It’s the freakin’ weekend, baby!
It’s been a great week for throwbacks; A League of Their Own is back, Follies is making a new debut, and conservatives are dragging public education back into the dark ages.
In that spirit, it seems it may be the perfect time for a look back at the hits released this week in history. As Jessie J famously shouted, “we need to take it back in time to when music made us all u-NITE!”
From Beach Boy musin’ to some lady named Susan, here’s your weekly bop rewind:
How about we take this to the next level?
Our newsletter is like a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.
“Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” by The Beach Boys (July 18, 1966)
Okay, but hear us out. It’s hard to argue that this doesn’t sound like repressed gay ideation of a more accepting future. Who among us didn’t think at one time or another while growing up, “Wouldn’t it be nice to live together in the kind of world where we belong?” Something about the softness of the song’s timbre and the wistful fantasy they’re dreaming of feels inherently just a little blessedly queer.
“Let’s Go Crazy” by Prince (July 18, 1984)
Queerly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this list called a bop rewind.
It’s wild to think that such a high-energy song — and one of Prince’s most famous — begins with a faux eulogy, but that’s just the kind of girl he was. Prince’s flamboyance was nearly always set to a ten, and “Let’s Go Crazy” is far from an exception. This jamming funk/rock/pop hybrid is a dance floor straight to the ears.
“My Name Is Not Susan” by Whitney Houston (July 21, 1991)
Before The Ting Tings and their 95 Theses of misnomers, Whitney was telling the girls what her name certainly was not. The queen of the night jumped on this Janet Control-style new jack swing track to tell a story of a lover messing her around with another woman. Between this and “It’s Not Right, But It’s Okay”, Whitney really had a knack for high energy denouncements of cheating men.
I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love by My Chemical Romance (July 23, 2002)
My Chemical Romance has recently made the rounds by including a gay adult star on their comeback merch, but their queer dabbling is far from new. Honestly, MCR came in and single-handedly raised a generation of queer emos by letting vocalist Gerard Way and guitarist Frank Iero tongue onstage as much as they wanted. This was all the more important because the state of queerness in music throughout the Bush era was, in a word, bleak. God bless these swoopy-haired icons.
“Teenage Dream” by Katy Perry (July 23, 2010)
When you look up “bubblegum pop” in the dictionary, a Teenage Dream CD actually falls out from between the pages. Nearly every song is some level of hit: “Firework”, “California Gurls”, “The One That Got Away”, “TGIF”, “ET”, etc., omg. This title track kicks off the whole project, and those opening muted string strums will forever be a gay activation sound.
Thank you for taking this little time travel with us, and we’ll see you back here next week for another weekly bop roundup!
