I can’t believe this was in Time Magazine online, but I was reading an article from June, 2008 about music and if there were discernible differences between homo and heterosexual music (http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1816760,00.html)
After I put my head back on and wiped up the drool of disbelief that had fallen out of my mouth (because it was wide open, you see), I wanted to, pardon the pun, set the record straight.
First off, is anyone that stupid as to think there is a difference between the two? We don’t hear people asking if Black music is different than White music (especially not in Time Magazine), and we don’t ask a song how it feels now that it can vote and own land, and we don’t ask a song to disclose it’s sexual partners before engaging in three minutes of ear sex with it. A song is a song is a song, and even if the article I was referencing was written tongue in cheek, I would like to think it’s author, having done his research, would have realized that (without stereotyping) artists tend to have a gay slant, and therefore, maybe the question that should have been posed was whether or not a song is heterosexual (gasp!).
The reason I find this article such a slap in the face is that a) it’s completely pointless, yet at the same time manages to perpetuate gay stereotypes, and b) it’s just stupid. Granted, the article was probably written to drum up publicity for the True Colors tour it references, and without dropping a beat, surely you can imagine that the gay artists on the bill were brought into the argument, most notably being the Indigo Girls.
What struck me about this article was that around the same time I read it, I was preparing to write a blog post about a CD that I’d recently heard and loved, Hide Nothing by Matt Alber. Title aside, it’s a great debut by an artist who happens to be gay. However, in mulling over my approach to my blog entry, would I be doing a disservice to Alber by pointing out that he was gay, or would it be better to gloss over the issue and focus on the music. It would seem that a chocolate bar got stuck in the peanut butter and there wasn’t an adequate way to separate the two.
And while this shouldn’t be the case, consider this: if a gay artist is signed to a record label with a majority of gay musicians, is he relegated and marketed only to gay listeners? Can an artist’s sexual orientation limit his appeal or is the fact that he is gay empowering to gay listeners? I suppose it’s point of view, though you’d get a different answer from the marketing reps at the major labels. I can personally say that after a recent road trip in which I foisted the contents of my ipod unapologetically upon my friends for a good three hours, the songs that got the most inquiries were by Matt Alber. My friends were heterosexual. In fact, on several other occasions, I’ve been asked about Matt Alber’s music. All by heterosexuals, mind you, which leads me to believe that it doesn’t matter where a song comes from but where it ends up.
I could go further and pose equally inane questions such as, “do heterosexual songs like to watch the Superbowl”, or, “when a gay artist covers a straight artist’s song, does the song turn gay”, or if “whether a straight artist singing anything by Barry Manilow means that he’s secretly a butt pirate?” It’s like McCarthyism in pop music!
Hide Nothing is an amazing piece of work that has major crossover potential. It’s also one of the few albums I own by a gay artist that I feel can speak to a large cross section of people. Songs like End of the World and Monarch are quietly moving and mesmerizing at the same time. And his cover of Imogen Heap’s Hide and Seek is almost as amazing as the original. It’s a quiet, reflective work that touches upon universal themes of love, self awakening, and well, touching boys at day camp (c’mon, we’ve all been there…). It sounds great on headphones in the middle of the night or blasting from the car stereo on a sunny day.
The point of what I’m trying to say is that in a perfect world, music would have the chance to be whatever it wants to be, both to it’s creator and anyone who listens it. It’s chameleon like and constantly morphing to fit all of the needs people place on it. It’s free of race, politics, rhetoric, shame, and predjudices. It’s cathartic and fluid and when a connection is made to it, it can be biblical. But people don’t let music exist for it’s own sake; company’s get in the way and bundle it up in bikinis and Escalades and tv shows. For this reason alone, Matt Alber is important to me in a way that the Indigo Girls or Janis Ian are not: he can sing his way through anything, all while walking a thin line between gay and commercial accessibility. To me, it’s important to give him credit for creating such an affecting piece of work and to know that gay artists might actually have a chance at mainstream success.
I’ve also posted the video for End of the World, which is one of the best music videos I’ve seen in quite some time. Give it a chance…it’s good good stuff!
www.mattalber.com
Alright, so while I’m on the subject of Juliana Hatfield (see book review below), let’s talk about the Honor System. It’s not everyday that a quality musician makes close to forty unreleased and rare tracks available on her website and simply asks for a donation in return. However, at www.julianahatfield.com, it’s called the Honor System and also an “experiment”, but for die hards, this really is a treasure trove of great material and a completist’s wet dream.
I’ve recently gotten back into reading after plowing through two books by Marianne Faithfull. For years I’d been under the impression that fiction was better than non-fiction due to the fact that the story being told was malleable. An author of fiction could go to painstaking efforts to craft a story that was planned perfectly from start to finish and presented in the same way that a host or hostess would plan a menu and set a dinner table. But after discovering several rock memoirs, such as Black Postcards by Dean Wareham and A Bit of a Blur, by Alex James, I’m convinced that the best stories are the ones that have actually happened and that give insight into a particular individual, event, or time frame, rather than sifting through pages filled with carefully constructed characters used to foil each other or convey some sort of symbolic significance. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, in fact, here’s a secret: Nothing is better than eating a Henry James novel)