Switched on Pop - What makes a gay anthem?

Episode Date: June 27, 2023

Vulture might have killed the song of the summer back in 2016, but if you’re a member of the LGBTQ+ community, it’s hard to argue against “Padam Padam” by Kylie Minogue. The track, released this May, has taken the queer community by storm, quickly becoming ubiquitous and inescapable – it's hard to even scroll on Twitter without a well-timed meme about the "padam-ic" popping up on the timeline. However, Minogue's song hasn't even cracked the Billboard Hot 100; instead, its status has morphed into that of a "gay anthem," a song widely celebrated inside the community but unable to garner longstanding success outside of it. This episode of Switched on Pop, producer Reanna Cruz tackles a question that the LGBTQ+ community has debated over for decades: what makes a gay anthem? Through talking with everyone from academics to their close friends, the answer takes us from Judy Garland to 1920s cabaret to, of course, "Padam Padam." Songs Discussed: Kylie Minogue – Padam Padam Édith Piaf – Padam padam Kylie Minogue – Supernova Mischa Spoliansky – Das lila Lied (The Lavender Song) Queen – I Want To Break Free Lady Gaga – Born This Way London Philharmonic Choir – Amazing Grace Traditional – God Save The King Queen – We Are The Champions Tom Robinson Band – Glad to be Gay Diana Ross – I'm Coming Out Judy Garland – Alone Together (Live At Carnegie Hall/1961) Countess Luann – Chic C'est La Vie Judy Garland – The Trolley Song Lady Gaga – La Vie En Rose Bronski Beat – Smalltown Boy Village People – Y.M.C.A. Sylvester – You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) Miquel Brown – So Many Men, So Little Time Depeche Mode – Never Let Me Down Again The Weather Girls – It's Raining Men Gloria Gaynor – I Will Survive Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat, same. I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of Eater. We've just launched the new-ish and way better Eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City. And save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors, and book right in the app. Download the eater app at eaterapp.com.

It's free for iOS users. Welcome Switched on Pop. I'm producer Rianna Cruz. And I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. So Charlie, I know the idea of a unified song of the summer is something of the past. Yeah, back in 2016, Vulture wrote, The Song of Summer is dead. Dun, dun, done. We don't have the same, you know, centralized culture.

I don't like the competitive nature of the song of summer. It makes sense that there shouldn't be. just one song. The song of the summer is dead, but I think we all have our own personal songs of the summer. And this Pride Month, I think my song of the summer has got to be Kylie Minogue's Pidom Pidum. I love that every decade, Kylie Mnog drops yet another earworm

that you just can't get out of your head. Was that pun intentional, Charlie? It was, yeah. This track, Padam Padam is quickly becoming one of the Australian singers biggest hits in years. And it's pretty easy to see why. Looking at the sonics, it's rooted in trendy sounds of the moment that are happening in pop music, like that thumpy, plucky bass in the chorus. This is definitely Kylie Minogue stepping into a contemporary sound. She had done a disco revival album recently. And so this feels like Hot 100 pop bass line. But it's strange because the chords

are kind of dark and menacing. It's the song about a heartbeat, and yet there's this really funky, modal mixture of major and minor chords that create this real discordant feeling. Yeah, that sort of dark melody that kind of keeps you on your toes is actually because the song uses a scale

called the Phrygian dominant scale, and it combines major and minor tonalities, giving the song an unresolved kind of tension in the chorus, which is funny and also appropriate, right? Because Padam Padam is the lead single for Kylie's new album, which is appropriately named, Tension. Ah, yes, there is a lot of tension in the sonics here, so it's fitting. And it's not just the sonics that are interesting.

The words are also interesting, too, because the phrase, padam, padam, the title of the song, is borderline nonsensical, right? Like, on paper, it doesn't really make much sense, but in the context of the song, and I guess if you say it out loud, you know, Padam, Padam is an Anamonopoeia for a heartbeat. Oh, yes, right. Okay. So as much as Kylie Minogue is using a contemporary sound on Padam Padam, she's not the first to use the Padam in a song. Throwing it back to 1951, Edith Piaf, using a... the phrase in her song also titled,

Padam Padam. These lyrics are wild. Padam, padam, padame, padame. He comes running behind me. Ooh, this is creepier than I. this is creepier than I would have thought. Maybe it's fitting that the underlying harmony in Kylie Minogue, which is maybe making an homage to Edith Piaf,

also has these sort of darker undertones. But in spite of these darker undertones, right, the song has caught on. I've managed to hear it pretty much everywhere. Can't scroll on Twitter without seeing a tweet about it, can't go out without hearing it out of the club. And since it was released about a month ago, every two days or so, it's hitting a new biggest gain in streams.

Every day it's netting around 700,000 to 800,000 new streams with the 30th day of the song being out netting the highest gain so far. That's what you want more than anything. It's not day one, it's doing well, but day 30, it's growing. That's cool. All right, good for her. Exactly. However, mainstream America, by and large, has not really caught the Padam fever.

The song hasn't even broke the Hot 100. In spite of this, however, something interesting is happening where the song, at least on my feed and among my friends, has become ubiquitous and inescapable. A person I follow on Twitter, Munamere, called it a gay shibbleh, meaning if you know you know it's the summer ba, you're a member of of the LGBTQ community. And if you're not, odds are you probably haven't even heard that Kylie Minogue had a new song coming out. So I know we've discarded the notion of a proper song of the summer,

but Padam-Pan very clearly is securing the notion of a queer song of the summer and simultaneously has morphed into something of a gay inside joke with an article from GQ even canonizing Pettam-Padam as an unlikely gay anthem. As we find ourselves in the midst of the pedomic, get it, pandemic, pedemic? You can't, you can't, no, no, no, you cannot roast me for puns and then drop the padam. That one's good. I like that. That's good.

Thank you. Thank you. As we're in the midst of the podomic, I am openly wondering, you know, why this song is hitting so hard among my community. Why are people gravitating towards it? why is it proliferating in this context? And that led me to a bigger and more elusive question, thinking about that GQ article, what exactly makes a gay anthem? Ooh, how should we answer that question?

Well, one way to start is by going and talking to the people. So I pulled a bunch of my queer friends, and this is what they said. To me, it's a song that you hear in the bathroom of a bar. And after the first three seconds, you think to yourself, oh my gosh, I need to run out there and I need to dance to this. Okay, so I think the thing that all gay anthems have in common is that they're made by someone who is almost delusional confident. I've noticed that the real pop girlies know that we have taste

and we're basically discovering ourselves to their music. To me, a gay anthem has to be fun, it has to be bombastic, It has to have an element of ravito and empowerment. So I think actually the gay anthem bucket is pretty inclusive. To me, there are two kinds of gay anthems. One gives voice to the feelings and experiences that have come out of my gay identity. And the other kind just brings up those feelings of confidence and pride and empowerment within me that I internally associate with being gay, even if the song isn't explicit.

textually gay. Wow, that's really powerful. I definitely take away from that that I need to learn to be more delusionally confident in life. Exactly. And I'm hearing in the words of my friends a lot of the same touch points, right? Empowerment, confident. Yeah. My friend Orlando used the word bombastic, which I think is a great descriptor.

Right. And your friend even pointed out that a song doesn't have to be explicitly gay to be a gay anthem. Like Kylie Minogue has made this anthem. that is being celebrated during pride. Right. And today, the LGBTQ community identifies with a vast repertoire of artists, right? Kylie Minogue, cisgender, straight to my knowledge, Australian woman in her 50s, that has emerged as the patron saint of, you know, 2020s disco.

Just last weekend, my roommates sent me a video of a drag queen performing her song Supernova at brunch and was bringing the house down. But of course, Miss Kylie is just an example of queer people identifying with a non-queer artist. Songs like Padam-Pidam demonstrate that queer anthems can be wildly inclusive and contain multitudes. It's not easy to pin them down or put them in a box, right? So to understand more about anthems, or particularly queer anthems, I talk to a couple of the folks that study them. Okay, great. I feel like this is your story to investigate.

So why don't you take it from here? Who did you chat with first? Dr. Imani Mosley is an assistant professor at the University of Florida. And I spoke to her about the broader idea of queering music. I use queer kind of differently. I use it in a much more sort of queer theory sense, where queering is the sort of act of disruption and things are queered. So it is a doing rather than a state of being.

And people who have lots of different positionalities can queer things. What is interesting to me is when LGBTQ people do the queer thing, like make something queer. This happens all the time when we think about pop music, right? How very straight artists, at least as far as we're aware, make music that becomes queered. And it's because it is understood to do this fundamentally disruptive thing. It disrupts heteronormativity in some way, shape, or form. And musically disrupting heteronormativity is such a fun and interesting way of thinking about music making

and the way that people engage in music, like listen to music, make music, dance to music, dance to music, and obviously not just music, but all sorts of, all sorts of artistic practices. So as she says, it's the listener that makes things queer. Even in Padam Padam, right? Nothing about Kylie Minogue's song on paper is openly or explicitly gay or even gay adjacent. What makes it that way is the implicated desire within Padam and the implicit connections with queer culture. That then by, you know, the way in which I listen to it or the way in which other people listen to it or engage in it or recirculate it through social media, recirculate it in performance and through all of these other kinds of practices, we are doing the disruption. Like, we are, we are aiding in making the thing queer.

One of the first gay anthems is noted to be the German cabaret song, Das Leile Leide, which, you know, my terrible German accent, translates to the lavender song. The lyrics, when translated to English, include lines like, and still most of us are proud to be cut from different cloth. And the refrain begins with the words, We are just different from the others who are being loved only in lockstep of mortality. So Das La La La Leid, which was written in 1920, has the themes of pride and empowerment that my friends mentioned at the beginning of the episode. And in the 100 years since it was written, many more songs have touched on these themes. From Queens, I Want to Break Free in 1984. To Lady Gaga's Born This Way in 2011.

But on a more contextual level, what are these songs, or more appropriately, anthems, doing? And why do people identify with gay anthems like Padam-Padam that, for them, most part, aren't explicitly about being gay. Where does the idea of a queer anthem even come from? We'll get to that after the break. Attention Spotify. Has arrived on the new Good Girl Jasmine Absolute of Caroline Herrera. A fragrance intense with character gourmet and addictive. Imagine a jasmine emvolventy, tofu caramelized and tonka toasted. A combination that seduce from the first instant and she'll beaweller. Good Girl Jasmine Absolute, hypnotic, irresistible.

Discovering Laoy and let's envolver for her sense. Part of understanding queer anthems is understanding the anthem itself and why the LGBTQ community projects onto specific songs. I asked Craig Jennings, an assistant professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, about this, as he's an expert in specifically the idea of diva worship. When we think about anthems, we tend to think about songs that articulate a sense of collective belonging. and also shared desires. Historically, anthems begin in, like, religious spaces, right, as a way to collectively articulate our love of the sacred, right? Or our, like, the community, the religious community that we're in, but also our devotion.

And then they sort of move out of the religious space into the space of the nation state. So God Save the King is probably the first example of this, where now we are using anthems to mark national identity and to showcase a little. allegiance to some sort of other power, right? Not necessarily religious, but some other sort of power. And so with this shift, the purpose of anthems still stays the same. I mean, even with sports anthems, the purpose still stays the same. It's about identifying a collectivity and articulating some sort of shared hope or shared desire.

What's really interesting about anthems, I find, is that they rely on this concept of like an us and a them. Some people are within this singing collective or the broader collective that it represents, and some people are not. But anthems are also taken up by like social movements, right? Especially by marginalized people because it's a way to tap into like a hopeful, collective, shared political desire. So I mean, we see anthems taken up by marginalized communities because they offer things that I think are really hard for marginalized communities to find in oppressive society. Right? Because they offer a sense of collective belonging, a sense of shared hopefulness, individual and community agency, and so much more. At their core, anthems remind us that we are not alone. What's interesting is there are queer anthems among many generations. I mean, there's one from Tom Robinson band called Glad to Be Gay.

Diana Ross is, I'm Coming Out. And then more recently, like Lady Gaga's born this way in 2011. So it's interesting to look back and see, you know, there are different moments, different historical moments, different geographical locations where anthems are embraced by certain segments of the queer community or of the queer collective. And so whether we're talking about communities of fans, whether we're talking about people meeting on the dance floor, we have long histories in which people find a way to find other people like them, who are are often similarly marginalized in terms of gender and sexuality. As long as there has been a lesbian and gay liberation movement or a queer liberation

movement in the United States and elsewhere, music has been foundational to that movement, right? Music and musical participation has allowed people to recognize that liberation is worth fighting for. So thinking back even before, like, disco, what would you consider? a gay anthem to be? So one example that I would offer of gay anthems pre-disco, I would kind of think about Judy Garland, to be honest. We have this amazing history about how Judy Garland in the 1950s and 1960s becomes this figure around whom huge communities of gay men, particularly white middle-class gay men in New York City,

convene around, right? Judy Garland is often given as like the first example in which we see like extreme gay male diva worship. And the sort of particulars of her life matter for this, right? So prior to 1950, Judy Garland was presented in all of her films, in the cultural zeitgeist as like this ordinary, normal, conventional, perfect woman. And then in 1950, she's fired by her studio. She attempts suicide, and she's presented in the press as like a total mess. And so it's clear that, you know, she wasn't quite who she was pretending to be. She wasn't quite who society was trying to force her to be. She was unconventional.

She was abnormal, even though everyone was doing everything they could to make her conventional and normal. And so we can see some sort of parallels here with like gay men of the moment, right, who are also recognizing the way that they don't necessarily fit into the society of the moment. Because Garland faced this, like, oppression after this failed suicide attempt and the sort of narrative that the press made

about her downfall, I think a lot of gay men of the moment saw, like, a kinship with her or a closeness with her. There are written accounts of gay men who were extreme fans, who did take up a lot of her music as, like, anthems of the community

that they imagined themselves as being part of. And a lot of them write about how Judy Garland, helped them realize they were not alone. So they would go to a Judy Garland performance and recognize, like, oh, there are other people just like me. There are other people in this row of seats who are just, like, weeping when she sings certain songs.

Like, there are other men who feel this level of devotion that I feel, and that opened up this possibility for, like, oh, maybe there is a community for me. Maybe there is something here for me. Maybe I'm not alone. Alone. together above the crowd. And that's something that both anthems,

like gay anthems that are taken up, and diva worship, I think, allows for. So there's this real interesting connection between the two concepts because both are primarily about reminding us, like, oh, we're not alone. Oh, we are part of something broader, something larger,

and we can understand ourselves as part of a community. Beyond the world. We're not too proud. Throughout the years, Judy Garland is one of the everlasting gay icons. In the modern era, she's also morphed into somebody that embodies another piece of the gay anthem puzzle, and that is the element of camp. Camp is very elusive and hard to describe, right? But on paper, Susan Sontag in her essay notes on camp,

described it as, quote, artifice, frivolity, naeemement. middle-class pretentiousness and shocking excess, unquote. In more practical terms, it essentially has come to mean over the years something that is good or appealing because of its over-the-top nature and silliness, right? Think of like the movies of John Waters, for example. And more often than not, identifying camp is identifying something that's intangible. A great example of this in the music world is the song Chic Say Levy by Real Housewives of New York cast member Countess Ler.

Luann. Sheik-S-Lavi is, to me, the perfect definition of camp in music. The production is rudimentary, the vocal delivery is unaffected, and the artist herself is a socialite who hosts her own cabaret show and stars in a reality TV show about rich women fighting. It lends itself to this kind of ironic detachment that has an underlying sense of appreciation and enjoyment. to it. Oftentimes, to understand the gay anthem is to understand camp. And that's part of the endearing allure of somebody like Judy Garland who has a career full of tracks like the trolley song from Meet Me and St. Louis. Clang, clang, clang went the trolley. Ding, ding, ding, went the bell. Zing, sing, zing when my heart springs from the moment I saw him. I saw him.

It's corny, but so incredibly earnest in a way that is at odds with itself, and that feels, for lack of a better term, campy. So when camp is brought into the picture, it gives queer people something to identify with and latch onto when it's heard in songs. Padampadam can be campy because of the onomatopoea that it's founded on. It could be campy because of how simple the lyrical context is. There's a lot of elements there that,

contribute to the campiness of a song. Craig puts it well. If we're thinking about camp as like artificiality and like over the top theatricality and these sorts of like eye roll inducing performance gestures and choices, like what a beautifully queer thing that is. Like what a fun over the top thing that is. I think particularly about the things we're talking about now, like part of my draw to certain divas or part of my draw.

certain anthems involves their campiness, right? Their campy factor. And I know that, you know, camp is in the eye of the beholder. But I think as queer people, we get really good at like over interpreting things so that they can be, you know, applicable to our lives or so that we can read ourselves or hear ourselves as represented in some of this music, in some of these cultural texts. And so some of my favorite sort of campy artists are artists who probably don't even. think of themselves as campy, but there are people who I read as like, oh, there is some sort of wink and nudge here. There is like a camp sensibility that I am either identifying with or like disidentifying with. I don't know what it is, but it's it's just like another lure for me,

right? Because now I'm getting really excited thinking about camp, but maybe the pull of camp is because one thing that camp teaches us to do is to take things seriously that we're not supposed to take seriously and to not take seriously the things we are supposed to take seriously. And so maybe for those of us who are like LGBTQ2 plus, there's like some joy in that in recognizing the constructedness, the artifice of all of this, of all of the ways we are told to live our lives. And maybe that's like part of our connection to camp. So that theatricality is important to creating that connection between the music that's being made and queer audiences. Thinking about Kylie Minogue's source text,

Edith Piaf's Padam-Padam. Edith Piaf wasn't outwardly expressive of queerness herself, but the combination of her theatricality with her tumultuous life that bears parallels with Judy Garland lends herself to identification with the gay community. In a sort of met a moment, gay icon Lady Gaga, even did Eith pee off drag in A Star is Born, lending her voice to an incredible rendition of La Vian Rose. So we already know why queer people gravitate towards divas and how these anthems come about,

and we know how music is queered in the first place. I still want to know the what. what constitutes as a gay anthem? Perhaps a good distillation of what makes a quote-unquote gay anthem in the 2020s is the music of the Palm Springs radio station K-Gay. The station plays what they call dance hits, specifically spun by members of the LGBTQ community, in an effort to connect with residents of the Palm Springs area,

which has one of the highest concentrations of same-sex couples anywhere. in the United States. I wanted to know what makes the cut for gay music, quote-unquote, on a gay radio station, and by extension, how certain songs get the distinction to be played on queer radio. Who better to ask about gay anthems than the program director of K-Gay, Chris Shebel. I call the format Dance Hits. So this is a hit-based format that we do, but there's a filter. It's like, it's like if you're a member of the LGBTQ community, is this a song that you heard when you were growing up or when you used to be going out and stuff? And if it's a newer song, does it have a feel like, you know, the beats or whatever, the flow that kind of fits in with the older song?

The older songs are really what drives the format. And for us, that's like one of our most important things is to be part of the community. I asked Chris essentially how he picks the songs that end up on the KGA airwaves. Well, I tell you, how did I originally select a lot of them? The older songs, I selected them because they were the songs I heard when I would go out to the bars. And they were also the songs that I would hear when I would go out to the bars that I thought had emotion. You know, that's what pop music has always been. So to be a real anthem song, it's something that's really got to build.

And then it's also got to stick around for a while. You know, I mean, it's like, oh, that's something. a great song, and then two months later, you never hear it again. You know, so a real anthem song is a song that the people that go out embrace so much that the DJs have to keep playing. The gay anthems, as you were saying, you're not going to hear Bronsky beat Small Town Boy on any other radio station. You're not going to hear it on a pop radio station. You're not going to hear it on an oldies radio station. I mean, it's so hokey still, but when you put the damn, um,

It's fun to stay at the YMCA song on by the village people. You see a bunch of people going, and I mean, you go back to the disco day, Sylvester. You make me feel so many men, so little time. There's like that level, songs like that that are just so ingrained that they will always, always, always be part of what is now the gay culture. And then, you know, there's the second level of songs that aren't as gay specific, but, you know, are always in there, too, Depeche Mode.

You know, Donna Summer, I mean, Duran, Duran, all of those artists from back in that day, because that's also when a lot of the people, at least for our audience, were a lot of them when they grew up. So it's still, there's still, you know, there's songs from the 2000s. I mean, you know, you can't, Lady Gaga comes on. It doesn't matter whether her song is like gay friendly or not. It's Lady Gaga, you know. And Madonna was like that in the 80s and going into the 90s and Britney Spears for a while.

You know what I mean? Every, every, all the divas. So knowing this and looking at the other songs that were mentioned, there's a connection between Kylie Minogue's Padam-Padam and the other tracks that Chris has talked about. First and foremost, Kylie Minogue is a diva and we've established that divas are a cornerstone of gay anthems generally. But it's fitting that Padam-Pram has swept the queer community because it carries similar characteristics to existing gay anthems. It's an example of catchy electropop like Small Town Boy by Bronsky Beat. There's that central Chris calls it hokey, almost campy concept,

like a song like YMCA or even the Weather Girls, it's raining men. And Padam-Panam speaks to a sense of universal emotion that everybody, LGBTQ or otherwise, can relate to. Padam-Padam is about, you know, finding a love, taking them home. The meaning isn't explicitly queer. But in that way, it's similar to other gay anthems like I Will Survive by Gloria Gayner that express a genuine sense of empowerment and confidence and, for the lack of a better term, pride. As Amani stated earlier, it's the implicit act of queering that makes the song

connect as a gay anthem. All of these separate elements contribute to that. And it makes sense that Padam-Pan-Pan has emerged as the for for gay song of the summer. It has all of these musical elements, but is also unapologetically confident and sexy and danceable. So I suppose, much like the LGBTQ community itself, which is full of different expressions of gender and sexuality, a quote-unquote gay anthem is not necessarily something that has a concrete, definition. Rather, it's not just heard, but much like the padam-pidam of a heartbeat, it's something that's felt. Switched-on-pop is produced by Rihanna Cruz, edited by Art Chung, engineered by Brandon McFarland, illustrations by Iris Gottlieb, community management by Abby Barr, our executive

producer is Nishat, Perwa, and we're a member of the Vox Media Podcast Network and a production of Vulture. You could find more Switched-on-pop at switchdonpop.com or on social media at you guessed it, switched on pop. And we would love to hear what your favorite gay anthem is. We'll be back next week on Tuesday. And until then, thanks for listening.