rfmcdonald (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rfmcdonald) wrote2010-02-04 12:41 pm
rfmcdonald) wrote2010-02-04 12:41 pm
Entry tags:
[MUSIC] Liza Minelli, "Losing My Mind"
Gay stereotypes can have some truth, you know. One night a few months ago, I was idly browsing YouTube, looking for music videos. I remembered the Pet Shop Boys, remembered their 1995 B-side collection Alternative, and then remembered that it included the demo version of Liza Minelli's 1989 European hit "Losing My Mind." So, I went to a performance video of hers.
Midway through the video, I realized that I was listening to a Liza Minelli cover of a Pet Shop Boys song. "Wow. I fit the stereotype."
(And I really like the song, thank you very much!)
I've always been interested in the ways that queer men--or at least, a notable minority of queer men, in North America at least--seem to share a very particular taste in music, often electronic and certainly dramatic, and often featuring the vocals of female divas (as described aptly in Richard Montlack's recent My Diva, a collection of different queer men's particular divas). It's idiosyncratic enough that, in the Pet Shop Boys' hit "Can You Forgive Her?, one of the biggest and first clues that the narrator wasn't quite straight came with the lyrics "She's made you some kind of laughing stock/Because you dance to disco, and you don't like rock."
I wonder: what's up with that? It's quite certainly not part of our biological inheritance, but I don't have any certain idea why this taste exists. Maybe it's because the unabashed energy of these musics resonates with people who had to keep their personal lives under wraps? I wonder.
Midway through the video, I realized that I was listening to a Liza Minelli cover of a Pet Shop Boys song. "Wow. I fit the stereotype."
(And I really like the song, thank you very much!)
I've always been interested in the ways that queer men--or at least, a notable minority of queer men, in North America at least--seem to share a very particular taste in music, often electronic and certainly dramatic, and often featuring the vocals of female divas (as described aptly in Richard Montlack's recent My Diva, a collection of different queer men's particular divas). It's idiosyncratic enough that, in the Pet Shop Boys' hit "Can You Forgive Her?, one of the biggest and first clues that the narrator wasn't quite straight came with the lyrics "She's made you some kind of laughing stock/Because you dance to disco, and you don't like rock."
I wonder: what's up with that? It's quite certainly not part of our biological inheritance, but I don't have any certain idea why this taste exists. Maybe it's because the unabashed energy of these musics resonates with people who had to keep their personal lives under wraps? I wonder.