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

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

I still don't understand how "Dance to This" got such a tepid reception

I...like this album a lot.

Dance to This is one of my favourite singles this year and I love its "Pass This On"-rip video too

plot twist

this album is good

the singles really don't stand out as singles to me but w/in the context of the album they work much better... the final 3 songs are pretty killer

not a dud-free album but definitely good! i like "seventeen" a lot and "bloom" is reaching that territory for me where it can plunge me right into bliss or melancholy alike (cf "teenage dream" the song)

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

new single isn't a big pop banger or anything but i really like it

I like it a lot too, works very well in these times, in a (thankfully) roundabout way.

Also, it’s tempting to hear this as “take your cellphone”.

the outro switchup is great

Yeah, it could go on for much longer. I’m almost hearing an amapiano remix in my head.

this song is weird and great

troye sivan "my my my!take yourself home" -- 'one of the first great songs of this young-ish year' or overpraised twink mediocritywhat??

New EP out yesterday, it's pretty good all the way through but I must highlight the follow-up single to the video posted above

"Easy" is so good

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

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."