The True Colors Tour (which I saw last year in Vegas and will see this year in Colorado) has sparked an interesting question at Time.com: “What Makes a Gay Song?”
Is a gay song about the orientation of the performer, as in the case of the Indigo Girls? Is it about sensibility and context, like most of the disco music of the ’70s that was performed by straight artists for gay crowds? Is it about explicitly gay lyrics?
We here at Homophonic don’t think about that question much beyond putting good music by artists we haven’t interviewed in our little store on the left. We’ve defined ourselves as a space for “out” musicians, as opposed to a space for “gay music”.
Fortunately, this lets us not only avoid the alphabet soup of “LGBTQetc.”, but also lets musicians focus on their music in our interviews, not on how they define themselves, if at all. Though we’re always eager to explore the intersection of identity and art, we’re just as interested in aspects of an artist’s music that have nothing to do with being lesbian or gay or transgender or any other color of “out”.
That doesn’t mean, though, that I don’t find Time’s question interesting and worth discussing. What do you all think? What songs do you consider part of “gay music” and why? Or do you think the whole question exemplifies an outdated, identity-based way of thinking that the kids these days have no use for?
[Via AfterElton]
Music we love | 1 Comment »
