The Queer Ear

It is no secret that I have a Mika obsession, so I was very excited about his new album, The Boy Who Knew Too Much.  Since his debut, Life in Cartoon Motion, Mika has consistently been compared to Freddie Mercury.  Like Jake Shears of Scissor Sisters, Mika quite explicitly channels Mercury's vocal range, both registrally and timbrally.  Both artists also draw from musical tropes that are instantly recognizable as Queen homages.  The increasing popularity, mainly in Europe and Canada, but more and more in the U.S., of these Queen-inspired sounds thrills me, as their underlying cultural implications have altered how we hear them in the nearly two decades since Freddie's death.

Mika ostensibly adheres to the "no labels" ethic of sexuality, though he has, nevertheless, aquiesced to the label "bisexual."  For queer communities, there is a great deal of political significance wrapped up in public self-identification, impacting conflicts between community cohesion and personal self-awareness.  The beauty of reading art, perhaps especially music, queerly, however, is that politics need not be polemic or explicit.  Rather, we can understand artistic objects as existing within a cultural history that, until recently, has largely been shrouded in code and allusion.  Unlike with Freddie, however, for whom the cultural decoding largely required audiences who understood them in some implicit way, the cultural history of the campy goofiness of music like Mika's is now more widely understood, de-closeted. 

Musical preferences among young LGBT people have changed quite a bit in tandem with the increasing "mainstreaming" of those identities.  I have found that many in those communities prefer more explicitly sexual pop (Britney, Pink) or Hip Hop (Pitbull) or R & B (Ciara) to the bubbly "juvenile" sounds that, to a great extent, carried queer pop culture through the '80s and '90s (Culture Club, Pet Shop Boys, Wham!).  But there is something exciting about the embrace of queer pop history exemplified by Mika and Scissor Sisters.  The irrational, seemingly superficial joy that, sustained queers during an even more hostile time, can now be experienced without the nudge and wink that used to be needed for protection.

My favorite song on Mika's new album is "Toy Boy," a disturbing tale of a wind-up toy in love with his male owner, told against a charming, childish musical backdrop.  The toy is abandoned because, "your mama thought there was something wrong, didn't want you sleeping with boy too long.  It's a serious thing in a grown-up world.  Maybe you'd be better with a Barbie girl."  His next owner is a mean girl who turns him into a voodoo doll, poking his eyes out with pins.  It is cute and twisted at the same time.  Like "Billy Brown," from Mika's previous album, the allegory here is less than subtle.  Yet its explicitness allows Mika to construct what, in my opinion, is a truly brilliant portrait of adolescent sexuality.

The first single from the album, "We are Golden," is equally lacking in subtlety, and equally thrilling to me.  Exhuberant to the point of absurdity, it asserts: "We are not what you think we are.  We are Golden."  Here it is (some of it) from his MySpace (I want his shoes . . . all of them):