troye sivan "my my my!" -- 'one of the first great songs of this young year' or overpraised twink mediocrity??

cf. as a point of comparison Hayley Kiyoko's 'Curious', which similarly is a pretty traditional pop song whose only really notable difference is that the singer is a lesbian.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXTzMOmmEfE

would I prefer for MNEK to finally blow up into a massive pop star in 2018? absolutely.
do I prefer these to 2010's wave of vague inspirational songs dedicated to gay teens by presumptively straight pop stars? also, yes.
do I prefer them to 2013's Macklemore raps about marriage equality song? also, yes.

We are definitely in a better place with this than we were with the Great Gay Pander-Offs of 2010 and 2013, yes.

also, halsey and kehlani are both queer too, right? i feel like in general we've seen a quiet rise of a bunch of out queer pop singers in the past few years. i'm sure there are a few more i'm forgetting.

i was wondering if the hayley kiyoko song would be brought up! that is another song that, aside from the playful use of the title word, i would also call "not quite there". but alas it too is getting pushed to radio and altho i haven't read it i saw someone post a billboard thinkpiece about how she and troye are 'boldly' normalizing queer affection in the mainstream or something

i would agree that what we are getting now is indeed preferable to the aforementioned phases. also that phase where that awful underwear-model-turned-country-singer steve grand was generating huffpo hype thru his mere ability to release a completely bland song/video centered on same-sex desire (which incidentally was heavy on the thinly-coded white-worship). (at least hopefully that's over now -- wouldn't be surprised if gay media were still talking about him tho lol.)

it's true that neither sivan nor kiyoko is going to receive the level of acclaim of e.g. frank ocean (whose good graces with music media predated his coming out but still). and i actually like quite a few things about this song! it is kinda catchy and the interplay between the production and his vocal lines at the beginning of the second verse is fun and hits the spot. but idk i just get disappointed when i see media takes, in whatever volume, that suggest that some social barrier is finally being destroyed by otherwise unchallenging art's existence.

i believe they both are xp, and halsey's latest hit does make it pretty clear. it's my favorite of the few songs i've heard by her, altho it seems a number of ppl here aren't feeling it based on posts in other threads

Didn't know about Halsey (not a fan) or Kehlani (don't know enough to have an opinion). I just wish Shura would become a beneficiary of all this.

yeah both kehlani & halsey have released songs which are directly queer in their lyrics recently
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3hjpNuvapQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wVB6pfWwnE

i liked that brief period when the internet's "girl" was on r&b and adult r&b radio (not very high up on the playlists but still)

I don't mean to be hyperbolic or anything but even just the mention of Frank Ocean in this thread makes me feel so soothed and relaxed like "it's OK the world is full of beautiful things, you don't need to type anything negative this evening"

but idk i just get disappointed when i see media takes, in whatever volume, that suggest that some social barrier is finally being destroyed by otherwise unchallenging art's existence.

i was wondering if the hayley kiyoko song would be brought up! that is another song that, aside from the playful use of the title word, i would also call "not quite there". but alas it too is getting pushed to radio and altho i haven't read it i saw someone post a billboard thinkpiece about how she and troye are 'boldly' normalizing queer affection in the mainstream or something

i mean, that article sounds tedious and wrong-headed. and yeah, media takes that overstate the impact of this stuff are probably annoying, but breathless overstated coverage of pop music is kind of...de rigeur.

the Kiyoko song is definitely all the way 'there' for me, though. I haven't paid any attention to her since we covered Girls Like Girls over at Singles Jukebox in 2015, which was definitely not quite there, and which made me write her off, but 'Curious' works for me. the beat is post-MustardWave but less minimalist, and the chorus is really smart about building momentum, from that initial touchyatouchyatouchyatouchya to the double-time patter of lines running together 'Did you takehimtothepierinSantaMonica' etc. and then the cleanly punctuated 'I'm just curious / Is it serious?'.

again, it's a completely typical pop song narrative, just written from a lesbian perspective, and...that's all it needs to be? i have plenty of other queer music that's actively political or angry or boundary pushing or experimental. there's nothing wrong with also having a Tinashe-style bop about Kiyoko's feelings when her ex-girlfriend makes out with some dude at a party.

(anyway, sorry for taking us so off-topic)

Years & Years use pop as a trojan horse for songs that capture the mix of shame, tentative fear and consuming lust that's unique to the experience of non-hetero early sexuality, the questioning of who you are and why you feel like that and recognising that it can be enjoyable as much as it can be terrifying. I also think they just write better songs and Olly Alexander is a proper popstar.

on the other hand this came on YouTube autoplay last night while I was tidying up and it just sounded like mediocre pop music from an uncharismatic singer? I played an earlier EP back when I first heard about him and it was just aural candy floss. The video makes it a bit more interesting but at the same time, I've met this guy/seen this aesthetic on Instagram/not replied to on Grindr, this exact archetype of gay man so many times.

Kehlani being on record about "Distraction" being about a woman, then having the video featuring her cavorting with a man, is exactly the kind of intersectional privilege issue that needs unpacked around discussion of queer oppression in pop spheres.

for the sole reason that I am now imagining the impact that it would have had if any of the 80s or 90s boy band thinks had been this conscious of, and pandering to, their gay audience back then

in the UK we had Take That, who as far as I understand it only really had one hit single in America, the serious and chaste ballad "Back For Good", which to me has always felt like an outlier in their early narrative. They had a run of hits in the early 90s and were huge to the point that Robbie Williams leaving the group and the band splitting up were both national news stories and there was even a helpline set up. They reformed after about fifteen years apart and have occupied a safe space in pop since, sounding like Scissor Sisters and Coldplay at once.

so what was really interesting about Take That is that they were basically about taking a gay man's view of sexuality - specifically, manager Nigel Martin-Smith - and selling that persepctive to a female audience. Their 1991 debut single "Do What You Like" came with a video which is three minutes of four attractive guys (and Gary Barlow, who can sing but clearly recruited for his voice unlike the others), rolling about in leather and rubbing jelly on each other's shirtless bodies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpqAXZI0s0s

the single was a flop and even the band treat it as a punchline now. But move forward a few years to something like their number one single "Pray" which recasts "Wicked Game" with five men on a beach.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbsAqs3YHyg

there's still a shameless fetishism to these men and their bodies and the sexuality of them. The song is better, the video is less cheap, but the intent is still there.

in the UK now this model still lives on. Pop stars and soap actors still do shirtless photoshoots for both gay mags and women's weeklies (at least, the ones that still survive). It's a world away from the 80s model of new romanticism, where Spandeau Ballet and Duran Duran were just as desireable but in a fully-clothed, fashion-and-style, repressed way.

Googling 'Simon Le Bon shirt off' will get you LOTS of examples of him posing topless for 1980s pop mags.

Good discussion, and, yeah, I'd wondered how Years & Years fit; to my ears they do it right.

probably worth noting that halsey's newest single is a terrible duet with her gross boyfriend g-eazy called "him and i"

they couldn't even get the grammar right!

RIGHT???

who did it better: halsey or zooey

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/She_%26_Him

Troye will be on SNL!

i guess i read troye less as like... part of the "sanitized white gay into the mainstream" conspiracy and more as part of the "let's figure out how to upstream youtubers into mainstream pop culture" conspiracy. there's some crossover b/w those two things (connor franta etc) but frankly i'm more concerned about the second one personally & as such my interest in the "my my my" video is just noting what it might look like when a vlogger really tries to assert himself as society's very traditional understanding of a pop star. i find the video pretty clumsy and hard to watch, he's trying to sell it so hard but needs more practice. but i'm sure for the intended audience it works.

the other thing is that for all the praise about queer representation yada yada whatever i find it funny that troye and the guys in this video (who fwiw are styled acutely well) don't ever touch each other. the men kind of dance in place in the shadows, hovering around troye but never interacting with him. if they were caged the scene would represent a zoo, where foreign species can gaze at each other with interest but no danger. small step for queer kind and all that but i think there you really get a sense for how calculated this all is -- we can expose this audience to shirtless slightly older men, but there can be no touching -- and so i understand where the cynicism would start to creep in.

yeah, the ultra-cynical take on this is "Jake/Logan Paul with good production"

I've decided I won't ever make another video without a shot of me sucking dick in it

Frankly

*at the climactic moment of The Riverbed, a thought bubble appears above the protagonist's head*

yo this song sucks

Johnny Gill, about whom there are questions about his private life too, already released the superior "My, My, My."

i love that song! (johnny gill's.) the growling and ad libs!

lol omg i didn't know that halsey and g-eazy were dating, how awful

A lot of girls I know are thrilled by the video clip for the Troye song. Whereas with all the hype I was surprised by how tentative it then seemed.

I wonder if maybe the way the clip presents a younger, relatively androgynous-looking Troye implicitly objectifying older, rougher-looking dudes who do not much but lurk suggestively without shirts in the background suggests a dynamic that - while incredibly familiar within gay culture, particularly gay clubbing culture, and particularly-particularly over the last five years or so - feels more novel if yr notion of male objectification is effectively split between boy-band twink and, I dunno, Daniel Craig as James Bond emerging out of the sea or something.

Sivan appeals to the sort of woman like the one I met a decade ago who boasted about how many gay boys were her friends.

Hmm I don't know how true that general archetype is these days, at least in my world of gay-friendly straight people - the kind of women i'm thinking of would not just have more gay male friends than straight male friends but would move in circles where that is totally unremarkable (literally - it would not occur to anyone to remark on it).

The separation really comes down to how people intersect with gay ~culture~ rather than gay guys per se - you can have brunch with a dude every Saturday morning and be pretty close to him while being effectively ignorant of his Saturday night habit of going to parties wearing a jockstrap and harness.

that's my life!

As for your first paragraph: it's a musty archetype for sure; the mid 2000s were the last time when a gay man would even allow himself to be subjected to this tokenism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ay4S61byZo

i like this one more, the synths are gorgeous

Fucking hell, this is great.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrMAfMbZOmg

Sivan is the weakest part of this song

His voice is too wan.

man do I dig "Bloom."

Yeah, that song really grew on me.

Also in me, etc.

HO

Just for you.

Dance To This is really excellent, would have been right at home on the last xx album

My My My is the weakest of the tracks released so far and it's still pretty good so I've got very high hopes for this album

The video was released today -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhxhNIQBKJI

I find the song to be very slight -- pleasant, but barely there -- but guess it's just not my style

"bloom" almost made me feel bad about the thread title. almost.

"Bloom" is his best single.

the whole album is pretty good, doesn't blow me away but a very solid and enjoyable pop album

"animal" is a good song but it's a little hard to buy it coming from him

He's better singing about plums and quoting Smiths songs

I am an animal with you

a chinchilla

as far as aesthetics beyond just the bodies in the videos, i think that one of the elements that feels interesting to me is that there is a mainstreaming of certain queer signifiers via his videos and etc. while i can ramble about assimilation til my face turns blue, the unapologetic queerness of the videos is refreshing, particularly because we know it’s not just some pandering shit.

i like the new song too, cautiously anticipating the album

great album

also, this video!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhGl8McrOHo

that video is amazing but also… cue the discourse lol

have had the album on repeat for the past couple of days, so good

I've warmed up to "Got Me Started" and this thing has a handful of strong tuneful mumbly jams.

lol only just noticed the Star of David he wears in the video which is always but esp in the context of this past week... a choice

my my my

Lol @ the Rush - "Power Windows" tee.

I like this song the least of the singles so far, but the video the best

was a bit iffy on it at first, but now am obsessed with the song, I guess the video helps

My fav on this was actually the closer, "How To Stay With You." Pretty solid record. Much better than the last one.

Is there something missing about this video? Makes me feel more comfortable to show off my own chicken legs but aside from that I'm... not gonna watch it a second time

Really digging this thing after walking, exercising, and driving to it for a week.

I am taking a break from grading papers -- one of my students wrote about the rejection of hedonism in "Got Me Started" (he was describing hedonism and I was like...there's a word for that :)

Because of the Bloom poll, I went back and listened to all of his records, and while the In a Dream EP is still my favorite, I have changed my mind— I think Bloom is as good as Something to Give Each Other, even if the latter has some more iconic singles. “My My My,” “Bloom,” “Plum,” “Dance to This,” and “Lucky Strike” are all excellent imho, and the only real stinker is “What a Heavenly Way to Die.”

I also rate “Postcard.” It’s heartfelt.

I need to give Something to Give Each Other a spin as all I know is "Rush."