Switched on Pop - The Sound of Sapphism

Episode Date: November 8, 2022

Tegan & Sara and King Princess have found themselves placed under the banner, "sapphic pop," a term recently coined referring to music by and/or for sapphics (a.k.a. women or femme folks attracted to other femme folks). Journalist Emma Madden defines the folk-inspired sound as having a “soft tactile approach” that’s “more sensual than it is sexual.” This umbrella folds in everyone from indie pop veterans Tegan & Sara to nonbinary artists like King Princess; even artists like Hozier and Sufjan Stevens are, improbably, considered sapphic pop, with their music having the same sonic qualities of other songs dedicated to feminine yearning. From articles popping up in multiple news outlets to the majority of Taylor Swift’s openers for this upcoming tour (looking at MUNA, girl in red, and Phoebe Bridgers, specifically), the terminology of “sapphic pop” has come to define a scene almost out of nowhere. This week on Switched On Pop, we explore exactly what sapphic pop is, where it came from, and how artists feel about it – even asking Tegan & Sara and King Princess directly. You can listen wherever you get podcasts. Songs discussed Clairo – Sofia King Princess – Talia girl in red – i wanna be your girlfriend Hozier – Cherry Wine (live) Alex G – Sarah The Velvet Underground – I Found A Reason Sufjan Stevens – To Be Alone With You Cris Williamson – Shine On Straight Arrow Jaylib, Madlib, J Dilla – The Red Taylor Swift – betty Brittany Howard – Georgia MUNA, Phoebe Bridgers – Silk Chiffon Tegan & Sara – Call It Off Tegan & Sara – Smoking Weed Alone King Princess – 1950 King Princess – I Hate Myself, I Want To Party King Princess – Pussy is God Kate Bush – Why Should I Love You? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Attention Spotify. Has arrived the new Good Girl Jasmine Absolute of Carolina Herrera, a fragrance with character gourmet and addictive. Imagine a jasmine

emvolvente, toffee caramelized and tonka tossed. A combination that seduce from the first instant and she has auella. Good Girl Jasmine

Absolute, hypnotica, irresistible. Discover it now and let you know about your essence. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm producer

Rianna Cruz. And I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. A few weeks ago, we spoke with Katie Gavin of the band Muna. Yeah. And there was a specific quote that stuck with me.

I would rather come up with what the box is than have somebody else come up with what the box is. Like if we say queer joy, they're going to say queer joy, you know? I love that quote. I was really wowed by Katie because I feel like Muna is having this sudden major success. And she really has control over the message, what she wants to be communicating. Right. and Muna, as well as that specific quote, got me thinking about this idea and concept that's sort of come to prominence over the past year, the term sapphic pop.

Safic pop? Yeah, it's a broad term, but at its core, it means and references music by and or for sapphics, which are women and femme folks attracted to other femme folks. If you Google Sapphic pop, several articles come up with that phrase in the headline. all from the past year. There's the SAFIC pop boom has been a long time coming from them, the best Sapphic bops of 2021 from Out.com, and a playlist by Moona from the Washington Post called Big Sapphic Energy.

All right, we're in the year of Sapphic pop. What do you make of this? Well, a quick Spotify search of the word saffick brings up the same artists on playlist, and they're all similarly titled Sapphic Uriening, WLW, which stands for Women-L-L-W, which stands for Women-L-W, yearning, sapphic bops, stuff like that. And they all contain frequent appearances from artists like Claro, King Princess, and Girl in Red,

whose name has become a short form for asking about someone's sexuality. A popular TikTok phrase among queer Gen Z users is, do you listen to Girl in Red? I listen to Girl in Red. It was just announced that she's going to go on tour with Taylor Swift. Right, exactly. And it's kind of relevant because all of the Taylor Swift opener are sort of under this sapphic pop bubble.

Muna included. Muna included, right. So, sapphic pop, its moment has arrived, which made me want to explore exactly what it is, where it came from, and how artists feel about it. I started by talking with Emma Madden, who is a freelance music and culture journalist.

A year ago, they wrote an excellent article for my old haunt and PR music called The Limitations of the Sapphic Anthem. So I wanted to talk to them for history of the sound and largely what it has meant in queer culture. I started by asking Emma, what is the sound of sapphic pop? I think a sapphic anthem can be defined by a few qualities. It has a soft, tactile approach, it's acoustic, it's muted, the singers, sing in this kind of hushed registers as though they're conferring secrets. And a sapphic anthem is more sensual than it is sexual.

A sapphic anthem isn't necessarily about sapphic love or romance. Like, Hosia, for example, isn't a lesbian. But he's been embraced by the lesbian community as a kind of icon of suffocism. And I think that's Open and are close to feel still would be fine And I think that's because his music is soft Like I just said It's muted, it's pining

It's kind of quasi-religious He kind of sings to the object of the song As though they were a saint There's a kind of heightened receptivity as well The singer can grow his style by the smell of someone's hair, things like that. Do you think that all savag anthems have to be in this sort of folky vein, or can savag anthems lean towards pop radio-friendly aesthetic?

I think at that point we might describe it as a sapphic bot. That was a descriptor I saw prior to the kind of cottage core movement of the 2010s. I saw there was, pre-2020, you described a sapphic song as a sapphic bop, and then after that I saw a sapphic anthem. Emma brought up the Spotify playlist, Sad Girl Starter Pack, a Spotify algorithm playlist designed as, per the description, sapphic songs that defined your music taste as yearning. And the playlist, I know, comedy, right? Oh, I just can't stand. You have a playlist editor who's saying,

These are the songs that define you, unless it's an algorithm playlist. But then we're getting into like the core ethos of Spotify in 2022. It's the point at you and say, these are for you. Yeah. And the playlist features all the usual suspects, Phoebe Bridgers, Girl in Red. But there's also straight artists as well and cis male artists at that. Looking at it right now, the playlist also contains the songs Sarah by Alex G. and I found a reason by Velvet Underground.

Offhand, you might think, why would these artists and an artist like Hosier fall under this category? The key thing to remember is that it's a concept in theory, rather than entirely in practice. Suffolk anthems are really how you interpret them You know it when you hear it, basically. That's why Sufian Stevens can be interpreted as a sapphic artist. It's kind of like the fun is in how you categorize a sapphic anthem.

And it's interesting how we all have a similar idea of what a sapphic anthem is. In their reporting, Emma cites Tumblr posts that tag songs like, To Be Alone with You by Sufion Stevens, a song about Sufyan's relationship with God with hashtag Sapphic or hashtag WLW, again, a shorthand way to describe women-loving women. That was my favorite song when I was like 13 years old. What's a sad song. Why was it your favorite song?

I don't know. There was something quite esoteric about it. I was a big Sufian Stevens fan in middle school and early high school. I was too. And I feel like that says more about me than it does. about the work of Sufyan Stevens. But the thing that ties a song like this together with the sounds of actual queer women, though,

is the genres from whence they came. The Suffolk anthem has, like, a clear historical analog with the women's movement of the 1970s. It was this moment in time where they weren't really trying to curate this lesbian subjectivity with the development of second wave feminism. So you had Olivia Records, which was this independent label, all run by women, and they relied on very DIY production techniques.

Folk was their musical vehicle. Olivia Records was home to artists like Chris Williamson, a musician and activist who released records like The Changer and the Changed, an album that was described by all music as a record that was to women's music, what Michael Jackson's thriller was to the music industry in general in the mid-80s, an album that's sold far beyond the perceived size of the market. That record became one of the best-selling independent albums ever,

and one of her songs, Shine On Straight Arrow, was even sampled by J. Dilla and Madlib on the song The Red. Get out of here. Even though that's a crazy way to flip the sample, the music of Chris Williamson is more indicative of the fulky sound of second wave feminism. It even draws parallels to other folk women artists of the same time, namely the one that came to my for me is Joni Mitchell. So more than just obvious lyrical allusions, you can hear a sapphackal, you can hear a sapphic anthem in long, legato, high vocals in acoustic instrumentation.

and in these sort of just soft textures that are very, yeah, of that era. Right. And it's interesting because this is one of the things that gets brought up by people who accuse an artist like Taylor Swift of queer baiting because she also uses these sounds. A song like Betty off of the acousticy woodland album folklore is told from the perspective of a man but has been interpreted to have used codes and winks and the tonality. and the tonality of a sapphic sound to give sort of a nod to that community. I'm not sure if something like folklore was pandering. Maybe it was, but it was described as a cottage court album. And I think that's a euphemism for lesbian sound in the same way that women's music was a euphemism

for lesbian music. I mean, it is a vibe, the sapphic anthem. It's basically an aesthetic at this point that you can draw from and mark it. I wouldn't be surprised if Gwen, if Paltrow came out with a Suffolk Goop Candle at this point. Oh, goop candles. You know, capitalism is really good at repackaging the culture of historically marginalized groups and selling it back to you as soon as it's culturally appropriate in the world. marketplace. Something we also have to remember, though, if we're thinking about this type of

sapphic anthem and quote unquote women's music, is that this subgenre is incredibly white and focuses around a quite narrow definition of womanhood, namely a white cisgender take on that. The idea of sapphic pub is different than dance music, which has been historically black, brown, and super gay since the jump. People don't call that sapphic music, nor do people traditionally call the music of an artist like Brittany Howard Sapphic or put it on these playlists, even though she sings explicitly about queer attraction on

songs like Georgia. She's not singing about the importance of Georgia in electoral politics. No, sadly, no. Oh. All jokes aside, though, a lot of queer identities aren't represented in this music.

It's a certain type of saffism that is conveyed, stemming all the way from the particular type of safism that Olivia Records embodied in the early 70s before they started to promote African American artists. So it's a particular lineage of pop music representing sapphic people. That's not to say this music isn't valuable, though. We just have to think about it more narrowly to talk about it. So to sort of stay within one historical lineage, make sapphic pop not a total monolith? So back to this narrow definition of,

Sapphick pop. Emma explained that there are kind of two subcategories within Sapphic music that you want to look at. Safic anthems, aka the hushed Sufyan and Hojure adjacent tracks of the world, and the Sapphic bops, a good example of which is Munah's Silk Chafon. So if it's got a big 80s snare drama to Sapphic bop. Exactly. It's quirky. It's catchy. It has an absolute gangbuster of a chorus. and a lot of these tracks also pull from 80s sounds. But to really understand that music, we have to talk to the artists that make it.

When we come back from break, we'll talk to two eras of leading sapphic artists who have made both sapphic anthems and Savic bops. They're the perfect people to help us understand why this music is made and how they feel about the labels associated with it. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster?

Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova, and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay. Ready? Ready. Do not sugarcoat something for me.

No. No. No. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. Immigration may be Donald Trump's signature issue. President Trump is now targeting predominantly

Democratic cities for ice raids and deportations. Dozens of protesters clashing with immigration and customs enforcement agents in Minneapolis Tuesday. We will begin the process. of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came. But what we want to do in this space is talk about America and politics beyond the current president. So what do most Americans think about deportation and border security, period? I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violent displays that we've seen in the street from ICE. When it comes to the question of deportation, the answer is more complicated. My sense is that people want border at the border.

They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's this week on America Actually. Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. When it comes to queer music, Tegan and Sarah have made massive inroads in all facets of their career. Over the course of their 10 studio albums, the duo has consistently tried new sounds. amassed a sort of singular catalog that has lasted through eras of indie music. In a way, their career also kind of represents the trajectory of sapphic music in general.

The first half of their career leaned on a sort of folk rock style of songwriting that we could consider a sapphic anthem. Take 2007s call it off. But over the past decade, they've turned to an 80s revival indie pop sound. They just came out with a new album Cry Baby, and it's in that same vein. Their song, Smoking Wheat Alone is a great example and has an excellent title. Okay, so Safik Bop, that's just a superbop. That is such a fun song. I love the style of inverted, lyrical meaning and musical energy.

This is all about wanting to be alone, and yet it's so upbeat. Are you dancing alone? What's going on? I love this. This is a great track. It's a great record. The whole record. sounds like that and it's awesome. In the career of Tegan and Sarah, they started at a time when

being labeled as lesbian artists was not necessarily a good thing. So I got to talk to Tegan and Sarah about their career under this label and how it's changed since they've started making music. Hey, this is Tegan. And I'm Sarah. And we're Tegan and Sarah. That's right. We're in a band called Tegan and Sarah. I asked them how they felt about being pigeonholed as artists in their career, whether it be a sapphic artist or even sapphic twin artists as Tegan and Sarah are identical twins. I mean, I do think that at different points in our career, we have suffered from pigeonholing for sure. I think like every artist, we rejected some of the, you know, some of the ways that we were referred to or categorized in the early part of our career. I would have actually preferred if people just referred to us as sapphic.

It was their folk, wink wink, meaning like only like, only like. lesbians will like them. I almost would have rather people just say what they were really meaning to say. I definitely feel like in the early part of our career where we were teenagers, there was like this, it felt extremely marginalizing and it felt extremely unfair that everything that was written about us and the majority of that was written by men was about like, hey, this isn't for anyone but young women who are queer. Everyone else, go ahead and flip the page. You're not going to be interested. And so I think there was a huge stretch of our career where We unraveled that probably by taking huge risks, like going into indie rock and then going into pop.

And I still think there's very coded language and very coded representation of us in the media that is still saying, hey, this is probably mostly for gays. So if you're gay or you're a girl, you're probably like this. And I see it in the coverage of a lot of queer artists or in gay movies or gay television. It still feels like everyone's going, this is a great piece of art. Excellent, excellent. Great job, everybody. Okay, high fives. All right.

champagne, but also just make sure we're clear that this is mostly for queer people. I mean, I think the things are a lot better, but I also think that, I don't know, maybe we'll never be, maybe we'll never like the coverage. Like, maybe we'll never really like our press and we'll never feel like people really got us. Maybe we're just like one of those bands. It's not even because we're gay or because we are what we are. I think it's just that there's a certain kind of artist that breaks through and is captured

in an accurate way. And then I think the rest of us just like, we just accept what we get. I think we've been really lucky. And I think we've been fortunate. And I'm really glad that we grew into the kind of artists that are, you know, respected and written about, you know, with sensitivity. Because I think in the early part of our career, I certainly felt like we were doomed to be, you know, to be critiqued in this way that felt mean. You know, because it was like they were mean. It was a cruel time in music.

And it was a cruel time to be queer and a woman and have short hair. And it made me feel ill. And I hated it. And I used to go head to head with editors and publicists and record. record label people all the time. And I was in a constant state of battle. And I spent pretty much all of my 20s in that. You know, it's one thing to have somebody say it's not good, but it's another thing to have somebody compare your harmonies on the album to listening to lesbians orgasming. I felt ashamed by the press that we would get. I felt embarrassed of our band because it was like,

oh, we're a joke. We're like the equivalent, like, being the lesbian band and sort of like being in a boy band. It's like, you know, people would write about our music and be like, well, it was a sold-out show at Irving Plaza, but it was just an audience full of gay people, like, as if it wasn't good enough. Yeah. And I'm like, gay people are some of the most, you know, powerful music supporters. They buy more merch. They've held up pop stars for freaking decades.

Like, you know, and instead of feeling like we should be celebrating this horrific audience of, you know, well-meaning supportive queers with our haircut, we were sort of like subtly made to feel ashamed by it. So it is weird because it does color certain records, like, in this sort of tint. And as artists still making music today, I wanted to ask them how this has changed. And if they have any thoughts about queerness and music now versus when their career started back in the late 90s. I mean, in general, it's an amazing time in queer music. I mean, I think one of the good things that streaming and playlisting has done is created so many more lanes.

I absolutely credit this explosion of LGBTQ-identified artists in the mainstream or whatever the mainstream is now with that access. You know, all of a sudden the people are speaking, you know, young people find an artist they love and they can make them big. You know, they don't need the conventional dinosaurs like radio to make a big superstar. And in art, when we were coming up in the first kind of decade, it felt like only one queer person got to be cool and relevant at a time. And now there's so, now it's just like pick what kind of queer artists are you looking for, you know, whether it's Janelle Monet and, you know, Haley Keoko or Girl in Red and Muna and, you know, Claude. And like, it's just like endless. Like it's just so many. It's so wonderful.

And for the most part, I do think it's really amazing and a vibrant scene. I do still see coverage, though, like I was saying, like I still feel like queer artists are treated like queer artists, you know, like a few years ago when all the major publications started creating their like queer site. Like they're like, we've got billboard, but now we're going to have the gay billboard. And it's like, no, no, no, we don't want a new closet. Put us in the regular billboard. We want to be the regular billboard.

So it's like, you know, it's complicated. People are trying so hard. Maybe this is, maybe this is the wrong thing for the gay old elder to say. But I think a lot of this, you know, first of all, just like wanting to be in the mainstream. And Tegan and I were part of this movement of like, I want to be in the mainstream. I want to be queer and on the radio. I'm not saying I'm taking it back. But like, I don't want to be in the mainstream.

I don't. No, we're like slowly. We're those people that are like slowly. I'm backing away. I'm backing away. For like four years now. We've been like slowly backing up. Like no one noticed, right?

nobody noticed we're just like we want to leave the party so you have artists like teakin and sarah very blatantly saying we're grateful that the scene is more saturated now but we're comfortable where we're at and they're grateful that all of these other artists they mentioned jeanel monae haley kiocho muna claude they're grateful that they exist but you could even argue that they're sort of tired of this sort of separation between sapphic artists and then everybody else you know Yeah, on either side of their career, from the hate they were getting at the beginning to the playlisting that they're getting now, there seems to be a persistent discomfort with the labels that are being applied to them. Exactly. And it's interesting to see how that has sort of changed over time. Under this umbrella of sapphic music, everybody feels differently. King Princess, despite her being non-binary, has come to be known through her expression.

of sapphic lust and desire through her work. Her early work contained those fulky pastoral elements mentioned earlier. It's an excellent record, and contrary to the pining, sensual, not sexual tone that has come to be synonymous with sappism, she has chosen in the past few years to title songs things like Pussy is God and hit the back with lyrics that are a lot more sexually radical. Take the opener of her latest record Hold On Baby, for example. This is, I hate myself, I want a party. But instead to watch TV, fuck my girl, check my phone, babe.

PS5, change my shirt, and drink alone, baby. It communicates a real shift in culture that when Tegan and Sarah were first making music, critics were using euphemism to describe their music. and now King Princess, she can just come out and say sexually explicit lyrics, whatever. It's just because what's happening. So I got to talk to King Princess about her new record Hold On Baby and how she feels about the whole Sathic Anthem movement. Hello, I am King Princess. I'm a musician and professional clown.

And I'm here to talk to you about pop music. What were your inspirations for Hold On Baby? I think partially it was inspired by just sitting back down at like the piano or guitar. and ridding myself of the stress of like needing to produce everything out and kind of getting back to just writing songs. But then like what I was listening to when I made that record, a lot of Fiona, a lot of Kate Bush, and then a lot of like 90s grunge stuff.

Like I kind of was like, you know, I was thinking about what I listened to as a kid. You know, luckily I was kind of inundated with great music as a kid. So I thought that maybe I should go back and listen to a lot of that shit more. And I did. Because it's a curse to be your friend. I get really stuck on songs. Obviously, like, fell in love with Kate Bush via, like, Wuthering Heights and Women's Work.

But then, like, going deeper in, like, there's a song called Why Should I Love You? Yeah. And Prince is doing all the backgrounds on that. And I was just, like, kind of just, like, was thinking about that production, like, how she's so capable, like, writing these complete sentences as songs. but the production is just so, it just blankets them so beautifully. And it's never distracting, but it's always interesting. And that's like the perfect melding of production and songwriting, right? So I noticed that you mentioned you were listening to music you listened to as a kid.

But a lot of those artists you mentioned, like Kate Bush, they're straight. Were you listening to any queer music when you were a kid? And if it was out there, what was it? Well, my understanding of queerness through music as a kid had a lot of, lot to do with people who presented, or at least to the greater public, were considered men. But, like, Bowie, Prince, Freddie, there is a lot of gender gray area in that type of expression. It's a really incredible sense of playful femininity. That was kind of what I connected to.

I wasn't necessarily listening to, like, Melissa Etheridge, or, like, you know, B.J. Harvey, or, like, I wasn't, like, hip to that. Right. As a kid. What I found was these like really flamboyant men. And I was like, oh, that's like me. As a non-binary artist, do you have a particular feeling about your work being categorized alongside other artists under a label of Sapphic pop? Because that's something I've sort of seen your work be called or on playlists about and stuff like that. I don't really mind, honestly. As long as you're listening and streaming. my music, I just don't really care. Like, I just, I'm over it. No, I'm not necessarily always, like, a lesbian, but, like, I write songs about eating pussy. Right, right. So it is sapphic.

My thing is, like, if it's the kids who are labeling it, fine. If it's the greater industry of business men and women who decide or the arbiters of what is mainstream and what is too queer to be mainstream, then I'm not chill with that because it's like, I've said this before, but like, it's like, you're supposed to listen to a playlist that says queer pop. And these people are grouped together based on who they sleep with. But their music might not be similar in any way. But because they're, queer, we're in a playlist together. Like, that's kind of crazy to me. But if kids are like, this sapphic-ass music, I'm like, sure, it is sapphic. It's, I'm, you know, I don't, you don't need to be a lesbian for something to be saffic. Do people ever criticize your choice to be more explicit in your

songs? And do you care even? I feel like sometimes I get comments on like the internet or whatever where it's like, ew. But I'm like, whatever. It's my choice. How I want to talk about my life, my relationships, you know, if you don't like it, if you feel like it's too explicit, then go listen to Christian music. To some extent, it's like if that came out of my body that day and that's like what I wanted to say, then who is anyone to tell me that I can't. Yeah. But I understand when people, some people clutch their pearls when they hear crazy shit. You know, people felt that way about Wop when it came out.

I'm talking Wop, Wop, Wop, that's a wet-ass pussy. People were like, I don't understand why this is happening. And I was like, I do, because it's fierce. I don't know. I mean, I guess it's kind of intense to be like, I'm going to go fuck my girl. But I don't know. That's my vibe. But instead to watch TV, fuck my girl, check my phone, babe.

So I guess the concept of a sapphic anthem, depending on who is calling music that, is not necessarily a box that artists feel trapped and squished in, but rather has become a sort of jumping off point to play and toy with the form of pop music, who it's for, and who it celebrates. I'll let King Princess have the last word here. At the end of the day, like, what's good hopefully cuts through? Gay, straight, trans, non-binary, whatever. If it's good, it's good.

And I think that that's really important to remember. And for us as queer people and consumers, not just artists, but consumers to remember, is that we need to promote and uplift good shit, things that we like. Switched on Pop is produced by Rihanna Cruz, edited by Joey Myers, engineered by Brandon McFarland, illustrations by Armas Gottlieb, community management by Abby Barr, our executive producers are Hannah Rosen and Ashok Kerwa, and were a member of the Vox Media Podcast Network and a production of The Vulture.

You can find us at switchedonpop.com and on social media at Switched on Pop, and let us know on there, what is your favorite Sapphic Bob? I have to know. Please check in next Tuesday. I'll be chatting with Willow about her latest release. It's going to be really great. Until then, thanks for listening. records of

rents with the form of the form of the form of the world

you're good the best conversion of the incredible

system of the shopify facilita the on the website

on the social and in whatever that that

music for your music for you don't do you

know your business to be a period per mows

Records