At a gay bar song
Despite its great appeal to many a very hetero man, many of punk’s early groundbreakers were LGBTQ+, from Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks, who was never shy about his sexuality, to Darby Crash of the Germs, who was sadly closeted during his short life. The ’70s brought glam and disco, gender play, and explicitly queer nightlife back to the mainstream we can’t forget that decade’s great gay pop icon, Elton John, and its great bisexual ones, David Bowie and Freddie Mercury. In fact, Springfield was one of the first pop icons to come out to the public (as bisexual, in 1970)-and, notably, she covered Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me,” as subversive a song as there ever was, on her debut album. Even in the prescriptive world of ’60s pop, where teen rebellion was anticipated and pre-packaged, there were artists like Lesley Gore and Dusty Springfield. Jazz can’t be imagined without the contributions of giants like Billy Strayhorn (of Duke Ellington’s band), who was openly gay, and, later, Cecil Taylor, who found that three-letter word was too limiting. This didn’t stop LGBTQ+ musicians from shaping American pop culture. The closet door, which hadn’t even existed as we know it now, slammed shut. In the mid-’30s, at the edge of the Great Depression, moral backlash-sometimes disguised as economic conservatism but usually explicit in its bigotry-shut down many of these clubs and formally criminalized gay sex at a scale that had never before been seen. In the 1920s and early ’30s, Prohibition’s end gave way to the “Pansy Craze”: cabaret drag performances that brought gay nightlife to the masses and carried their aesthetics into mainstream musical theater. Blues originators like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, both openly bisexual, helped form the foundation of what would become R&B and rock‘n’roll. LGBTQ+ people have always been at pop’s vanguard, as performers and audiences the history of pop music is queer history.
At a gay bar song series#
īritish comedy duo Armstrong & Miller parodied the Gay Bar song in their series promotional video for BBC One television.The Rainbow Is a Prism: The Many Facets of LGBTQ+ Pop Music History By Jes Skolnik A studio version was released in their album Stallion Battalion.Īustrian band Harpia Deiis covered the song live as a recording in the studio in September 2012 and released it in December 2013. The Bosshoss played a cover of the song during their 2010 "Low Voltage" tour. Track listing CDĬanadian electronic musician Peaches covered the song as a bonus track for her album Fatherfucker. It also won Video of the Year award (2003) from both Kerrang and Q magazine. The song was nominated for the Kerrang! Award for Best Single. Various phallic images appear throughout the video, such as a bell, a train entering a tunnel, a hamster running through a tube, and so on. The video depicts a series of Abraham Lincoln ('Gaybraham') look-alikes in the White House, portrayed primarily by the band's lead singer Dick Valentine, but stand-ins were used for some scenes.
At a gay bar song movie#
The music video, directed by Tom Kuntz and Mike Maguire, was recorded in April 2003 at a movie studio in Toronto, Canada. A radio version in Japan exists in which the same lyrics are replaced with "let's do an edit, do a radio edit". In the clean version of the song, the words "nuclear" and "war" (in the line "let's start a war, start a nuclear war") are cut out and a whip lash sound is used instead. (The actual lyric is "She's just the girl, she's just the girl, the girl you want".) Censorship Background and writingĪccording to Spencer/Valentine, the idea for the song came up from incorrectly hearing the lyrics of DEVO's " Girl U Want" as "it's just a girl, it's just a girl at a gay bar" while the song was playing in a very loud nightclub. While both the song and music video received significant airplay, lyrics mentioning war were edited due to their possibly offensive nature since the song made its air debut at the start of the Iraq War. Written by band member Tyler Spencer, under the pseudonym Dick Valentine, it was released in June 2003 as the second single from their debut studio album, Fire (2003). " Gay Bar" is a song by American rock band Electric Six.