Katy Perry, I’d like to have a word with you.
No, not for those reasons. I’ve noted your brazen sexuality, and while the normal college-age male might salivate over such suggestive posturing, I’m insulted.
Not as a man, mind you. If I didn’t have the sex drive of a eunuch, I probably would be far too busy with other tasks to write an article about this.
The first reaction to “I Kissed a Girl” was predictable — “Gasp! Lesbianism at the top of the charts!” However, Perry breaks the mold in a way that, while seemingly progressive for the LGBT community in the mere utterance of the chorus, is devastatingly demeaning after considering the carefully crafted rules gay artists created to express themselves without being ostracized.
To find the first commandment of homosexuality in popular music, we must travel back to the early ’60s. Although sexual impropriety was an impetus for ’50s rock ‘n’ roll, they were more concerned with breaking heterosexual taboos — referencing sex, dancing on each other and, in one case, marrying your underage cousin.
But in the early ’60s, one rock group managed to take the first steps out of the closet. Or at least a few steps toward the door.
Few people have ever heard of The Tornadoes other than dedicated British Invasion fans. However, somewhere along their rocky road to obscurity, they wrote a song called “Do You Come Here Often?,” a drawn-out instrumental organ jangle — something I saw someone describe as “roller-rink music” — punctuated by men in the background in fairly effeminate voices making light-hearted but flirtatious conversation. As songwriter and producer Joe Meek was a homosexual, it only takes a few minutes to put together the pieces. This is your first gay pop song.
And it lays down the first rule of coming out of the closet through pop music: Don’t make it so obvious. Of course, with the threshold set so high, homosexual artists could only become more conspicuous.
And in some ways, they went leaps and bounds above that bar. While most pop music in the late ’60s concerned itself with psychedelic experimentation, a few rogue pop — and I use that term loosely — musicians were writing songs ranging from the metaphorically campy “Nobody Likes a Fairy When She’s Forty” to the very direct “The Man I Love” — a George Gershwin tune covered by gay stage singer Zebedy Colt.
This lays down the second rule of gay pop songs: Overt description of a gay lifestyle is inversely proportional to the circulation and popularity of the song.
Of course, the ’70s and ’80s challenged that rule. With disco and the prominent gay club scene on the rise, an explosion of gay liberation took place; gay pop songs were still hidden behind metaphors, but with early ’70s pop stars like Bowie, Roxy Music and others projecting an allure of androgyny, gay musicians were able to tread further into the mainstream. It reached an apex of absurdity in 1983 when British pop group Frankie Goes to Hollywood released the song “Relax.”
Despite the obvious and infamous references to ejaculation, the kids loved it. People wore their “Frankie Says Relax” T-shirts and thought nothing of the refrain “When you wanna come.” Perhaps the ignorance came from the fact that American record buyers conflated homosexuality with U.K. residency, but nevertheless, this led to a third rule: Rule two does not apply if the listening public doesn’t get — or ignores — the gay undertones. If you don’t believe me, look at the popularity of Queen and Gary Glitter songs at sporting events.
But as we make our way toward the end of ’00 decade, our first real, in-your-face brush with mainstream homosexuality is actually angering gay groups and music fans.
Which brings us back to Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl.” It breaks the three rules of gay pop songs: It reached the top of the charts while embracing the lesbian action, and the audience knows very well what she means.
However, instead of taking down barriers for the LGBT crowd, she puts them back further than “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” and Liberace combined.
First, she broke the unspoken rule that should have been obvious from the start: You have to be authentic. Katy Perry may have kissed a girl, but it’s doubtful. Given her previous career as a Christian singer, “I kissed a girl/ And I liked it” sounds more like a five-year-old playing with dolls rather than a sexually liberating experience. Even when you ignore the fact that she also penned a song called “Ur So Gay” on the same album, the song is still an atrocity.
Apart from helping to cement the “hot girl-on-girl action” caricature of lesbianism, she may create the fourth rule for a genre she doesn’t even belong in: All previous rules don’t apply if the song fits the industry standard of overproduced schlock. Most unique expressions of artistry and soul-searching are jettisoned in favor of a hot beat in today’s Top 40 charts, but they’ll appropriate some remnant of personality. That’s what the industry calls “depth.”
While the fact that Perry appropriated a lifestyle directly opposed to her previous artistic direction and offended both gays and Christians in the process is certainly insulting, the fact that she subjected a typically underrepresented group to her exploitative swim through a cesspool of retarded sexuality is downright disgusting.
Those rules came about for a reason — the delicate expression of sexual identity becomes even more difficult when the American public is listening. But the fact that a painted tart came and wrecked the already shaky foundation of LGBT expression for a few bucks is another dangerous expansion of the music industry’s disease into another arena of artistic expression.
Perhaps we’ll see an artist like Rufus Wainwright finally craft a true gay pop song worthy of the charts. But for the time being, we’re stuck with this unappreciated anomaly in the gay pop song history.
At least, I hope it’s an anomaly.
Jason Smathers ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in journalism and political science.
