For Your Entertainment: The Adam Lambert Controversy

I don’t watch most music award shows, and I haven’t watched nor even noticed the American Music Awards since I was a teenager. But where there’s self-righteous, bigoted furore, I’m there. Because my mother tends to half-watch entertainment news programs (the implication being entertainment is actually worthy of being called news and that all news is now entertainment), along with a heavy dose of “reality” tv, I only became aware of the so-called Adam Lambert controversy last night. Apparently, the runner-up in this year’s American Idol kicked off the promo for his debut record with a live performance on the AMAs, which notably airs on the Disney-owned ABC network. And apparently, the performance was a wee bit too naughty. Naturally intrigued by the media uproar, I decided to watch the performance (I had to download it via a torrent because YouTube maintains it’s copyrighted material). To Disney’s chagrin, Lambert the sheepish lion, he was not. PR savvy, yes.

As with most performances of this nature, I didn’t notice anything particularly awry or offensive. Suggestive pop song, check. S & M-costumed dancers, check. Semi-naked writhing, check. Crotch grabbing, check. Pretend fellatio, check. Same-sex kiss, check. Admittedly, I’m not the average middle American ABC-viewer. But if you insert someone like Britney Spears into the formula, you’ll feel like you’ve seen it all before. However, because it was Lambert, who is openly homosexual, parts of the performance were blurred out in later airings of the live footage. You can pop in any number of alternative scenarios, including overt, clobber-you-in-the-head heterosexual sexuality, heterosexuals masquerading as homosexual for the titillation of others, and scantily-clad dancers who don’t openly reference “deviant” sexual practices, and suddenly, the likelihood of censorship goes down exponentially. You can connote all you want right up until a wardrobe malfunction and/or a big slap of gay in your face.

I don’t know why I still get shocked by puritanical hypocrisy in relation to the US. It’s why Adam Lambert couldn’t have actually won American Idol despite quite obviously being more entertaining and stronger vocally than the guy who eventually won. It’s why they cancelled his Good Morning America performance. But my jaw does still slacken a bit. Perhaps because I’m used to reading books, watching films/tv and listening to music that isn’t remotely conservative, especially in the gender/sexuality department. A high percentage of my favourite artists are gay or bi-sexual, and frankly, you’d think S & M is so passé by now in a post-post-punk age. I’m not likely to be shocked at Lambert’s trite lyrics (“I told ya I’m ‘a hold ya down until you’re amazed” – I think he may have gotten so worked up he forgot how to speak English) when Chris Corner sings lines like “I can hold you down by candlelight/With indifference.” The kiss between Lambert and his male, ostensibly straight keyboardist actually made me chuckle because of the indifferent reaction from both parties; the keyboardist just gets back to work without missing one non-chalant bounce to the music.

Interestingly enough, while supposedly 1500 people complained about the “indecent” kiss, others like
Rosie Swash on the Guardian website, actually griped about the dangerous link between sex and violence. Oh, dear. Firstly, as far as I can tell, most interpersonal relations are rife with power differentials, including sex. The fact that some people take this further and consent – note the word consent – to sado-masochism is just that, a fact. To quote Depeche Mode, it’s a lot like life. Secondly, I don’t believe Lambert is attempting to shake off his American Idol roots (those never go away), especially when he’s pandering to the mainstream with catchy, dancey pop songs with suggestive lyrics. Pop music is built on selling sex. And Lambert just did what hundreds of pop stars have done before him – generated publicity through controversy. The difference between him and other gay Idol runner-up Clay Aiken, is his campy, over-the-topness; Lambert somehow ironically managed to offend more people by turning his sexuality into an ultimately unthreatening cartoon than if he had quietly stepped out of the spotlight while stepping out of the closet. He could be/has been accused of trivializing and playing to gay stereotypes, but when it is play, the agenda isn’t likely to be very serious. As if that massive picture frame enclosing the stage didn’t already give you a clue about his intentions.

These kinds of teacup tempests, like Lady GaGa’s MTV VMA spectacle (read my opinion about that here), essentially reveal more about society than anything else. Will I buy into Adam Lambert’s music? No, just as I won’t with Lady GaGa’s. I don’t get much out of them musically, but I can appreciate their attempts at challenging what constitutes acceptable representations on popular stages. In the schlockfest of manufactured awards shows made to celebrate disposable, mass-produced music, hyperbolic renditions should be expected. There’s nothing terribly subtle about Lambert in the first place – choosing to collaborate with Matt Bellamy and Justin Hawkins on his album shows you what level of theatricality I’m talking about. Lambert’s only crime was throwing everything but the pubescent boy chained to the kitchen sink into one performance.

I’m more offended by objectification without admission, which nearly every other pop star engages in. These performers who shake their barely-covered butt cheeks and gyrate their pelvises may not be attached to leashes and harnesses, but they’re no less tied up in bondage.

Master & Servant – Depeche Mode

Kiss & Swallow (Moonbootica Remix) – IAMX

Bloody Bizarre: The 2010 MTV VMAs

Last year, I used the unfortunate blight that is the MTV VMAs to rant about the state of music television. This year, it turns out, has produced fodder of a different kind. Sure, I could still rant about the lack of quality in music videos and MTV, but that’s not really top of mind after viewing the awards show on Sunday night. I’m not quite certain what it was that made this year’s show so surreal; it could have been a combination of the incessant Twittering and texting running along the bottom of my screen (I watched it via MuchMusic in Canada, but it could have very well been happening everywhere), or the long line of live airing debacles (the Kanye West outburst didn’t even seem quite as strange as the general malaise and/or bewilderment throughout the rest of the show).

The show kicked off with yet another Michael Jackson tribute (I had to watch just to see what the institution that really created him would come up with), and it was…boring. For an artist who based most of his career on spectacle, the performance was bizarrely pedestrian. I had expected several celebrities to make an appearance (hey, people like Usher and Justin Timberlake made a living off imitating him), but instead it was a long line of generic dancers doing a few of Jackson’s routines against a backdrop of the music videos. And these dancers weren’t even all that good – during the gravity-defying leaning move at the end of Smooth Criminal, one of the dancers ended up being rather conspicuously bent over like a coat hanger instead. Then Janet Jackson made her appearance during Scream in order to dance in-sync with her brother on the screen behind her – she fell out of step somewhere and ended up lagging slightly behind like a satellite feed. The quality control on the man’s memory was about as good as the quality control on his public image during the last fifteen years.

Then there was the odd, less-than-exciting cover version of We Will Rock You by Katy Perry and Joe Perry, which inexplicably summoned Russell Brand to appear as host for the second year in a row. (I suppose the fact the MTV VMAs never seem to have a specific theme to run with contributes to the lack of coherence in these shows.) There are times that I find Russell Brand funny. There are times when I really don’t (loads of puerile sex jokes). This was of the second variety, which is wearing very thin. He, himself, seemed out of step more than usual (granted certain types of British humour don’t always make much of an impression on North American audiences, especially of the award show type, but Brand seemed to lose the plot a whole lot more than last year). His one decent comment was about American health care, and then he seemed to be relegated to the fringes for the rest of the night.

And then the part of the show that interested me the most was the Lady GaGa performance, which you can view above. Essentially, she parodied a tragic opera, which saw her strung up and bloody by the end. Perhaps what interested me even more than the performance itself was the reaction from MuchMusic VJ, Devon Soltendieck, who was manning the airtime before and after the live feed would cut in from New York. He stood there as though someone had just ran past him and slapped him in the face with a fish. Then he inserted the remark, “When is too much too much?” I found this a bit puzzling. Too much? MTV Awards? Without trying to be too punny, the comment kind of hung there.

I’d be the last person to rush to Lady GaGa’s defence about anything (I don’t listen to her music if I can help it), but there’s no doubt that her performance was a spectacle in the spirit of pushing boundaries of taste and adolescent rebellion, which I had assumed MTV always stood for. She made this year’s awards show memorable, and when, let’s face it, the majority of the music MTV promotes is disposable pop, the way it is performed comes to matter even more. We’re not expecting groundbreaking music or art on MTV; we’re expecting a channel that parents would cringe at, and style prevailing over substance. I’m not even particularly interested whether Lady GaGa’s performance represented her view of paparazzi and privacy; to me, it was a conversation piece that stood out from the other very standardized, predictable acts (oh, Green Day, you’re so dangerous inviting fans on stage with you). From what I gather, Lady GaGa has seemingly attracted loads of publicity for her costumes, her performances, her bisexuality, and the rather fascinating accusations of hermaphroditism. Russell Brand made reference to the latter charges in a set-up for one of his opening jokes, questioning why a woman couldn’t be strong, successful and sexually aggressive without being called a hermaphrodite. Obviously Brand’s comment simplifies things, but it does pose a good question regarding gender, sexuality, performance and social taboos, including suicide, disability and insanity.

Why did Soltendieck, amongst many others, including anti-suicide advocates, find Lady GaGa’s performance so unsettling and/or offensive, but don’t mind rap artists glorifying violence and sexism, including a chainsaw-wielding Eminem (who looked very subdued during this year’s VMAs)? Lady GaGa was different because she portrayed violence turned inward, not outward. Another thing that struck me about Lady GaGa’s gory performance was the implication of insanity – she was wholly absorbed in her role, right down to the mad, vacant eyes. Mental health issues can scare people much more than violence; ever since the seventeenth century, madness has either been treated as a freakish spectacle or as something to be institutionalized, literally sectioned from the rest of society. She also brought disability into it by supporting herself with crutches and having a girl spastically dancing in a wheelchair. To most, those things don’t belong on the stage at a pop awards show. Nor amongst sexily-dressed dancers. Is it allowed to sexualize disability? It makes you question what society deems appropriate where.

I also wonder why it is completely okay for Katy Perry to prance about in scant clothing singing about kissing girls and liking it, but Lady GaGa gets branded a she-man. I think it’s because Perry stays within the acceptable boundaries of gender and sexuality; she’s transparent and non-threatening, she still dresses like a pop tart pin-up should and kisses girls to titillate others, she’s an object, not a subject. Gender is a performance; in fact, identity itself is a performance. Lady GaGa represents an exaggeration of that truth and a stubborn refusal to stop performing. It’s why she was so offputting to Jonathan Ross months ago on his chat show; her facade never broke. People focus on the outrageous costumes and stage shows and often quite brutally attack her gender and sexuality because they find her challenging and/or disturbing; it’s easier to reduce her to a caricature than deal with someone who will not play everyone else’s game. I suppose she didn’t write a song called Poker Face for nothing.

Sexy antics are easy and not so provocative – rolling around in a wedding dress just doesn’t mean much anymore, nor do lesbian kisses between heterosexual women. I don’t find what Lady GaGa did very bizarre, but I do find the reactions to it to be quite strange, indeed. I have to give it to her – Lady GaGa actually found a way to shock the masses in a world where nothing supposedly shocks. When the Michael Jackson tribute didn’t deliver, she did.

A Strange Day – The Cure

Is It Really So Strange? – The Smiths

Everyday is Like Sunday, Except for Blue Monday and Ruby Tuesday, and…Well, Friday I’m in Love: Weekly Mix #78

This week I’m going to feature some of my favourite female artists. This is significant because for a long time during my teens and even a bit after, I didn’t listen to music by very many female artists. There was absolutely no real reason for this – I just found myself inherently drawn to music produced by males, much in the same way I’ve usually gravitated towards books by male authors. In my teen years, the mainstream and alternative scenes seemed to be dominated by either pop tart music (Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, etc.) or whiny/angry chick music (Alanis Morrissette, Tori Amos, etc.), and neither really spoke to me; I realize that, in retrospect, my music knowledge and exposure were incredibly limited. In my twenties, I definitely began to embrace a good number of female artists, the two frontrunners being Kate Bush and Siouxsie Sioux, and many of the bands I fell in love with ended up being boy-girl duos like Stars, The Brunettes, The Indelicates, The Raveonettes, and The Deer Tracks (a theme for another week). I’ve found a large proportion of bands that end in the diminuitive “ette” are quite good. If you believe Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, female artists can’t win – they’re either playing into stereotypes or denying their gender completely by pretending to be men. At which point do female artists enter into parody of themselves, and shouldn’t that be just as acceptable as male parodies ranging from hair metal to camp glamour? I maintain that I believe in fully-developed humans, not gender divisions. And perhaps we should all just take ourselves a little less seriously. For more of my witterings about gender, see here.

This mix spans singer-songwriters, girl groups, and female-fronted bands, and it also spans a few different genres, including twee, electro, post-punk, dark cabaret, retro-Spector, indie-pop and dance-punk. This one’s called What’s a Girl To Do.

Never Forget You – The Noisettes

Dance and Boogie – The Pipettes

In These Shoes? – Kirsty MacColl

Them Heavy People – Kate Bush

Listen Up! (MSTRKRFT Remix) – The Gossip

Girl – Robots in Disguise

My Delirium – Ladyhawke

The Ballad of Lucy Jordan – Marianne Faithfull

I Could Be Happy – Altered Images

Backstabber – The Dresden Dolls

Maps – Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Blue Jeans – Ladytron

Glamour Girl – Chicks on Speed

On My Own Again – Bishi

Please Don’t Touch – Polly Scattergood

I Muse Aloud – Jane Siberry

Comme des enfants – Coeur de pirate

A Sister’s Social Agony – Camera Obscura

Prescilla – Bat For Lashes

The Hollow Men – Cocteau Twins

Into the Light – Siouxsie and the Banshees

Isobel – Bjork

The Girl Who Wanted to Be God: Gender and Music

Gender has been a fascinating concept for me, especially ever since I started university eight years ago. I’ve only taken two courses that actually dealt with gender directly (one on the Rhetoric of Gender and the other on Sexual Disguise in the 18th century), but they were enough, along with my general interest in androgyny, to give me a good sense of gender as a social construct. Even within the context of gender classes, where people should be most open to gender variation and ideas, I felt like a bit of a square peg because I’m not some militant feminist. To be particularly ornery, I would always twist my essay topics into ones that either dealt with androgyny or masculinity as a concept – the rest of the class likely had the feminist issues covered anyway. Admittedly, feminism is/was important, especially considering the track history of the world, but I figure that gender equality should work both ways when gender performance theory is concerned. Men are performing just as much as women are. And I generally don’t care for stereotyping and those who feel they must adhere to gender stereotypes. Then again, maybe this is because I don’t often fit into one very neatly.

One particularly irritating stereotype is the one that implies females cannot be involved in music the same way males can, whether it be as an artist or a critic or a fan. Sure, females can be artists, but they’ll always run up against some sort of crazy catch-22 where if they’re too masculine, they’re betraying their femininity, but if they’re too feminine, they’re just playing into female stereotypes. Just read Simon Reynolds and Joy Press’s book The Sex Revolts to experience this frustration (I disagreed with several points in the book’s argument, especially the chapter that dealt with The Clash and the Manic Street Preachers, which argued that both bands were so homosocial and “gang-like” that they deliberately excluded women from their worlds – anyone who actually knows anything about both bands couldn’t possibly criticize them for this borderline misogynist attitude). Additionally, sure, there have been female music journalists/critics, just not nearly as many as male ones, nor as many famous ones – I know that I haven’t ever been aware of being a fan of a female music journalist or critic. And as far as music fans go, most music magazines are clearly aimed at a male market as males are assumed to be the most fanatical and obsessive when it comes to loving music. Females are often portrayed as being less critical in their music choices and as lovers of popular music rather than alternative styles, that they are more suited for fawning, groupie-like behaviour than that of intelligent connoisseurs. It’s all ludicrous from my point of view, but then again, just by scanning through the MP3 blogs out there and The Hype Machine demographics, I would have to admit that the vast majority are written and consumed by males.

In the research I’ve done on blogs and general blogging behaviour, it seems more females blog than males, but that they are more likely to favour the diary style as opposed to the filter style, which is arguably more objective and usually about topics and issues outside of the blogger’s personal life (ie: politics, technology, etc.). When doing my own primary research about MP3 blogs, I noticed a plethora of styles that couldn’t be concretely linked to the bloggers’ genders. In many cases, bloggers, including myself, use pseudonyms that don’t readily reveal the bloggers’ genders. To be honest, I hadn’t really thought too much about whose blogs I was reading in relation to their gender identity – selection of music and writing style most often draw me to particular MP3 blogs more than anything else, which I assume is the case for most other MP3 blog readers. At least I hope so.

Interestingly enough, I received a comment awhile back on a post I wrote about not wanting to grow up; it stated that the feelings I was expressing were a “boy thing.” I’ve also been called a “dude” or “guy” in other places by other bloggers and once or twice in comments on my YouTube videos. I find this rather fascinating from a rhetorical standpoint – it means that something in my style or rhetorical presence connotes masculinity. At this point, I don’t quite know what it is since I analyze enough rhetoric without bothering with my own (I’d rather not be too conscious of the how in case it affects and influences my future writing). Admittedly, ever since I was younger I read books mostly by male authors, but did that really shape me and my future writing style, or was there something in my nature that drew me to them first? And why can I only share my musical fanaticism with males (most of the females I know get glassy eyes after I ramble on too long about music)? Is any of this related to each other? I hadn’t until recently realized how out of place I seemed in my attitude towards music (and several other things, mind), but gender performance and societal expectations seem to explain this issue.

Though the song, The Girl Who Wanted to Be God, was definitely not one of the Manic Street Preachers’ finest moments, it still holds some of Richey Edwards’ most cryptic lyrics as far as I’m concerned (okay, Revol is also a bit of a mystery). Having a history of writing songs that either criticized or bemoaned masculinity, Richey, and to a somewhat lesser extent Nicky Wire, seemingly wrote from a position of gender identity crisis. However, this song’s meaning, no matter how much I use my university-educated guesswork about metaphor and imagery, still eludes me.

There are no sunsets just silence
You could see that she was true and faithless
But see through the future and forget all the lies
Black out the words for the blind have eyes
I am the girl who wanted to be God
There are times when you feel hopeless
Just for once for no-one else we are blameless
The dawn is still breaking its heaven is so high
She told the truth, told the truth and then she lied
Hold me she said love me to death

These lyrics switch between third and first person positions, seemingly making its narrator both objective and subjective. Is the girl the narrator? Is the girl actually a male narrator? How much of Richey can be read into these words? Like with most literature, no one will ever concretely know the answer; everything is speculation. While Richey often appeared to identify himself with females, whether through songs about prostitution or anorexia, it all seems to amount to his feeling trapped into gender performance expectations, and perhaps that’s part of what made me identify with and love the Manics so much. As well-known as the Manics are for their comments and lyrics on politics, they are just as prolific in gender politics. Though the Manics did glam it up (and the Wire still does to an extent) in their beginning, emphasizing the artificiality of gender roles just as glam and camp acts always have, I think they had some of that more internal androgyny that Morrissey was so adept at expressing. My thinking is that androgyny of this sort would be a lot more helpful in creating a whole human than favouring one side of the gender spectrum in some global game of make-believe.

What came first, the gender stereotype or the behaviour? I suppose that’s more of a question of nature versus nurture, which, with only an introductory course in Psychology under my belt, is an issue I’m not prepared to debate right now. In my perfect world, none of this would matter at all anyway. Gender is just one of the many ways of identifying who one is. I would much rather classify people by the music they love than whether they are female or male, girlie or boyish. In the words of Depeche Mode, people are people. And music is bigger than that.

Gender Bombs – The Stills

The Girl Who Wanted to Be God – Manic Street Preachers