Listen for a sec, though, and tunes emerge from the din listen closer, and you begin to hear how she’s how artfully she’s deploying the noise, how many tasty sonic details she packs into her very short songs, many of which clock in at under two minutes. She also happens to be a musical savant, who uses homemade and jerry-rigged instruments (including a vacuum cleaner), to cook up small, rackety pop songs, which conceal their hooks beneath all kinds of dissonance and rhythmic clamor. She’s a lesbian, and I guess you could say she looks it: She’s as androgynous, in her scruffy way, as G-Dragon. RuPaul, meet G-Dragon.Īnd then there’s Mica Levi, of Micachu and the Shapes. David Halperin, you needn’t worry: Camp aesthetics will thrive where they always have, in pop music, and if 2012 is any indication, Seoul will lead the way. They were more androgynous than Ziggy Stardust.”) In this year of marriage-equality landmarks, we have begun to hear fretting about the End of Gay Culture, about the splendor that is being lost as gays and lesbians trade the closet for the white picket fence. Some guys wore high-waisted jackets with loose harem pants or jodhpurs, circus-ringmaster style others wore white cutaways with high, stiff collars and black ties, like dream prom dates.
The K-Pop takeover was big industry news this year, but for me the headline was this: How the Fuck Did South Korea Turn Into a Gigantic Drag Show? (John Seabrook, writing in The New Yorker about K-Pop stars at press conference in Anaheim: “The boys’ faces were as pancaked and painted as the girls’, and their hair was even more elaborately moussed, gelled, and dyed, in blond and butterscotch hues. The gender-bending goes both ways, of course: I give you BoA and T-ara. Consider Super Junior, and SHINee, and a chart-topping rapper in a Wonder Woman bathrobe. And no surprise, the 21 st century’s great pop fop Kanye West got into the act, sporting a leather skirt for his performance at the 12-12-12 Concert for Sandy Relief.īut our Anglo-American faunlets shrink in terror before the pop stars of Korea, where camp musical spectacle has been taken to rococo Ziegfeldian heights. There’s the “post-closet black queer overground” that Jason writes about, a category that includes not only Azealia Banks but fast-rising rapper Le1f, and Zebra Katz, whose mesmerizing “ Ima Read” I’d slept on until Music Club professor emeritus Jonah Weiner woke me up this past weekend. But camp was all over the place in ’12: bubbling up from below, and agleam at the top of the pops. The cult of Freddie is one example of the resurgence-the resilience-of camp, which, as Jason drily notes, “is still very much alive in pop music.” Certainly fun.’s appeal is due in no small part to its savvy updating of Queen’s camp theatricality-the best way, maybe, for a rock band to go mainstream in an age of pop spectacle-not to mention Ruess’ embodiment of epicene hipster style. (There’s a Mercury biopic in the works, too, starring Sacha Baron Cohen.) Mercury has returned to pop with a vengeance recently, his influence audible in Ruess and Lady Gaga and Adam Lambert and Mika and Foxy Shazam’s Eric Sean Nally, who has also revived Mercury’s moustache. (My favorite song on Pink’s album is the Ruess duet, which he also co-wrote, “ Just Give Me A Reason.” It’s no mean feat to sing Pink to a draw.) Of course, it’s not hard to detect the voice behind Ruess’ voice: He flaunts his debt to Freddie Mercury. It’s that sound, I imagine, that enticed the Grammy nominating committee: a mix of contemporary and classic, earthy and synthetic, that feels right in 2012.īut, bottom line, Ruess has the pipes. The music that thumps and swells behind him is a bit nuts, too: “Some Nights” opens with an a capella chorale borrowed from Kansas and steals a refrain from Simon & Garfunkel there’s hip-hop production and auto-tune and “tribal” chants. I love how emotionally all-over-the-place he is in “ Some Nights”: whipsawing from navel-gazer (“Who am I?” “What do I stand for?”) to zealot-at-the-barricades (“This is it, boys, this is war”), from alienated artiste (“Ten years of this, I’m not sure if anybody understands”) to ADD-addled youth (“Five minutes in and I’m bored again”), from little-boy-lost (“I miss my Mom and Dad”) to megalomaniac (“I always win”).
You’re also right that Ruess is a compelling character, a kind of gonzo emo confessor-a little bit Sorrows of Young Werther, a little bit My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. It helps, for sure, that he and his bandmates write excellent songs, with storm-surge choruses worthy of that big voice. Ann, here’s the thing about fun.: Nate Ruess can really sing.
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