How well do you know gay music?
The
folks over at Blender.com decided to join the festivities by posting
what they feel are the gayest moments in music. Here’s their list!
t.A.T.u Leads Mass Make-Out Session
In 2001, Russian ad exec Ivan Shapovalov noticed an untapped musical niche: underage girls who pretend they’re gay and the men who love them! So he created t.A.T.u, a hottie duo who completed every song by eating each other’s face off. For the 2003 MTV Movie Awards, Julia Volkova, 17, and Lena Katina, 18, performed "All the Things She Said" with an army of paired-off horny babes who, on cue, played tongue-hockey for the cameras. Cynical, yet titillating!
Scissor Sisters Make Gay Concept Album
Released in July 2004, Scissor Sisters’ jubilant self-titled debut is a Sgt. Pepper’s Homo Arts Club Band set in the queerest New York. The songs concern gay sex, gay drugs and getting mom drunk so you can tell her you’re gay. Jake Shears rhymes "hit of acid" with "your moneymaker’s flaccid" and announces "I left my heart in San Francisco/It’s in some motherfuckin’ disco." For those slow on the gay uptake, the sleeve reprises the poster for the Judy Garland movie The Wizard of Oz.
Madonna Preys on the Young
Some girls only do it for the attention, as evidenced by the 2003 VMAs, a ceremony that will be remembered exclusively for the choreographed lip-lock between cross-dressing "groom" Madonna and her snow-white "brides" Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. The producer’s career-threatening decision to cut away and capture ex-Britney boy toy Justin Timberlake’s stone-faced reaction, left poor Aguilera with half the face time and a fraction of the press. To be fair, Britney did seem to put a bit more enthusiasm into it.
The RuPaul Show Premieres on VH1
On Oct. 12, 1996, Saturday night TV took a definitive turn for the queer when everyone’s favorite singing drag queen, RuPaul Charles-nearly seven feet tall in heels-debuted her, er, his weekly late-night talk show with fellow plus-size cross-dresser Dennis Rodman as guest. The ab-fab gabfest remained on the air for over 100 episodes, officially bringing trannies into the mainstream. "If the show makes money," RuPaul said, "they don’t care what you’re wearing."
Little Richard Writes Two "Tutti Frutti's"
The song originally went "Tutti Frutti, good booty/If it don’t fit, don’t force it/You can grease it, make it easy." But with 15 minutes left in a 1955 recording session, songwriter Dorothy LaBostrie was brought in to sanitize and hetero-fy the lyrics. Though he outed himself as an "old homosexual" in 1979, Little Richard now insists his flamboyance was a ploy. "I had to be Alice or white folks wouldn’t let me play their clubs," he said. "Girls fell in love with me anyway."
Pet Shop Boys Pay the Rent
From the Pet Shop Boys’ 1987 album Actually, "Rent"-a tale of a boy and his sugar daddy-snuck the notion of male prostitution onto the radio ("I love you, you pay my rent"). A Top 10 hit in Britain, the allusions in "Rent" were too purple for U.S. release. "People always thought it was about that rent-boy arrangement," singer Neil Tennant said. "But in my head it’s about a politician’s mistress." To compound the "definitely not gayness", they later recorded it with Liza Minnelli.
Franz Ferdinand Lust After "Michael"
Ask anyone who’s seen ’70s heavy-leather footage: Gay dudes know how to get down. These Scottish fops clearly got the memo, tapping gay discos for inspiration on their horn-dog single "Michael." "You’re the boy with all the leather hips," Alex Kapranos moans. "Sticky hair, sticky hips, stubble on my sticky lips." It’s a glitter-bomb smuggled inside a sleek new-wave Trojan horse. So, is there more than skinny ties and stovepipe pants in Kapranos’s closet? "It’s called an imagination," he tells Blender.
Boy George Finds His Muse
When transvestite Boy George enlisted drummer Jon Moss into Culture Club, he found more than a collaborator: He got a lover and a muse, too! Moss inspired George’s "lovey-dovey songs," including the breakthrough 1983 hit "Do You really Want to Hurt Me" Their affair, however, was a disaster. Moss was, for all intents and purposes, straight; and they had vicious, often violent, fights. "Our love," George later said, "however diseased, was the creative force behind Culture Club."
Cher Makes the Gay-est Video Ever!
The 1989 video for "If I Could Turn Back Time" looked like something dreamed up by a committee of aging gym bunnies: Cher sings, straddling a vast cannon, surrounded by eager young sailors in full naval whites, wearing an outfit that exposes her tattooed ass. A horrified MTV refused to show it before 9 P.M. Cher recently claimed to be baffled by how she became a gay icon; maybe she also thinks we’ll believe that’s her real hair, too.
Village People Create a Classic
Blender saved a classic for last. According to their website: Y.M.C.A." is a cute, clean song about a dirty subject. A NO. 2 pop giant in 1978, it’s been played at millions of ball games, thousands of bar mitzvahs, and sung in public by Secretary of State Colin Powell. Which is pretty odd and unexpected history for a song about men showering together.
OK, nothing in the song is expressly gay. But in the ’70s, long before Will & Grace aired on prime-time TV, sex songs were written in code: "Afternoon Delight," which is as filthy as any Prince track, sounded like a soap commercial. So when the Village People directed a confused "young man" to a private place where "you can have a good time" and "hang out with all the boys" the subtext was clear: buggery.
Jacques Morali, the bossy, insecure French producer who devised the idea of a costumed group of macho archetypes, noticed a YMCA in the Chelsea area of New York and asked the band, in broken English, "What is YMCA?" Morali was gay, and the songs he wrote for the Village People coyly refer to Fire Island, San Francisco and other elements of queer culture. With their muscles, mustaches and leather pants, the Village People were the gayest act American had ever seen until B2K. And "Y.M.C.A.," written in 20 minutes, was even more cartoonishly exuberant ("There’s no need!/To!/Be!/Unhappy!") than other disco hits of the era. If this traffic cop pulled you over, you really might not mind.
A few months after its release, American Bandstand host Dick Clark booked the Village People on a TV variety show he hosted. "The YMCA people called and threatened to sue us if we played the song," Clark tells Blender. "They were very, very uptight about it."
"The Y wasn’t sure what it thought about the song," Ken Gladish, national executive director of the YMCA of the U.S.A., admits. "There was a lot of controversy."
The Young Men’s Christian Association was founded in 1844 by religious leaders to isolate men from female temptation and encourage Bible study. Over the years, ironically, the male-only enclaves became known as safe meeting places for closeted gays.
One Y pamphlet from 1909 warned against the presence of "lisping" men.
In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson’s chief of staff was arrested for having sex with a man in the restroom of a Y two blocks from the White House.
Today, the Y no longer objects to the song, and plays it at official Y events. (Gladish even admits to having done the "Y.M.C.A." dance. "Come on, are you kidding?") Whether through repetition or the mainstreaming of gay culture, the song seems to have lost its power to shock.
"It’s a party staple," says Eric Culter, president of M&M Entertainment in Boca Raton, Florida, which produces 150 bar mitzvahs and corporate events a year. "Eighty percent of the parties have to have it. It’s a song everybody can dance to."
At banquet halls across America, Aunt Sylvia and Grandpa Barney dance happily to a song about men meeting men in secret. The song has nearly become a national anthem - like the "Star Spangled Banner," but with real spangles. Colin Powell once sang a revised version of the song Indonesia, ("President Bush, he said to me, ’Colin, I need you to run the Department of State’") at the ASEAN Forum, an annual security meeting for foreign ministers. Though the event was off-limits to reporters, a videotape appeared on CNN - like 50 cent, Powell had been bootlegged.
When Blender asked if the secretary of state is a big Village People fan, a spokesman sighed uncomfortably and said, "This is not something that should have been made public." It was good to see that Jacques Morali’s gaytastic march could still make someone uncomfortable.
Article courtesy of GayWired.com
t.A.T.u Leads Mass Make-Out SessionIn 2001, Russian ad exec Ivan Shapovalov noticed an untapped musical niche: underage girls who pretend they’re gay and the men who love them! So he created t.A.T.u, a hottie duo who completed every song by eating each other’s face off. For the 2003 MTV Movie Awards, Julia Volkova, 17, and Lena Katina, 18, performed "All the Things She Said" with an army of paired-off horny babes who, on cue, played tongue-hockey for the cameras. Cynical, yet titillating!
Scissor Sisters Make Gay Concept AlbumReleased in July 2004, Scissor Sisters’ jubilant self-titled debut is a Sgt. Pepper’s Homo Arts Club Band set in the queerest New York. The songs concern gay sex, gay drugs and getting mom drunk so you can tell her you’re gay. Jake Shears rhymes "hit of acid" with "your moneymaker’s flaccid" and announces "I left my heart in San Francisco/It’s in some motherfuckin’ disco." For those slow on the gay uptake, the sleeve reprises the poster for the Judy Garland movie The Wizard of Oz.
Madonna Preys on the YoungSome girls only do it for the attention, as evidenced by the 2003 VMAs, a ceremony that will be remembered exclusively for the choreographed lip-lock between cross-dressing "groom" Madonna and her snow-white "brides" Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. The producer’s career-threatening decision to cut away and capture ex-Britney boy toy Justin Timberlake’s stone-faced reaction, left poor Aguilera with half the face time and a fraction of the press. To be fair, Britney did seem to put a bit more enthusiasm into it.
The RuPaul Show Premieres on VH1On Oct. 12, 1996, Saturday night TV took a definitive turn for the queer when everyone’s favorite singing drag queen, RuPaul Charles-nearly seven feet tall in heels-debuted her, er, his weekly late-night talk show with fellow plus-size cross-dresser Dennis Rodman as guest. The ab-fab gabfest remained on the air for over 100 episodes, officially bringing trannies into the mainstream. "If the show makes money," RuPaul said, "they don’t care what you’re wearing."
Little Richard Writes Two "Tutti Frutti's"The song originally went "Tutti Frutti, good booty/If it don’t fit, don’t force it/You can grease it, make it easy." But with 15 minutes left in a 1955 recording session, songwriter Dorothy LaBostrie was brought in to sanitize and hetero-fy the lyrics. Though he outed himself as an "old homosexual" in 1979, Little Richard now insists his flamboyance was a ploy. "I had to be Alice or white folks wouldn’t let me play their clubs," he said. "Girls fell in love with me anyway."
Pet Shop Boys Pay the RentFrom the Pet Shop Boys’ 1987 album Actually, "Rent"-a tale of a boy and his sugar daddy-snuck the notion of male prostitution onto the radio ("I love you, you pay my rent"). A Top 10 hit in Britain, the allusions in "Rent" were too purple for U.S. release. "People always thought it was about that rent-boy arrangement," singer Neil Tennant said. "But in my head it’s about a politician’s mistress." To compound the "definitely not gayness", they later recorded it with Liza Minnelli.
Franz Ferdinand Lust After "Michael"Ask anyone who’s seen ’70s heavy-leather footage: Gay dudes know how to get down. These Scottish fops clearly got the memo, tapping gay discos for inspiration on their horn-dog single "Michael." "You’re the boy with all the leather hips," Alex Kapranos moans. "Sticky hair, sticky hips, stubble on my sticky lips." It’s a glitter-bomb smuggled inside a sleek new-wave Trojan horse. So, is there more than skinny ties and stovepipe pants in Kapranos’s closet? "It’s called an imagination," he tells Blender.
Boy George Finds His MuseWhen transvestite Boy George enlisted drummer Jon Moss into Culture Club, he found more than a collaborator: He got a lover and a muse, too! Moss inspired George’s "lovey-dovey songs," including the breakthrough 1983 hit "Do You really Want to Hurt Me" Their affair, however, was a disaster. Moss was, for all intents and purposes, straight; and they had vicious, often violent, fights. "Our love," George later said, "however diseased, was the creative force behind Culture Club."
Cher Makes the Gay-est Video Ever!The 1989 video for "If I Could Turn Back Time" looked like something dreamed up by a committee of aging gym bunnies: Cher sings, straddling a vast cannon, surrounded by eager young sailors in full naval whites, wearing an outfit that exposes her tattooed ass. A horrified MTV refused to show it before 9 P.M. Cher recently claimed to be baffled by how she became a gay icon; maybe she also thinks we’ll believe that’s her real hair, too.
Village People Create a ClassicBlender saved a classic for last. According to their website: Y.M.C.A." is a cute, clean song about a dirty subject. A NO. 2 pop giant in 1978, it’s been played at millions of ball games, thousands of bar mitzvahs, and sung in public by Secretary of State Colin Powell. Which is pretty odd and unexpected history for a song about men showering together.
OK, nothing in the song is expressly gay. But in the ’70s, long before Will & Grace aired on prime-time TV, sex songs were written in code: "Afternoon Delight," which is as filthy as any Prince track, sounded like a soap commercial. So when the Village People directed a confused "young man" to a private place where "you can have a good time" and "hang out with all the boys" the subtext was clear: buggery.
Jacques Morali, the bossy, insecure French producer who devised the idea of a costumed group of macho archetypes, noticed a YMCA in the Chelsea area of New York and asked the band, in broken English, "What is YMCA?" Morali was gay, and the songs he wrote for the Village People coyly refer to Fire Island, San Francisco and other elements of queer culture. With their muscles, mustaches and leather pants, the Village People were the gayest act American had ever seen until B2K. And "Y.M.C.A.," written in 20 minutes, was even more cartoonishly exuberant ("There’s no need!/To!/Be!/Unhappy!") than other disco hits of the era. If this traffic cop pulled you over, you really might not mind.
A few months after its release, American Bandstand host Dick Clark booked the Village People on a TV variety show he hosted. "The YMCA people called and threatened to sue us if we played the song," Clark tells Blender. "They were very, very uptight about it."
"The Y wasn’t sure what it thought about the song," Ken Gladish, national executive director of the YMCA of the U.S.A., admits. "There was a lot of controversy."
The Young Men’s Christian Association was founded in 1844 by religious leaders to isolate men from female temptation and encourage Bible study. Over the years, ironically, the male-only enclaves became known as safe meeting places for closeted gays.
One Y pamphlet from 1909 warned against the presence of "lisping" men.
In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson’s chief of staff was arrested for having sex with a man in the restroom of a Y two blocks from the White House.
Today, the Y no longer objects to the song, and plays it at official Y events. (Gladish even admits to having done the "Y.M.C.A." dance. "Come on, are you kidding?") Whether through repetition or the mainstreaming of gay culture, the song seems to have lost its power to shock.
"It’s a party staple," says Eric Culter, president of M&M Entertainment in Boca Raton, Florida, which produces 150 bar mitzvahs and corporate events a year. "Eighty percent of the parties have to have it. It’s a song everybody can dance to."
At banquet halls across America, Aunt Sylvia and Grandpa Barney dance happily to a song about men meeting men in secret. The song has nearly become a national anthem - like the "Star Spangled Banner," but with real spangles. Colin Powell once sang a revised version of the song Indonesia, ("President Bush, he said to me, ’Colin, I need you to run the Department of State’") at the ASEAN Forum, an annual security meeting for foreign ministers. Though the event was off-limits to reporters, a videotape appeared on CNN - like 50 cent, Powell had been bootlegged.
When Blender asked if the secretary of state is a big Village People fan, a spokesman sighed uncomfortably and said, "This is not something that should have been made public." It was good to see that Jacques Morali’s gaytastic march could still make someone uncomfortable.
Article courtesy of GayWired.com
Article courtesy of PLU Blogs, a gay and lesbian community and bloglisting site. Visit us at http://www.plublogs.com!