GAYLETTER

Pussy is God is something that we’ve all known, in one way or another, for some time now. King Princess, the self proclaimed “dyke bitch,” newest single aptly titled “Pussy is God” restates the bravado of the female genitalia, and makes another declaration of queer romance and sensuality for the cohort of Gen-Z’ers and hyper-contemporary music lovers alike who idolize the American singer-songwriter.

Born Mikaela Straus, King Princess launched herself into the queer hall of fame this past summer with her debut EP Make My Bed that features hit singles like “1950” and “Talia.” Straus takes music in her own direction combining the sounds of teen bedroom pop, blues, and now the drum beats of R&B.

“Pussy is God” was originally released in video format with a washed out green screen complimenting the song’s soft vocals. The music video plays on ideas of vintage children’s shows and ads, skipping every so often and featuring whimsical floating objects. The joking tone King Princess inhabits on the track (“Your pussy is god, and you know / I think you’re so cute when you’re high”) are mimicked in the video’s humorous dance sequences, fashion styling, and the selective editing.

By drawing her fans in with her penchant for humor and general laid back attitude, King Princess creates eloquent and relevant proclamations necessary to garner the younger fan base. The more serious listeners will appreciate the nuanced lyricism and tightly composed, historically-indentured musicality. …

It’s been eight years since Body Talk. After the massive success of singles like “Dancing On My Own” and “Call Your Girlfriend,” Robyn stepped back from the pop conversation. The distance has done her well. With Honey (Konichiwa Records), out this past weekend, the Swedish singer-songwriter has evolved beyond the ultra-assertive 2010s electro-pop that she mastered. Body Talk was built to interject the market, to force you to see and hear Robyn from the margins. Here, those pulsing dance floor hymns have loosened into a language more fluid, and more house, with a bit of R&B and disco for influence. The nine tracks are invitations to groove, to dig your hips into the beat, rather than just thump your chest against it. It’s body contact over body talk.

Robyn the Fembot has been decommissioned for now, her hard edges and staccato rhythms have been shelved. Honey is delivered by a more realistic voice, concerned with the effect of light on water, with “strands of saliva,” with “every color and every taste.” Robyn, speaking with Interview said: “There was such a physical pleasure and sexuality to making music and creating this soundscape in which my body could experience those kind of feelings again.” She’s let the music – intimate, seductive, and emotional – teach her to feel again.  Recovering from emotional trauma, Robyn writes how love and sensuality can help us cross the emptiness that loss creates. On title track “Honey,” Robyn asks, “Won’t you get me right where the hurt is?” …

What exactly are we learning from Kim Petras? Well, for one: There is no specific market formula to success. With eight stand-alone records out over the past 12 months, Kim has been releasing the year’s best pop music and hitting the charts without a major record label behind her. Two: Clearly we all need to be taking Halloween way more seriously.

The singer’s latest is a Halloween-themed mixtape released (unannounced) today, Turn Off The Light, Vol. 1. Featuring eight brand new thematically titled tracks, including “o m e n,” “Tell Me It’s A Nightmare” and “In The Next Life,” which stars Kim finally singing in German, Turn Off The Light, Vol. 1 haunted straight in on the first day of the year’s spookiest month, and I’m sure a lot of fans are shook.

Not for nothing, but the mixtape shines yet another light on Kim’s diabolical taste for pop music. If her previous singles like “I Don’t Want It All” or “Heart to Break” instructed us on her taste for the sparkle and sheen of pop delight, Turn Off The Light, Vol. 1 (And I haven’t even mentioned that “Vol. 1” implies a “Vol. 2″…) let’s us know arena-anthems are not far from her reach. Elongated fingers or not, Kim has proven again that she has a firm grip on her not just her own musical needs, but the general audiences’ wants as well.

The mixtape has a more fully rounded electronic, synth driven sound. …

The flower is the oldest virgin metaphor in the books, literally. It dates back to Sappho — the Greek feminist hero and queer champion from Lesbos. “Her mouth for immolation / was ripe, and mine the art; and one long kiss of passion / deflowered her virgin heart.” Sappho wrote in her lyric, “The First Kiss.” Queers have been shouting Sappho’s praises ever since because, not only was Sappho among the firsts to write about same-sex desire, Sappho was one of the firsts to take the marginalized sense of same-sex affection and ascribe to the natural world. Turning her own homosexual purity into a mainstream understanding.

Fast forward several millennium later and enter Troye Sivan. At 17, the Australian garnered a large fanbase on YouTube by posting videos of himself singing. At 20, Troye came out to thousands of his subscribers in an eight minute long video in the style of “It Gets Better.” (His parents were supportive from the get-go.) Naturally, Troye went viral. It presently has over eight million views. Following his public honesty, a record deal from EMI Australia (a Universal Music Australia Party) followed and thus a bona-fide pop-star from the digital generation was born. His debut album, Blue Neighbourhood secured international and industry fame. “Blue Neighbourhood Trilogy“, the three-part film released in tandem with the album told a cliché love-story between Troye and another boy: Childhood friends turned teenage lovers turned first heart-break. It’s all very regular by pop-imagery and pop-media standards, but it was the first time pop-culture was handed a same-sex teenage love story that bode well in the market. …

Doja Cat’s major label debut Amala (Kemosabe Records/RCA Records) sounds like it sprung fully-formed from the forehead of 2018, draped in honeyed synths, serpentine bass-lines, and sugary trap snares. Here, she’s left behind the hopeless and barred-out heroine of Purrr! (2014) for a brighter persona, with a range of scenes and emotions more rose-gold than ultraviolet. (You should still go back and listen to “No Police,” though.)

“Go To Town” and “Cookie Jar” are the tracks which showcase the zany, larger-than-life sides of Doja most clearly. “Go To Town” is an eat-me-out banger, and the clearest potential sleeper hit from Amala. The track is brash, wacky, and clever, like a Glossier version of her bovine hit. “Cookie Jar,” the second track, is also lyrically absurdist (“I got extra taco but you better bring that macho grip”) but she delivers that energy at a way more chaotic and ecstatic pitch than the more calculated “Go To Town” can.

Other songs on Amala burn more slowly, like “Wine Pon You,” “Roll With Us,” or “Morning Light.” These shift the emphasis from the anthemic toward the more vulnerable and dramatic possibilities of Doja’s voice. The vocal production crystallizes Doja’s melodies with glassy harmonies and layers, pitch-shifts and self-samples. This album feels like the final product of an artist ready for wider public reception.

All in all, Amala is a strong and singular debut record. Buy or stream the album wherever, so that Doja can take care of her cat. …

It’s time to demand better, newer, next. Most of us are sick of normalities that only appease the hetero-typical American psycho. Here enters Love Bailey; bedecked in scarlet, her flesh and bones made a sanctuary for all us lost and wayward children. Like an angel of bygone-history, Love asserts that the past is old news. Filmed in the California desert at her very own Savage Ranch, Love’s “Hollywood Hooker” is a reminder you can easily be redeemed, just choose a night to slather it all the way up!

We got in touch with Love to hear straight from the Hollywood Hooker’s mouth what this moment in her career means to her, and the queer community more widely.

So, who is the Hollywood Hooker? Whether you’re selling couture or selling your ass, we are all hookers in this together!

Where does she come from? Tinseltown

Now that there’s nothing left for her to prove, what does she want? To Trojan Horse Hollywood giving more opportunities to woman & minorities and less power to greedy men in suits like Harvey Weinstein.

Over at Bullett, you discussed the role that Heidi Fless played in the foundation of the Savage Ranch. If she is the Hollywood Madame, is the Hollywood Hooker her heiress? Is this moment a way for her to stake a claim to her inheritance?  The last thing I remember Heidi saying to me before she got evicted from the ranch was, “You can’t even suck dick for $5 dollars.” …

Big Dipper is back with a camp spectacular. The new music video for “Lookin,” directed by Tobín del Cuore, features dancers of every shape and age and is right on time for Pride season. This car wash fantasy celebrates the bodies that Instagram won’t, and we’ll help too! Decked in daisy dukes and Timbs, and sporting a a fresh cut by New York’s own Best Barber, Big Dipper leads the sort of zany highly choreographed affair that we might have expected from the AAA Girls before Willam’s amorality tore the trio apart. “Lookin” evokes the infectiously joyful energy that radiates from your screen when Jiggly Caliente death-drops and tears up the stage. It’s thick and sudsy, upbeat and brash. If you’ve ever got lost on Growlr, this will go right up your alley. The bearlesque affair even serves pasties and tassels on one dancer’s cakes. This video was developed by gay science to leave you gagged, face-cracked and shooketh.

The track itself was produced by So Drove, who has worked with Cupcakke and Kreayshawn in the past. Like any drag queen’s best club track, the beat on Big Dipper’s latest is anthemic and club-ready. His vocals are deep and more masculine than Pitbull’s, serving a funny irony ‘cause we never really hear men talk about being so consumable. But that’s why we love bears. Like Shawn Mendes’ entire last album or Blue Franklin’s viral hit “Licks,” it’s almost unnervingly seductive. With the sublime confidence of Cardi B, Big Dipper delivers an anthem for trade dudes everywhere. …

19-year-old Grace Shaw, performing under the name Mallrat has been harnessing her growing hype, from opening for Post Malone in Australia, then catching a wave, crashing in  Brisbane, and eventually finding herself at SXSW. And now, she’s released her second EP, In the Sky (Nettwerk Music Group Inc).

Following 2016’s Uninvited (2016), Mallrat builds on her ennui-laden pop style, though she has ditched some of the teenage exuberance from Uninvited for an atmosphere that’s a bit more threatened — a bit darker, and more fevered. At the same time, however, she’s grown surer of herself. She is never lost in the EP’s exacting, hypnotic, and glowing production, and at times the immediacy of her voice is almost confrontational as on the chorus of the album closer, “Make Time” where she sings “I hope you’ll be home real soon / It’s getting dark and getting cold / I’m getting tired, you’re getting old.” Her songwriting is a bit like an early Lily Allen on “Groceries” (“Really sorry about your broken heart / I’m trying to walk on broken glass.”)  Not just because of her pronounced Australian accent, but also by her sharp and detail-driven lyricism, her penchant for unexpected polysyllabic rhymes, and her agile, not-quite-rapping flow through fragmented beats.

Throughout In the Sky, she articulates the strange sort of self-death that takes place as one succeeds beyond the limits of their circumstances. With a painfully wrought honesty reminiscent of Lorde’s Pure Heroine, Mallrat both begs for her rapture and aches not to lose the love she’s known. …

Best known as the frontman of alt-rock band R.E.M., Michael Stipe is an artist in the most far-reaching sense of the word. His distinct vocals are hard not to recognize thanks to the popularity of tracks like “Losing My Religion” and “Shiny Happy People”. Stipe has also worked extensively in film, founding two production companies and acting as the executive producer behind well-known independent hits like like Being John Malkovich and Velvet Goldmine. His circle of friends — musicians Natalie Merchant, Tori Amos, Thom Yorke, Courtney Love, and the late Kurt Cobain,  just to name a few — reads like a who’s who of the 90’s alternative rock scene. It should comes as no surprise that Stipe would extend his practice into the realm of the visual for his latest project — a photo book.

 
Volume I is the first in the series “presenting different aspects of Michael Stipe’s multifaceted artistic practice.” Here Stipe and co-collaborator Jonathan Berger work with photographs; there are thirty-five in total and through them Stipe plays an array of roles. He moves fluidly between subject, photographer, and curator, putting together his own photographs with found pieces from his collection. Present in condensed form are 37-years of Stipe’s artistic practice of creating and collecting materials, and he involves the two practices in Volume 1 as he conflates “figures in his own life with those in American history and popular culture,” focusing specifically within his experience as a queer man.

 
The book features many of his friends, lovers and fellow artists. …

My very first introduction to Christeene was at the D.C. gay bar Trade. A friend sprung up from his seat running and shouting “Christeene! Christeene!” towards a strange looking woman dressed in ripped fabric, heeled leather boots and doting a bulky handbag. Christeene, when she turned around, had shoddy black bangs that wanted to cover her fierce blue contacts, and a space between her two front teeth to boot. It was a look so out of the ordinary you had no choice but to look. Not to mention she spoke with a lisp. Regardless of her appearance, she seemed nice.

Christeene — the character created by Paul Soileau — has been making music for the better part of a decade. Her gritty, transgressive queer music shocks on the surface level, but her sophisticated avant-garde approach to music has caught the attention of fashion big-wigs like Rick Owens and the international fag-rock audience.

When Slava Mogutin told us he was headed to Austin, Texas to spend some time photographing the performer at home, we knew they would be images worth seeing. Published here for the first time, Christeene and Slava’s collaboration looks dystopian — it’s as if the only thing left on earth are farm animals and one super chic punk-femme.

In between their photos they took some time to talk too, which you can read below:

Slava Mogutin: How do you introduce your new album, Basura, in comparison to the last one. …

“Fake It”, the new single by LA-based singer and songwriter Jesse St. John feels like a queer contender for 2018’s song of the summer. Musically it’s bright, fun and pop-heavy, which makes sense considering Saint John has written songs for Britney Spears, Charli XCX and Brooke Candy. He’s also worked with singer-turned-Real Housewife of Beverly Hills Erika Jayne on her song XXPEN$IVE. “Fake It” has a total LA vibe to it too, it’s the sort of song you’ll want to blast in the car with the top down if that’s your thing. You can hear the Britney influence but it’s there with a bloghaus, Ed Banger kind of edge. “Fake It” has me seeing glitter and palm trees, not sunglasses and Advil. It’s exciting, too, to see the force behind many of today’s gay icons coming out with his own stuff. It feels like St. John is part of a burgeoning queer renaissance within pop music, material not just targeted toward us but written by us. What with Troye Sivan and Kim Petras eating up the charts, music – along with every other industry – is certainly having a queer moment.

It’s clear, though, that St. John creates more than just a fun pop song. On “Fake It” his lyrics are ultra-relatable and contemporary, capturing the unique emotions that come with being queer in the social media age. He sings, “Ever make you feel like a fraud, living just so people see it, wish that I was pretty enough to not think hard.” …