noname doesn’t jump in, she’s already wading in the water, waiting for you. You know this is for black people because there are only things you get if you grew up like this. With samples from The Spook That Sat By the Door in Blaxpoitation to the verses covering colonization, prison, police brutality, and God in No Name, the last song off the album, the entire work feels like sitting in your uncle’s backyard during the barbeque. Your aunts are dancing to Prince, uncles are telling you “you don’t know nothin bout this right here!”, your dad and his buddies are cursing each other out over cards, and you and your cousins are trying to catch gossip since they called you in from riding bikes so late. Your cousins wanna check out the new game you got and you tell your mom you’re leaving, your house isn’t far away. You’ve got one foot out the door when someone related to you (probably) grabs you back, tells you “You really shouldn’t be out by yourselves after dark like this.” You try to tell them you’re not alone, you got family with you. And they shake their head, and you want to tell them you’re not stupid, that you know what they mean. But they buried their son a few years ago. You and your cousins were told he died in the army, but it turns out he made it home. It was the cops that killed him You listen to this probably family member and sit outside to listen to the crickets, the smoke from the day funneling its way towards the sky.
This album feels like all that living, some of the best of living, but the something you can never forget like thunder overhead. Noname doesn’t make that feeling go away, but she sits with you while you talk through it. And if you don’t wanna talk, she lets the music do enough of that for the both of you.
You Can and Should Put On Hayley Kiyoko’s Extremely Gay Debut Album, “Expectations,” Today
We are living in 20GayTeen, the First Year of Our Lord Lesbian Jesus Hayley Kiyoko. Today she has released her first full-length album, Expectations, and she has delivered and surpassed any of those that we could have had. Because we are so blessed to have Hayley in our lives, here at Autostraddle we feel strongly that we need to do what is right and good: buy, download and stream Hayley’s new album today. We’re living in the future: we have the lesbian of color rising pop superstar we’ve been dreaming about. We have an album from one of the hottest young pop artists in the country right now where every love song is explicitly about girls. In-your-face, unambiguously lesbian songs being played on the radio and TV! We can show our enthusiasm and support by streaming Expectations today.
Expectations features a few song we already know, love and flirt with girls to, like “Curious,” “Feelings,” “Sleepover” and the recently-released “Let It Be.” “Curious” is a total bop and so far my favorite song of hers. In it she sings about the girl she likes who’s dating a boy, asking if he touches her “the way I used to.” In “Feelings,” Hayley talks about how she can’t hide any of her emotions and never acts cool around the girls she likes — relatable, amirite? “Sleepover” is more of a quietly heartbreaking slow jam that’s about unrequited queer crushes. Her newest single, “Let It Be,” is a great song about trying to move on from love and finding the strength to keep going. Hayley Kiyoko has been releasing some of the queerest EPs and singles for a couple of years now, leaning into explicitly depicting feelings between girls in her songs and videos both, and she’s finally stretching her creative wings to deliver a full album of lesbian bangers.
On top of delivering the gay pop hits we know and love from her, Expectations also sees Kiyoko trying out some new things and growing as an artist. It features a few things she’s never explored before, like the duet with fellow queer pop star Kehlani, “What I Need.” Songs like the back to back “Mercy/Gatekeeper,” and “Under the Blue/Take Me In” are ambitious, both over five and half minutes long, and when Hayley reaches for the stars, she grabs a whole handful of them. For every total dance-friendly bop on this album, there’s a really thoughtful exploration into how complex and interesting a really good pop song can be. When she returns to more traditional pop, she hits hard with “Wanna Be Missed,” a guaranteed Lesbian Feelings classic, and the bouncing girl-power jam “He’ll Never Love You (HNLY).” This album is fun to listen to from start to finish, to and never lets you down.
This is the gift we’ve all dreamed of since we were kids. This is the red carpet debut of a lesbian icon. Celebrate Gay Good Friday and Lesbian Easter with Hayley Kiyoko and Expectations.
CHAVELA Documentary Highlights the Pain and Poetry of the Seminal Mexican Lesbian Singer’s Life
Chavela Vargas was a boundary-breaking lesbian ranchera singer whose life and career grew up in Mexico. The first woman to openly sing to another woman on stage in Mexico, she sang wearing pants and button-ups under long ponchos, a distinctive style that the bucked norms of the time: one of the first women to wear pants before the 1950s, and onstage, no less. As she says in the film, “I won’t contradict the composer or myself.”
Chavela in her distinctive persona: strong brows, a poncho, and a guitar.
CHAVELA, the new documentary about her, is a beautifully-woven portrait of her life centered around an interview she gave in 1991. At that time, she was in her seventies and was just beginning to experience a great revival in her career, a third act after a long time away due to hardship and a difficult bout with alcoholism.
She was born in Costa Rica, at “the end of the world” as she describes it in the film. Her family never understood her “boyish” ways, and her mother hated her for her inability to conform to the traditional expectations held for young girls. She knew she had to leave, and so she made her way to Mexico — famous at the time for a golden age of film and music. There, she sang on the streets until she could make her way into small cantinas and cabarets, making a name for herself with her strong voice, deep passion, and unique style.
Growing up in a culture laden with machismo, Chavela struggled throughout her life with a stubborn nature and the expectations, put upon her by the rules of patriarchy, for her to be even more manly than the men. She built up a mythology for herself as a playboy, a celebrity who could have any woman she wanted. She reveled in this myth, even as she was brought down by insults and innuendo around her lesbianism. She would sing in Acapulco during a time where “all of Hollywood was there,” her performances attended by the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and Lana Turner. She’s described as beautiful, seducing the wives of the senators and celebrities that came to Mexico to hear her sing. She coyly mentions great affairs with famous people — like a passionate, brief relationship with Frida Kahlo and a night with Ava Gardner after attending Elizabeth Taylor’s wedding.
She knew she was hot stuff
Still, she struggled. She spent years refusing to be out, certain that it would end her career. Her penchant for partying led to a dependence on alcoholism, and ruined her reputation with the venues that would book her only to have her fall down drunk onstage. One of her dearest friends and collaborators, Mexican composer José Alfredo Jiménez, died of complications due to alcoholism. She withdrew, broke from her spending habits and difficulties with record companies that gave her little in return for her many sold records.
But, thankfully, the story doesn’t end there. She found a relationship with a young human-rights lawyer that helped her rebuild, and along with her deep spirituality and mysticism connected to the old Mexican gods, she gave up drinking. She was induced to come back onstage, and invited to Spain. Her music retained the same power, and she sold out bigger venues than she had ever sung in before. She was championed by filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar and found a new generation of fans in Spain and France before returning to finally sing in the Palacio de Bellas Artes theater in Mexico City.
Pedro Almodóvar found a muse and a friend in Chavela Vargas’s work and became a huge proponent of her success in Europe.
Though her life was characterized by solitude, her love for it and the freedom it gave her, CHAVELA is a story of a remarkable person told by the people who loved and admired her most. “There isn’t a lesbian in Mexico who doesn’t know Chavela Vargas,” says one of the interviewees in the documentary, “And who doesn’t love her.” She opened doors for art, gender expression, and sexuality in unprecedented ways. The people who followed in her footsteps show a deep gratitude and appreciation.
Woven throughout the film is the art that came out most brilliantly in her music. Her singing sublimates the deep pain she’s experienced throughout her life into art, as she describes: “I offer my pain to people who come to see me. And it’s beautiful.” It is this strength and beauty that drew people to her, and it is the heart of the documentary.
CHAVELA opens in NYC Oct 4, and in LA and SF Oct 6. CHAVELA is an Aubin Pictures Production Produced and Directed by Catherine Gund & Daresha Kyi.
Hello, Goodbye: From Faking My Taste for Crushes to Falling in Love with Music for Real
feature image via shutterstock.com
My music tastes have been unpredictable since day one. Most toddlers are contented with the simple, cloying loops of Sesame Street numbers and nursery rhymes. But I only wanted to listen to Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. “Louinella,” I’d say, an amalgamation of both their names, pointing to the stereo with as much conviction as a drunk person on their birthday requesting their jam from the DJ.
As I entered the formative years of developing music tastes, I sought guidance from the all-knowing goddesses in my life: my friend’s older sisters. They were teenagers. They could go to the mall by themselves. They drank diet sodas — the height of sophistication in my adolescent mind — and some of them even drank coffee. They all had the same handwriting: this bubbled, large scrawl that I could never for the life of me recreate. I wanted to absorb all their knowledge. One introduced me to Spice Girls and Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. From there, I found Jennifer Lopez, who I cited as the reason I wanted to become a singer in my second grade journal.
As I hit the later years of elementary school and then the world of middle school, where listening to the coolest music officially became a form of social currency, I did what I assume most people do: I adopted the tastes of my crushes.
Well, at the time, I didn’t think of them so much as my “crushes” but as my “best friends.” When you’re a closeted little queer girl, those terms are pretty much interchangeable. With Kelsey, I didn’t have to fake it completely. She liked the same music as me: Shakira, Missy Elliott, Xtina, Alicia Keys, Ciara, Usher. The summer before sixth grade, we were obsessed with the Disney Channel Original Movie Cheetah Girls, learning not just all the songs but the original choreography from the movie, too. We once spent a week in her attic choreographing a dance to “Whenever, Wherever” by Shakira, Kelsey attempting to get my stubborn hips to sway like hers. She preferred N*SYNC and Backstreet Boys to Britney and the A-Teens, but those were differences I accepted. Her parents weren’t as strict as mine, so they let her buy the explicit versions of CDs that we’d pop into her pink boombox. The only music I pretended to like along with Kelsey was that of Eminem.
Kelsey was my first friend breakup — a story for another time — and her absence from my life took a long time to fill. Any new best friends I made didn’t seem to be as understanding as Kelsey when it came to the fact that I only ever knew the clean, radio version of the hottest songs. When Kelsey left me behind to become one of the coolest girls at school, I felt decidedly uncool for the first time in my life. I tried to keep up with music trends, but I always felt just a couple steps behind. I also started getting serious about my future Broadway and/or glamorous Hollywood film career, which meant acting, singing, and dancing classes on the regular, which meant a newfound obsession with showtunes.
Then I met Summer. Summer was a junior counselor at the Christian summer camp I went to between sixth and seventh grade. She was only a few years older, but that was enough back then for me to declare anyone immediately wise, cool, and enviable: the Older Sister pedestal I had created in my mind all those years before. I laugh now when I think of how I would react to someone like Summer if I met them today: She was a white girl with thick red hair that she often adorned with flower crowns or backwards baseball caps, and she referred to herself unironically as a hippie. I thought she was hilarious, but in retrospect I think she was just loud.
Summer wore a different band shirt almost every day: Rolling Stones, Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd, The Doors, Led Zeppelin. She told me she loved classic rock, and without hesitating, I said “me too.” When she asked me what my favorite band was, I said U2, because it was my dad’s favorite band. Summer thankfully didn’t drop me right then and there, instead gently recommending that I expand my horizons. Her favorite band was The Beatles.
In “Louder Than Love: My Teen Grunge Poserdom,” Jessica Hopper writes of transforming her 14-year-old self into a grunge devotee for the sake of a crush on a 14-year-old boy. She bought all the pertinent records, DIY’d a Nirvana shirt, even changed her look to match her new persona. As I read the essay in The First Collection Of Criticism By A Living Female Rock Critic, I squirmed. It was all too familiar. Hopper opened a portal to the sticky desperation of obsessive teen love, and as I gazed into it, I remembered all the things I did because of Summer.
We weren’t even friends, really. She lived in a completely different part of the state, and when camp ended, all we exchanged were AIM screen names. Still, I was determined to stay in touch with her, to absorb her knowledge. I romanticized her life in my head. At least Hopper went to school with the boy she became a poser for: Summer and I were worlds apart, which only intensified the depths of my crush.
I messaged Summer a few times a week, often late at night when I would sneak into my mom’s home office while everyone else was asleep. I became a classic rock devotee, even though to this day I’m not sure I know how to define classic rock. I started listening to all the bands Summer had advertised on her wardrobe. I bought band shirts, too, finding them on the sales racks at T.J. Maxx, including one with the Rolling Stones logo emblazoned across it in gemstones. The Beatles became my favorite band. I got a box set of their full discography for Christmas. I started journaling in a notebook with a Yellow Submarine illustration on its cover. I started taking guitar lessons in addition to dance, singing, and acting.
I grew out my hair and started wearing long skirts and skinny jeans and beaded jewelry that I made myself. I tie-dyed shit. I denounced brands and started unironically referring to myself as a “hippie” and an “old soul.” I donned this mismatched and clumsy identity as if I were trying on a new outfit. Most devastatingly, I turned my back on the fierce and complex ladies of pop music who had always been there for me, trading them in for white dudes who I could not relate to on any level and who made music I had no interest in dancing to.
My new persona carried through to high school, but one person saw through it right away. Still determined to become a famous actress (although by this point, I also had decided I would be a powerful politician in Washington simultaneous with my thriving acting career), I was accepted into the musical theater program at Appomattox Regional Governor’s School for the Arts and Technology. My new high school was 35 miles south of my neighborhood, so every morning and afternoon, I took an excruciating 90-minute-long bus route to and from school. I could write entire novels about the lives we lived on those bus rides. They’re as memorable and drama-filled as any other part of my high school experience. On a daily commute that long, you’re bound to make friends (and enemies, too), and the first one I made was Julien, a tall, striking visual arts student who wanted to work in fashion (unlike me, he went on to achieve his high school dreams).
Julien was the first openly gay friend I had. We sat together on the bus every day, rolling our eyes at the annoying boy Christian who loved to remind people that as a conservative, he was a minority at our arts school. He never explicitly said it, but Julien could tell I was faking. Sometimes I wonder if he could tell I had been faking more than just my Beatles-loving, aggressively alt lifestyle, if he could tell I also was faking my interest in Ben, the energetic and forgetful boy on our bus who seemed to wear the same pair of corduroys every day. Julien subtly told me to stop wearing all my unflattering, colorful hippie clothes. Sick of listening to The Beatles on repeat on the clunky iPod that rested between us, my ear buds split between us like string tying us together, he announced that he was making me a mixtape.
In sloppy, elongated letters, Julien wrote “Now That’s What I Call Scandalous, Volume 1” (two more volumes would eventually follow it) on the disc he handed me the next day. But now I think he should have written something more like “One Day, You Will Realize You Are Gay, And Your Attachment To This Mixtape Will Suddenly Make Sense.” Bikini Kill, Le Tigre, Shiny Toy Guns, and Rilo Kiley were all prominently featured, musical influences he had picked up from his impossibly cool mother. But most importantly, it provided my first introduction to Sleater-Kinney.
For the first time in a long time, I fell in love with music again. Not the fake, forced love of my Summer-induced identity crisis. This was real. I saw the layers under the lyrics. I could relate. I wanted to dance. I wanted to scream. In her essay Hopper writes of eventually discovering Bikini Kill on the Kill Rock Stars compilation she initially bought to further conversation with her crush, but something changed. “Kathleen Hanna’s rebel yell posted the bail from my teen grunge prison,” she writes. “I had found music that meant everything to me.” For me, something similar happened when I first heard Corin Tucker’s booming, otherworldly voice, snapping me out of my daze. I had been listening absentmindedly to the music that I pretended to love on some deep, intellectual level. When Tucker sang, I listened for real. I didn’t just hear the music; I felt it.
I became a fan without changing who I was, my music diet gradually shifting back to women-fronted acts, white dudes nearly disappearing from my iPod entirely. My Beatles anthology discs gathered dust. Rolling Stones lyrics started leaking out of my brain, quickly forgotten. I gave my band shirts away (presently, the only band shirts I own are a Dixie Chicks one and one for the Alanis Morissette/Barenaked Ladies Au Naturale Tour, which are much more fitting). My hair had grown so long that it was giving me headaches, so I chopped it into a long bob, shedding a superfluous part of myself.
Newly baptized by Julien’s mixtape, I felt music reverberate within me as it had in the years before my classic rock persona hijacked my life, when music was inextricably tied up in specific memories, feelings, senses. To this day, I still can’t listen to Shakira without thinking about Kelsey, about the way her attic smelled like brand new carpeting and the touch of the warm sun filtering through its small window. When I listen to Sleater-Kinney, I’m often hit with the leathery smell of a school bus. Seeking out more Sleater-Kinney on my own, and eventually finding Dig Me Out, which remains one of my favorite albums of all time, felt as natural as the Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald portmanteau spilling out of my mouth when I had only just learned to talk. I wasn’t doing this for anyone else. I was doing it for me.
Though they exist in an entirely different genre, Sleater-Kinney opened the door for me to bring Britney and Christina and Jennifer and Missy back into my life. I went back to the music I loved unconditionally, to the music that made me feel like me. Bus rides to and from school were scored by a turbulent playlist of showtunes, mid-aughts Top 40 hits, riot grrrl punk, female rappers—and the occasional “Louinella” when I wanted to feel totally centered.
(Mortified by how good of a poser I was, it took me years to acknowledge the depths of my deception. But inauthenticity and intense earnestness are paradoxical, universal truths of teenagedom. Haven’t we all faked something in the name of soul-crushing, irrational love?)
My classic rock makeover attempted to distill my music tastes. “My name is Kayla, and I love classic rock.” It’s so simple and straightforward and succinct and… uncomplicated. I wanted to be easily defined, neatly packaged. Because underneath it all, I couldn’t even parse out my own wants and desires, my feelings for girls that were more confusing than they were illuminating. I allowed myself to be reduced. But I contain multitudes, and my music tastes do, too. Bubbly, optimistic pop goes unexpectedly well with punchy, complex riot grrrl rage. These different sounds fused the contradictions of girlhood for me, speaking to my young feminist, fuck-you attitude and my itching desire to be loved and easy-going and spontaneous. Embracing the depth and breadth of my musical interests eventually helped me embrace the depth and breadth of who I am.
VIDEO: Mary Lambert’s “Hang Out With You” Is The Perfect Summer Pop Song
Audrey’s Team Pick:
OH MY SWEET QUEER BABY HEART. Mary Lambert has given us a gift at the end of this wretched week. It is a music video about how sometimes all we can possibly do is hang out with our perfect dog and our hot, awkward girlfriend, and how it’s ok to lean into that desire.
Lord do I feel that.
Mary’s latest single, “Hang Out With You,” is a perfect summer pop song. Here’s the story behind it in her own words via Facebook:
“It’s here!! It’s here! It’s heeeeeeere! “Hang Out With You” is out today! Michelle Chamuel and I wrote this song when I was under serious pressure to write the next “hit.” I got so fed up trying to write something everyone else wanted me to write and at one point I just said, “I don’t want to write a song. I just want to hang out with you.” Michelle yelled, “HOT DOG! That’s a song!” And then I thought, “who should produce it…? YOU, most talented woman!” And it was done.
Chamuel is also Mary Lambert’s real-life partner and one of the co-stars of this most music video. The other co-star is a golden retriever!!
In the words of staff writer Maddie:
BUT THEN INDEED!
Here y’all go. Be blessed.
Tegan and Sara Explore All Types of Queer Intimacy in “Love You to Death”
Tegan and Sara have always been excellent at reaching into our chests and tugging at our queer heartstrings in an excruciatingly beautiful way. Their eighth full-length album, Love You To Death, out on June 3, branches out into new layers of emotional and musical depth, and stands up to their heart-wrenching standard.
It seems important to note up-front that I loved Heartthrob and it’s what really got me into Tegan and Sara. I’m entirely here for their pop era, and though I love their old stuff, too, I’m not pining for it. If Heartthrob represented a bold definitive splash into new musical territory, LY2D shows Tegan and Sara hitting their stride in creating music ready to find a home alongside today’s Top 40. LY2D is more refined than Heartthrob. The sound is cleaner and simpler, making room for honest and direct lyrics, some of which represent more mature and removed takes on their earlier angst, and some of which dissect the twins’ sibling relationship — a dynamic they’ve yet to deeply explore in their music.
Love You To Death cover art via Twitter
Lyrically, this is my favorite Tegan and Sara album yet. As a writer, I’m a hell of a lot more comfortable deconstructing their lyrics, and I’ll do that in a moment, but first, let me put my new music critic hat on for just a second. LY2D sounds great. The belabored social media lead-up to the album’s announcement and the somewhat kitschy name “Love You To Death” made me nervous that the album was going to lean too heavily on a shallow and gimmicky sugar-pop feel, but I’m happy to say that my expectations were far surpassed. Despite some overdone distorted background vocals here and there, the choruses are catchy and the verses drive the narrative of the album. Since the head-bopping highs are matched with interesting emotions, LY2D retains a depth that keeps it interesting beyond a few listens — it’s excellent driving music, especially for when you have an existential relationship question to think through. On LY2D, Tegan and Sara kept up the “soaring synths” of Heartthrob‘s electro-pop feel, though they also stripped down to a single piano on “100X.” The twins didn’t touch their guitars to record this album, and I don’t miss them.
OK. Now the for the lyrics: LY2D is Tegan and Sara’s most identifiably queer album yet. Despite having been out queer artists since they first arrived on the scene almost twenty years ago, they’ve often shied away from making their music explicitly queer, partly because of homophobia and sexism in the music industry, which they recently discussed at-length with Buzzfeed. This isn’t to say LY2D is “queers-only” — a lot of people all over the sexual orientation and gender spectrums are going to be able to relate to and enjoy these songs — but the themes are ones I see repeated in my life and my queer communities over and over. In LY2D, Tegan and Sara wrote to queer experience, and were able to trust their audience to buy in.
In many ways, LY2D is about the desire to be seen and understood, which caught me like a baseball bat to the gut more than once. The opening track, “That Girl,” begs, “So recognize me, so recognize me,” which will resonate for anyone who has gotten lost in a relationship, and asks “When did I become that girl?” The album continues, examining the struggle between trying to be the person you feel you are and trying to be the person who you think other people want you to be.
Tegan and Sara explore that tension in all kinds of relationships: In “Boyfriend,” which I think is their queerest song ever, they wrestle with the confusion of unspoken attraction in supposedly platonic relationships: “You call me up/like you would your best friend/You turn me on/like you would your boyfriend.” In “Faint of Heart,” they describe the disorienting frenzy of falling hard and fast for a person, even though the rational voice in the back of your head and all your friends are telling you the relationship seems inevitably doomed. They deconstruct the complexities of their identical twin sibling artist relationship in “White Knuckles” and “100X”: “Doubled like a couple we stood, stood out in the light/ …breaking each other like/ knuckles in a fight.” They vent about the frustrating erasure of queer love when it doesn’t conform to heteronormative standards in “B/W/U.” The album’s final song, “Hang on to the Night” answers the lingering question from “That Girl,” in an ’80s-esque ballad with soaring synths: “Hang on to yourself/no good will come from being untrue.”
photo by Pamela Littky via Twitter
While the twins’ on-stage and public image has always featured their ability to collaborate alongside some entertaining on-stage teasing, behind the scenes, things haven’t always been so relaxed. In 2008, they even got in a physical fight while on tour with Neil Young. They spent several years living in different cities, in part to have space from each other between tours. Though the dust has largely settled as they’ve aged, in an interview with Time, Sara also discussed how part of the reason they’ve avoided writing about their sibling relationship in the past to was to keep people from making comments “borderline suggesting [they] were incestuous.” She continued, “writing a song like ‘100x,’ which everyone will think is about a romantic relationship, that would have made me so uncomfortable even five years ago. I would have been afraid people wouldn’t underestimate how truly intimate and like a marriage my relationship with Tegan is.” In LY2D, the Quins took a chance by offering up vulnerability about their relationship, and it pays off.
It’s amazing to see a queer artist comparing her relationship with her sister to a marriage. It’s amazing to see the intimacy of a non-romantic relationship examined and picked apart. As queer people, we are often critically aware of how complex and many-layered our relationships are, across the board. It takes hard work to maintain any partnership — whether it’s between lovers or friends or the person you shared a uterus with. Ending or shifting a relationship with a friend or family member can feel exactly as dramatic and difficult and painful as breaking up a romantic relationship, and we don’t usually get to see that reflected back at us in songs.
Tegan and Sara’s opening up about their sibling relationship adds a profoundness to LY2D that takes it from a collection of songs about various stages of romantic love, which would have been fun and relatable, to a deep and complex exploration about sharing any kind of intimacy, be it romantic or platonic or familial, which I felt in the deepest and rawest pieces of my heart.
Love You To Death is out today, June 3. Buy it HERE, through our affiliate link and support Autostraddle while you listen!
25 Incredible 8Tracks Playlists from Autostraddle Days of Yore
Autostraddle has been around for SEVEN years, and we’ve been making playlists that whole damn time! Even though our newest playlists are on Spotify, all those 8Tracks playlists from the early days still exist, and we thought we might remind you about them! So here we go: From the mixes we’ve made for people we had heart-eyes for, to soundtracks for when you need to get the fuck outta town, to quiet mornings, to tracks to jam to with your gal pals, here are some of our favorites from the 8Tracks archive.
1. The Most Beautiful Song in the World by Laura (2013)
Pristine A-Camp mountains, uncorrupted by the patriarchy.
2. Sugarbooty Blackout Mix by Brittani Nichols (2015)
3. Here/Queer by Riese (2012)
4. 100% Country, 0% Asshole by Fonseca (2012)
5. Former Disney Child Stars by Crystal (2014)
6. Getting Ready for A Femme Meetup by Mey (2014)
7. Sleeping-In Dream Day by Robin (2015)
8. A Thing Called Female Rap by Rachel, Phoenix, Gabby and Carmen (2012)
9. Keep on Fightin’ the Good Fight by Robin (2014)
via Golden GatExpress
Women of the Black Panther Party
10. Emotionally Intense ’90s Women by Laneia (2013)
11. Bitches Who Brunch by Carmen (2012)
jayne mansfield, 1956, via retronaut // life magazine
12. Everything Is Changing and You Are Excited but Also Terrified by Maddie (2014)
13. Ellen Page Is Gay by Grace (2014)
14. When You’re Feeling Helpless by Hansen (2012)
15. You Can Go Home Again by Cara (2012)
16. We’re Finally Dating, Everything Is Wonderful, I Want to Pick Dandelions by Carmen (2011)
17. Classic Rock Radio Is the Best Radio by Riese (2013)
18. Playlist: This Photo by Crystal (2011)
19. Sexytime, ’90s R&B Edition by Jamie (2011)
20. So You’re Panicking About Graduate School by Ali (2012)
21. Music For Queers by Queers by Rachel (2012)
22. Tiny Songs for Your Sleepy Brain by Gabrielle (2012)
23. Pack Your Bags and Move On Out by Hansen (2012)
via {heliotrope3 on flickr}
24. Work Your Shit Out at the Gym by Riese (2011)
25. Drop It Lower Than Your Credit Score by Brittani (2012)
What are your favorite Autostraddle playlists from the archives??
Tegan and Sara Just Released TWO New Music Videos for Your Eyeballs
feature image via YouTube
In the past 48 hours, Tegan and Sara have released TWO new videos, lifting the curtain on what their forthcoming album Love You To Death has in store.
“U-Turn,” released Wednesday, is a masterful execution of the bizarre dance moves and weird faces Tegan and Sara videos are known for. The Quin twins sport elaborate eye makeup, while dancing against a cityscape depicted in animation reminiscent of early 90s educational cartoons. It’s fun and silly and over-the-top.
On a completely different note, “100X,” released this morning on Noisey, is a masterful collaboration with Instagram-famous dog groomer Jess Rona. “I swear I tried to leave you/ at least a hundred times a day,” the twins croon to the rich sounds of a single piano, as tiny dogs hilariously and, somehow, heart-wrenchingly, gaze into the camera, their fur rippling in slow-motion from the wind of an off-camera fan. The twins’ only appearances feature them gazing into the camera with the exact same earnest expressions as the dogs. It’s simple and understated, just like the song, but also entirely absurd.
“U-Turn,” “100X,” and “Boyfriend” (the video for which was released last week), give a great look at where Tegan and Sara are heading with LY2D, which will be released in-full on June 3. They’ve retained their poppy-yet-lyrically-interesting vibe introduced by Heartthrob, while introducing simpler heartbreakers that seem to be more grown-up and retrospective takes on the angst of their earlier work.
Tegan and Sara’s “Boyfriend” Video Was So Much Gayer In My Imagination
feature image via YouTube
Tegan and Sara’s single “Boyfriend,” off their forthcoming album Love You To Death is arguably one of the gayest songs they’ve ever written. It details the agonizingly relatable experience of falling for a girl who will be emotionally intimate with you, but is either actually straight or too tied up in internalized homophobia to reciprocate the feelings. (That’s my takeaway at least; am I just projecting?)
If you were hoping for some sort of visual depiction of that classically gay narrative in their eagerly anticipated video for “Boyfriend,” released this morning on Pitchfork, that’s not what you’ll find.
Directed by Clea DuVall, with cameo appearances from Mae Whitman (Arrested Development, Parenthood) and Sarah Ramos (her character was queer on Parenthood), this video is a bit mystifying. A frazzled video director played by Rachel Antonoff tries and rejects various backdrops and props including balloons; a green screen featuring a running herd of zebras; and weird paper doll outfits. The director finally has a meltdown and Sara comforts her and they hold hands, staring into each other’s eyes. Is that a queer moment?
It’s pretty weird, you guys!
Not that Tegan and Sara are in any way obligated to make a super gay video for their SUPER GAY song. They’re not obligated to, and their lyrics and videos are pretty consistently not so much queer as they are somewhere on the spectrum between gender-nonspecific and gender-inclusive. The video for “Closer” did that really well, and I think I expected the video for “Boyfriend” to be some kind of follow-up to that — like showing the way you would feel the morning after that party, when the friend you’re crushing on insists that cuddle sesh on the trampoline at 3 a.m. was PURELY platonic.
Watch “Boyfriend” below and please share all of your feelings and/or fan fic based on this video immediately.
Let Us Speculate About the New Tegan and Sara Album, “Love You to Death”
feature image by Pamela Littky via Twitter
After an excruciatingly drawn-out social media build-up, Tegan and Sara released the cover art for their eighth studio album and announced its release date: Love You to Death will drop on June 3, preceded by new music on April 8.
Love You To Death cover art via Twitter
Their last album, Heartthrob, dropped over three years ago. We had a lot of feelings about it. Or rather, Crystal had a lot of feelings about Tegan and Sara on Autostraddle, and I had a lot of feelings about them alone in my room.
Tegan and Sara have had a big few years. They went on tour, recorded an infectious song hated by adults and children alike (which they then sang at the Oscars), were the voices of an Oreo jingle and Sara wrote the score for a film. They also got an Instagram account. And cats.
Based on Tegan and Sara’s social media presence over the past year, I can only conclude that this long-anticipated album will be a collection of songs from their previous records, rewritten to be about how they love Sara’s cats – Holiday and Mickey — to death.
Find the track list that I assume will be on the album below:
Track List (based purely on my ability to draw a logical conclusion)
1. Back in My Bed
2. How Come You Don’t Want Me (Please Just Come Cuddle)
A photo posted by Tegan and Sara (@teganandsara) on
3. Living Room (Is Where the Shiny Box Is)
4. Relief Next to Me (Purring in My Lap)
A photo posted by Tegan and Sara (@teganandsara) on
5. So Jealous (That You Get to Sleep All Day)
6. Don’t Confess (Because You Can Only Meow)
A photo posted by Tegan and Sara (@teganandsara) on
7. Drove Me Wild (Jumping on My Head at 3am)
8. You Went Away (Under the Covers)
A photo posted by Tegan and Sara (@teganandsara) on
9. Nineteen (Is the Number of Cats We Would Like to Have)
10. Knife Going In (No, You’re Just Biting Me)
A photo posted by Tegan and Sara (@teganandsara) on
What are your hopes and dreams for Love You to Death?
Hurray For The Riff Raff Interview and Ticket Giveaway!
Party of Five is a quick little ditty where we ask someone (anyone we want) five questions (any five questions we want) and they answer them. This doesn’t have to be necessarily ‘queer’ — it doesn’t have to be anything at all, except five questions and five answers. Today we’ve got Alynda Lee Segarra and Yosi Perlstein, co-founders of Hurray For The Riff Raff. Ticket giveaway details at the bottom.
Hurray For The Riff Raff is the New Orleans-based queer Americana band that stopped your heart mid-beat with “The Body Electric’s” music video this January. They’re currently on tour, and according to Alynda, are playing the absolute best shows they’ve ever played.
On a rare day off during a stopover in Oakland, Alynda and Yosi graciously chatted with Autostraddle about about their recent successes.
Alynda Lee Segarra and Yosi Perlstein. Credit: Joshua Shoemaker.
Can you tell me about some of your inspirations? For your latest album but also in general.
AS: This album was a lot about New Orleans, actually. I found myself writing a lot about place. Small Town Heroes was definitely a lot of inspiration from living in New Orleans for 10 years and learning to play music there. And definitely there were a lot of different music styles that went into it. We have song like “Blue Ridge Mountain” and then we have songs like “Good Time Blues.” We just really tried to get all of our inspiration in there.
In general, I feel like when it comes to our band, we have a lot of different inspiration. Sometimes they’re not even musical. Lately I’ve been reading a lot of Junot Diaz and he’s become a huge inspiration to me. … When I have a shell of a song — I’ll have the lyrics and the melody — I bring it to the band and we kind of bring it to life. Definitely with Yosi, I’ll come to him and explain to him the vision that I have for the song, and we’ll try to make that feel happen. Especially in the studio. He understands the way I explain my ideas. I’ll come to him and be like, this song I want to feel like a 16-year-old girl crying in her room, playing her guitar, and her mascara is running. And he like totally gets it and we can somehow create that.
I think it’s always sort of subversive when queer and marginalized people — the “riff raff” — enter these more traditional spaces and stake their claim. Could you talk a little bit about that experience? How do you feel your identity affects your work?
AS: I feel like with this album we really stepped forward and decided that we really had to be very overt about who we are. So much of what this album meant to me was me really claiming all parts of my identity. Like with the cover even, it has many different parts of my identity. I wanted to not put anything aside, and not feel like I was having to lower any parts of myself to fit in or something. You know?
Album cover via The Body Electric Fund.
AS: Ferguson sparked this whole movement of political activism among youth and people of color. It really inspired me to be like, this is the time to not be silent anymore, to really let our audiences know that this is who we are and this is what we believe in. You might think we’re an Americana traditional band, but just because we’re influenced by those things, we’re also very modern. And we’re very here, and we’re queer. I’m a Puerto Rican woman and I’m going to say things about this. I’m not going to try to fit into a white male hetero world just in order to have our band be a little bit more successful or something.
It feels really good, and it feels like we’re attracting people who have been waiting for that and who feel like they fit in with that. That’s really rewarding to me. Lately I’ve noticed that there have really been a lot more hispanic people coming to our shows, and that means so much to me. Being a Puerto Rican girl who feels like a weirdo who doesn’t quite fit in with the mainstream culture, it means a lot to see people who relate to that feeling. They come to our shows and feel like they belong, for an hour.
You do an incredible job of integrating your political philosophy into everything you do, from social media to music videos. … You frequently spotlight people that don’t always get to be in the spotlight. What’s your thought process like?
AS: I feel like me and Yosi talk a lot about being more responsible and being very intentional with everything that we do. In [“The Body Electric“] especially, we thought it was really important to bring a trans woman of color in. We just kind of wanted to bring them to the spotlight and let them shine. Let them reinvent our ideas of power and our ideas of femininity and our ideas of beauty. Also, Katy Red is from New Orleans. I feel like we rep New Orleans so much but I’m not from there. I thought it was really important to bring a New Orleans person into that song and to let her do her thing. She was so amazing and captivating.
With “I Know It’s Wrong,” the girl gang video, I really wanted to bring in all different sorts of people and let them have their moment. Because when you include different types of people, it makes more room for viewers to see themselves and to feel represented.
Some of the cast of characters in “I Know It’s Wrong (But That’s Alright).”
AS: With social media — I’ve been thinking about how for me, as a woman, I finally have a space where I can represent who I am. Somebody isn’t doing it for me. I just feel like it’s finally a time when a woman can be in control of how she’s represented. And even through something like Instagram, it may seem silly, but it actually becomes something really important.
YP: I think that probably for both of us, we don’t see ourselves in the media very often. So when we do it’s really exciting. I honestly actually can’t think of anywhere I see myself right now.
What does success look like for you?
AS: We do a lot of dreaming and a lot of trying to manifest the future. For me, it would really be just for us to be ourselves and to really be creative and to keep changing our sound. To just keep growing as a band and be able to play shows to audiences that find our shows fulfilling. I guess that’s like a mutual fulfillment, you know, for us to play shows where we feel we’re living our dream, and to audiences that feel like they’re getting some type of emotional release from it. I would love to be a musician until I die, but it’s not an easy life, especially financially. So I think that’s a big part of my dream is to just make it sustainable, to keep moving forward and to keep focusing on what’s happening in the moment.
YP: Yeah, I think if we can just do what we’re doing forever, that would be really nice. And hopefully we’ll be able to get by.
“We took this photo to honor some of then women we look up to. We were inspired by the well-known Audre Lorde photograph. ” Photo by Laura E. Partain, via Hurray For The Riff Raff Facebook.
Is there anything that you want to say to Autostraddle readers?
AS: Something that I would like to say to young women of all kinds is that it’s really good to be confusing. And if you confuse people, that’s totally fine. Just make sure that you’re not really letting any part of yourself be dumbed down or taken away from you. You can be as complicated as you want. There’s a Billie Holiday quote that my friend Amelia says, which I love: “If you can’t be free, be a mystery.”
YP: Yes. What Alynda said is really good. Hopefully we can all just be our authentic selves and not have to worry about what other people think of it.
Don’t you love them? Well prepare to love them even more! Alynda and Yosi have two presents for you:
- A new and free tour EP (including an excellent Billie Holiday cover)
- The chance to win a pair of tickets to any non-festival show on Hurray For The Riff Raff’s tour. Wahoo!
Here are the tour dates:
3/17-19 – Austin, TX – SXSW
3/20 – Seattle, WA – The Crocodile*
3/21 – Vancouver, Canada – Electric Owl*
3/22 – Portland, OR – Aladdin Theater*
3/25 – Boise, ID – Treefort Music Festival
3/26 – Salt Lake City, UT – The State Room*
3/27 – Denver, CO – Bluebird Theater*
3/28 – Boulder, CO – Fox Theater*
3/30 – Sante Fe, NM – Sky Light*
4/1 – Dallas, TX – Dada*
4/18 – Charlottesville, VA – The Southern#
4/21 – Washington DC – 9:30 Club#
4/22 – Philadelphia, PA – World Café Live#
4/23 – Boston, MA – Paradise Rock Club#
4/24 – New York, NY – Bowery Ballroom$
4/25 – Brooklyn, NY – Music Hall of Williamsburg$
4/28 – Detroit, MI – The Shelter^
4/29 – Chicago, IL – Lincoln Hall^
4/30 – Madison, WI – High Noon^
5/1 – Minneapolis, MN – Cedar Cultural Center^
5/3 – St. Louis, MO – The Sheldon Concert Hall^
5/5 – Little Rock, AR – South on Main – Oxford American Series^
5/29 – Louisville, KY – Headliners
5/30-31 – Nelsonville, OH – Nelsonville Music
6/2 – Cleveland, OH – Beachland Ballroom
6/3 – Buffalo, NY – Ninth Ward
6/7 – Hunter, NY – Mountain Jam Festival
6/14 – Manchester, TN – Bonnaroo
6/27 – Dover, DE – Big Barrel Country Music Festival* Adia Victoria
# Son Little
$ Clear Plastic Masks
^ Daniel Romano
& Jess Williamson
% Joe Pug
To enter, all you have to do is comment on this article! Super easy, right? You could tell us which show you want to go to, wax poetic about your favorite Hurray For The Riff Raff song, or even just post a cute gif. Whatever you like! We will select a winner on Thursday, March 19 at 8pm.
Update: the winner has been selected. Congrats, Hanna!
Cathy & Marcy Celebrate Diverse Families with ‘Dancin’ in the Kitchen’
Grammy Award winning children’s musicians Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer release their 44th album today, titled Dancin’ In The Kitchen: Songs For All Families. The recently married couple, who refer to their relationship as the “30-year engagement,” hope their album follows in the footsteps of Marlo Thomas, famous for creating the universally famous 1972 album celebrating diversity, Free To Be… You and Me. Surely you’ve heard it, maybe even suffered through assembly-time renditions in grade school. My middle school even printed Free To Be themed day planners. Thing is, though revolutionary for its time, Free To Be is a little dated. Fink and Marxer hope they can bring the spirit to contemporary issues.
image courtesy of Cathy & Marcy
Fink and Marxer want to expand our definition of diversity. They have songs about adoption (“Happy Adoption Day“) and LGBT families (Dancin’ In The Kitchen With Mama and Mommy/Dancin’ In The Kitchen With Daddy and Papa). Primarily, the duo are concerned with complicating the notion of the nuclear family, and instilling children with the notion that every family looks different. “Marlo Thomas defined a family as a feeling of belonging,” Fink tells me:
I totally love that because that includes every family. It includes every family with an adopted kid, with a foster kid, it includes blended families, it includes multiracial families, it includes single parent families… Now, thanks to the work of so many great organizations, we live in a world where when you say the word ‘family,’ you aren’t thinking of the Cleaver family anymore… you’re not thinking of a nuclear family with a white mom and white dad and 2.3 children… every family is unique.
In the song “Soccer Shoes,” a child can’t find their soccer shoes because he lives with separated or divorced parents. “Twins” is a song about identical twins, written and performed by actual identical twins. The album boasts multiple songs with titles like “I Belong to A Family” and “Family Song,” all celebrating the different ways to define family.
Fink and Marxer use this album to open up discussions about themes that many parents might be hesitant to tackle. The album contains a story written and told by storyteller Andy Offutt Irwin, “Who’s In Charge of Naming the Colors?” during which we are prompted to discuss the oversimplified ways we identify skin color. A little boy sees some paint swatches at the hardware store, and uses them to name the colors of his multiracial family. Creating space for difficult conversations between parents and children has been both a goal and a side effect of their music making through the years. In 1992, the duo invited a children’s chorus to perform on their song “Everything Possible,” written by Fred Durst. However, upon reading some of the lyrics, many parents decided to pull their children out of the project. The offending lyrics?
There are girls who grow up strong and bold/There are boys quiet and kind/ Some place on ahead, some follow behind/ Some go on their own way and time/ Some women love women/ Some men love men/ Some raise children, some never do/ You can dream all the day never reaching the end of everything possible for you.
In the end, no matter the parent’s decision, each parent had to sit down with their child and explain exactly why they were not being allowed to participate in the chorus with their friends. I asked Fink if any of the parents ended up changing their minds about participating after a conversation with their child:
There was a family who came into the studio, they had a son in the sixth grade. The father was in the military, and apparently the mother and father had some pretty ‘hearty discussions’. He was against it, she was for it and in the end they left it up to the child. And the child said ‘I definitely want to sing that song.’ The interesting discussion between the mom and dad was that they had a son in college. And the mother finally looked at the dad and said ‘Are you trying to tell me that if our son comes home from college and says he’s gay, you’re not gonna love him?’
“Everything Possible” is also included on the tracklist for Dancin’ In The Kitchen.
The newlyweds will certainly be continuing to make music that embraces diversity, and you can keep up with their albums and children’s concerts at their website, cathymarcy.com. Buy Dancin’ in the Kitchen: Songs for All Families on Amazon.
Lesley Gore, Legendary “It’s My Party” Singer-Songwriter and Lesbian Icon, is Dead at 68
Lesley Gore was perhaps best known for her hit single “It’s My Party,” but was also known as a proto-feminist singer, and later in life became notable as an openly lesbian pop legend. She passed away today at age 68 due to lung cancer.
via biography.com
Gore was only sixteen years old when she recorded “It’s My Party,” the first of several hits for her that included that song’s sequel “Judy’s Turn to Cry,” the very upbeat “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows” and the feminist anthem “You Don’t Own Me.” She went on to have a guest spot as Catwoman’s singing henchwoman Pussycat on the 1960s Batman TV show and co-write the Academy Award nominated song “Out Here On My Own” from Fame. In her career she had four top-five hits, two Grammy nominations and one Academy Award nomination. She also earned a degree in English and American Literature from Sarah Lawrence College.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsYJyVEUaC4
Over the years “It’s My Party” has become an iconic song that’s played all over the world and has been covered and sampled by many artists over the years, including Amy Winehouse and Icona Pop. The chorus has even found its way into the American lexicon.
In 2004, Gore started hosting the PBS program In the Life, which focused on LGBT issues, and then stated in a 2005 interview that she was a lesbian. She continued to advocate for LGBT and feminist issues for the rest of her life. Her death was first reported by her partner of 33 years, Lois Sasson. Sasson, a jewelry designer, said that Gore “was a wonderful human being — caring, giving, a great feminist, great woman, great human being, great humanitarian.”
Her song “You Don’t Own Me” has been used over the years to empower women all around the world. It has a strong, simple message: each woman is her own person and no one controls or owns her but her herself. Recently it was given new life in a PSA encouraging women to vote that included female celebrities like Tavi Gevinson, Natasha Lyonne, Miranda July, Carrie Brownstein, Sia, Tracee Ellis Ross and many more. Gore ended the video with the message “I recorded ‘You Don’t Own Me’ in 1964. It’s hard for me to believe, but we’re still fighting for the same things we were then. Yes ladies, we’ve got to come together. Get out there and vote and protect our bodies. They’re ours.”
Lesley Gore was a great pop singer, a powerful feminist, a devoted partner and an inspiration to many. She will be greatly missed.
“The Body Electric” Is Beautiful, Necessary, By Your New Fave Queer Band Hurray For The Riff Raff
Within folk music, there exists a thrilling subgenre of songs known as “murder ballads.” I’m sure you can guess the subject. Through their lyrics, these story-songs dramatically illustrate gruesome homicides. A typical scenario would involve a young woman being lured to a secluded location by her male lover, who then kills her as punishment for perceived sexual excesses, disposes of her corpse in water for symbolic “cleansing,” then leaves and confesses his crime. Though there’s some variation within the modern murder ballad genre, we continue to live in a misogyny-soaked culture where violence against women is both glorified and normalized on a daily basis. With that context in mind, I’d like to draw your attention to something remarkably beautiful, subversive and powerful: Hurray For The Riff Raff’s music video for “The Body Electric.”
Album cover via The Body Electric Fund.
The band’s 26-year old queer-identified Puerto Rican-descended frontwoman, Alynda Lee Segarra, has previously said that her intention in every song she writes is to put a feminist viewpoint on old folk songs. This one is no different. At first, her goal was to create a response to misogynistic murder ballads, humanizing the victims as women just like Segarra and her friends. As the work evolved, however, it took on a larger meaning to her.
There is a true connection between gendered violence and racist violence. There is a weaponization of the body happening right now in America. Our bodies are being turned against us. Black and brown bodies are being portrayed as inherently dangerous. … It is the same evil idea that leads us to blame women for attacks by their abusers. Normalizing rape, domestic abuse and even murder of women of all races is an effort to take the humanity out of our female bodies. To objectify and to ridicule the female body is ultimately a symptom of fear of the power women hold.
As is often discussed on this website, those with intersecting oppressions are made especially vulnerable by the kyriarchy. In particular, trans women of color are often hit devastatingly hard. So it was amazing to see “The Body Electric” music video flip the script to feature Katey Red, trans mother of “Sissy Bounce” music, as Botticelli’s Venus (a symbol of divine beauty). The anti-violence themed track also includes the work of multi-instrumentalist fiddler/drummer Yosi Perlstein, co-founder of Hurray For The Riff Raff and a queer-identified trans man.
The song’s title, “The Body Electric,” refers to the Walt Whitman poem which perceives all human bodies as sacred. Segarra says it also refers to Damini, one of the many names given to the 2012 victim of gang rape on a Delhi bus. “Damini” means lightning, which is appropriate considering the swift, heated reaction the incident sparked. Segarra hopes that her song will breathe power and humanity back into all people who feel targeted by violence and oppression.
Segarra’s voice is like dark chocolate with sea salt. Her politics make my heart beat faster than a KitchenAid stand mixer. Her lyrics are pointed as star anise, and powerful as ghost pepper. I could go on, but I’m getting hungry and maybe you’d better just watch now:
Am I wrong, or is this not the most beautiful thing to grace your ears and eyes since Angel Haze last did, ya know, basically anything? (This is not to diminish Haze, who remains incredible. I merely invoke her name to let you know how excited I am about this. Which is to say: very, very excited.)
If you enjoyed this, you may also want to check out the song Segarra wrote for Trayvon Martin, and Hurray For The Riff Raff’s more light-hearted music video featuring a girl gang at a roller rink.