Album of the Week
My favorite pop single of the year is Mika's "We Are Golden," a hit
in Europe but not here. Who could resist its choral melody as it
deliriously declares, "Teenage dreams in a teenage circus / Running
around like a clown on purpose / Who gives a damn about the family you
come from / No givin' up when you're young and you want some?" If that
hooky chorus wasn't enough, Mika adds another chorus with a second
melodic hook and shifts into a giddy falsetto as if moving into a
higher gear. Everything is driven relentlessly forward by the tom-tom
thump and the bright piano chords until melody, rhythm and harmonies
coalesce into a dizzying anthem of liberation.
Rock'n'roll has
been regularly reinvigorated by just such a desire for liberation from
society's underdogs--from New Orleans African-Americans, from New York
Jewish tunesmiths, from East L.A. Latinos, from working-class Cockneys
in Liverpool and London, from blue-collar losers in Memphis. So what's
the source of Mika's desire for liberation? A good hint is supplied
when his single climaxed in a mind-boggling third chorus, even catchier
than the first two, and proclaims, "We are not what you think we are /
We are golden, we are golden." What a pithy summation of the gay
experience everywhere: thought to be one thing but actually something
else entirely.
If we can talk about the African-American,
Jewish-American and blue-collar-Cockney contributions to rock'n'roll,
why can't we talk about gay contributions? Elton John, Freddie Mercury
and David Bowie all transformed the way rock'n'roll sounded and the way
it talked. John is the key figure here. The heightened theatricality of
everything he did--from the weird glasses to the piano-pumped falsetto,
from the stage antics to the unabashed melodrama--came out of a culture
where confession was often delivered via disguises.
He mixed
the outré and the everyday, the camp and the catchy unlike anyone ever
had or ever could. In recent years, however, a number of gifted
singer-pianists have emerged to extend John's genre--call it
cabaret-rock or simply Eltonia--in new and exciting directions. These
sons of Elton--Rufus Wainwright, Ben Folds and Mika--have taken his
example of over-the-top flamboyance anchored by chiming pop hooks, and
given it more pointed lyrics.
It should be acknowledged that
Folds is an out-of-the-closet heterosexual with a wife and children.
But just as Hall and Oates and Eminem have embraced African-American
culture without being African-American, just as Andre Watts and
Leontyne Price have mastered European culture without being European,
so Folds has embraced and mastered John's take on gay culture. What
matters in art, after all, is not the color of a person's skin or who
they sleep with, but the cultural tradition they choose and their
ability to command and expand that heritage.
Wainwright and Adam
Lambert get all the press, but Mika is making the more interesting
records--"We Are Golden" is from his second album, this year's The Boy
Who Knew Too Much. Unlike John, Mika grew up in a generation for whom
the closet was someplace you visited but never lived. When Mika sings,
"He's got a face to make you fall on your knees" in "Blame It on the
Girls" or "I look for joy in a strange place from the back of a bar" in
"Dr. John," he's having fun with a gay eroticism that John never
touched. In the latter song, though, he still acknowledges the
challenges his identity can bring: "I see the look on my daddy's face /
When his son's falling over, undone."
In response to such
challenges, gay artists such as John created an aesthetic of willed
joy, an assertion that their lives could be fabulous if they wanted it
badly enough--like Dorothy clicking the heels of her sparkly red shoes
in The Wizard of Oz. Mika pursues the same aesthetic, but
he's willing to give us a peek at the wizard behind the screen in the
Emerald City. The verses of "Dr. John" detail the obstacles he
faces--heartbroken parents, departing lovers, shadowy barrooms--and on
the chorus he wails, "What am I doing wrong?" But the chorus is backed
by a skipping march rhythm and a bubbly sing-along melody that's
impossible to forget. Here's a song that is itself the solution to the
problem it's describing.
Such problems are not the sole
province of any one group, and the solution offered by John and Mika is
available to all. And just as John transformed the gay aesthetic of
willed joy into a universal experience on the strength of his
pop-pleasure hooks, Mika does the same on his new disc. Whether it's
the breezy Latin-pop of "Blue Eyes," the Tin Pan Alley feel of "Good
Gone Girl" or the dizzying vocal counterpoint of "One Foot Boy," The
Boy Who Knew Too Much offers one miraculous combination after another
of a hip-grabbing groove married to an ear-grabbing tune, usually
wrapped in Spectorian layers of strings, voices and keyboards.
Born
as Michael Holbrook Penniman (interestingly, the same last name Little
Richard abandoned) to an American father and Lebanese mother in 1983
Beirut, this war refugee moved to London and reinvented himself as an
opera prodigy, jingle singer and ultimately as Mika, a singer-pianist
in the John mode. His 2007 debut album, Life in Cartoon Motion, was a
delight, and the new follow-up is even more ambitious, more successful.
The most ambitious track is "Touches You." Ostensibly a riposte
to an ex-lover who recently broke it off, the song also functions as a
comeback to a whole society that tried to marginalize him. Over
co-producer Greg Wells' industrial-strength programmed beats,
brightened by Mika's bell-ringing piano chords, the singer announces,
"Growing up, I needed to compromise; well, I've had enough." As the
hand-clapping, booty-shaking, choir-singing hymn nears its climax, Mika
is no longer singing just to his ex-lover but to anyone out there in
the broad pop audience who has ever felt it necessary to disguise his
or her true nature: "When you've had enough and you need somebody to
know / When you're looking tough but you need a way to let it go.../
Touching me, touching you."
