Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Radio & Music >

Gay love

07:59 / 27.11.06

On the way to work this morning I was listening to my ipod and Dusty Springfield started to sing 'Breakfast in Bed', she really has an amazing voice, but all I really 'know' about her is what my dad tells me, namely that she was gay. I think she referred to herself as bisexual, but most press ran with the, as she termed it 'bent' side of her sexuality.

That aside, the song is beutiful, and I realised that the implication in the lyrics is of a love affair between two women, one, seemingly Dusty, comforting her lover, who seems upset because her (although never confirmed, again the feeling I got) male lover and her have been arguing.

It really is a beautiful song, and completely fits into a classic, for lack of better word, motown soul style.

So, apart from wanting to share that, I wanted to see what Barb thought about love songs, and the manner in which they are presented - is there a need to make gay love songs different from contemporary teen hetrosexual love songs in order to drum home the alternativness?

Crux Is This City's Protector.

14:52 / 27.11.06

> ...drum home the alternativness?

I don't think so. The best love songs are always about the love; the genital configurations are nearly every time going to be secondary to what has been pretty well-established to be a universal phenomenon.

I am reminded, specifically, of the Buzzcocks—Pete Shelley, by dint of doing the most conventional, natural thing he could do—write short, catchy songs about being young and frustrated in love—became quite a powerful force for 'alternativeness' because he was a punk rocker, and he was gay. The man never felt the need to censor himself either, of course, but he managed to fill in the 'love song' box completely without (one gets the impression) feeling too beholden to political impulses.

20:11 / 27.11.06

Interesting to think about. My basic feeling is that a good song will reach you, whatever. Moon River is the most romantic tune I can think of and that holds whether it's Audrey Hepburn or Michael Stipe or Andy Williams singing it. Growing up gay, you get good at identifying with the singer's PoV irrespective of their sex.

So I've been trying to think of lyrics that forbid cross-gender identification. I don't relate to Lady In Red but that's probably nothing to do with the heterosexuality of the lyric. I hear Mick Jagger singing Angie and I do identify, although there's no ambiguity about the heterosexuality.

The best love songs have the more oblique lyrics anyway. They veer away from moon, June, spoon and tell a more cryptic story. The sex is pften backgrounded. When Bowie wanted to make a song about Iman, he wrote Abdulmajid, an instrumental. I think Robbie's Angels is very romantic, an opinion commonly held, but apparently it's a song about his mother.

Anyway, you'd have to be a kitchen appliance not to be moved by Dusty's voice.