Trixie Mattel’s Queening of Country Music
Since her initial appearance on the seventh season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, Trixie Mattel has gained an awful lot of notoriety. Whether if it was from her extreme makeup style that alluded to 1960s and 70s Barbie dolls, her hilarious YouTube success with Katya Zamolodchikova on UNHhhh (which became adapted to the Trixie and Katya Show on Viceland), or the enormous upset that came from the RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars’ third season finale where Trixie was crowned the winner and front runner, Shangela, fell into third place, Trixie Mattel has become a popular subject of ridicule and praise. However, something that I’ve found quite notable about Mattel is her bridging of the gap between drag culture and the country music genre.
As someone who hasn’t entered the mainstream drag world until Rupaul’s Drag Race’s seventh season, which aired in 2015, Trixie’s decision to start a music career after gaining exposure from the competition reality show wasn’t an entirely original one because most of her predecessors (Sharon Needles, Jinkx Monsoon, Adore Delano, Alaska Thvnderfuck, Willam Belli etc.) have done just that. However with a few exceptions, most of the music that Mattel’s predecessors released primarily are pop/dance/club music that is comparable to the music that RuPaul became known for in the 1990s, while Trixie created country/folk music. This unlikely choice of genre that Trixie is taking part in starkly contrasts from musical expectations that have been set for drag queens.
Since drag has been closely related to popular culture and some kind of performance, it has become a drag tradition to allude to popular culture through performance, whether it be celebrity impersonations, lip syncing to popular music, or taking on entire personas that reflect women in entertainment. Again, most of Mattel’s predecessors produce club music, which makes traditional sense for drag queens because before YouTube and the popularization of RuPaul’s Drag Race, drag queens pretty much only found their footing by performing in gay night clubs. Therefore, dance/techno music is not only familiar in drag and queer culture, but marketable as well because it can be easily incorporated into DJ mixes and the artists can use their own original music for lip syncing on stage. On the other hand, as more Drag Race queens dive into the music industry, there’s a lot more variance from this tradition because more queens are singing live and a lot of them deviate from the typical club music genre even though most of them still fit normative expectations and conventions for drag musicians.
Unlike Sharon Needles, Willam Belli, and Jinkx Monsoon, Trixie’s country aesthetic does not fit into traditional drag conventions that have been set before. Even though the other drag artists I mentioned fit some form of drag expectations and conventions, I am in no way indicating that these queens are unoriginal or that their music is of a lower quality. I am just arguing that their musical aesthetics reflect what I’d refer to as traditional drag, where Mattel’s doesn’t. For example, some of Sharon Needles’ music alludes to Jayne/Wayne County’s punk style and she even featured the seasoned trans/drag artist in her song “Hail Satan” in PG-13, Needles’ debut album. Although punk also contrasts from the traditional club music in drag culture, with bands like Jayne/Wayne County and Limp Wrist, as well as Divine’s appearance that reflected the punk style, drag and punk share an underground and transgressive history that predates Sharon Needles, showing how punk drag has a minor part in what I’d call traditional drag.
Furthermore, Willam Belli’s music that has primarily consisted of parodies of pop songs, although different from club music, is similar to the parodies of songs that Lady Bunny and other comedy queens have been creating and performing since the 90s. Aside from lip syncing to dance numbers, another common trope in drag music and performance has been to sample or re-record popular songs with the drag artist’s voice to make the original song’s lyrics silly and/or raunchy. Not to mention, Sherry Vine went beyond recording her own parodies of pop songs by filming parody music videos and posting them to YouTube when the video sharing platform was still relatively new.
Lastly, there is Jinkx Monsoon who was one of the first queens to compete on RuPaul’s Drag Race to showcase a higher caliber of vocal talent both on the show and in her album, The Inevitable Album. What separates Jinkx’s music from other drag music, yet reflects traditional drag is the fact that her aesthetic is rooted in theater. Although, like the relationship between punk and drag culture, the relationship between theater and drag culture is not as widely popular as drag club culture, the dramatics involved with theater performance have commonly intersected with drag and queer cultural traditions. Thus, even though Needles, Belli, and Monsoon deviate from the traditional club music that drag queens typically perform, all of them fit some kind tradition in drag music culture, while Trixie Mattel’s emergence in the country genre is almost completely outside of the norm.
Although Trixie Mattel is not the first popular country musician who is openly queer, she is the first to actually “queen” country music not only by singing country/folk music with queer themes while dressing in drag, but by alluding to the garish and gaudy elements of classic country artists in her appearance. Unlike other out gay male country artists like Brandon Stansell and Steve Grand, Trixie obviously brings a male effeminacy to the genre as a drag artist while Stansell and Grand are fairly homonormative. The homonormativity in most gay male country artists typically involves a performance of masculinity that is similar to heterosexual male country artists with the only exception being that these artists are gay. The implicit messages for these kinds of queer artists could be attempts to convince country fans that gay men can be just as rugged and butch as straight men; however, the normative aspect of these kinds of messages can imply that it’s better for gay men to be traditionally masculine, like straight men, than to show femininity in any way. Therefore, since Mattel’s aesthetic is probably even too feminine for women in the country world, her contribution to the genre is fairly transgressive and subversive.
Beyond subverting the hetero and homonormative aspects of country, Trixie also subverts the over-the-top aesthetic that was present in classic country during the 70s and 80s. Along with singing heartfelt breakup songs with a folksy sound, Trixie combines Dolly Parton’s big blonde wigs, heavy makeup, and curvaceous figure with Conway Twitty’s glitter fringe, beaded, and rhinestoned cowboy outfits to create a country drag aesthetic that is more drag than a mere Miranda Lambert or Carrie Underwood impersonation. By alluding to these classic country aesthetics, Mattel is not only able to bring back the old school country look, but subversively point out the femininity and absurdity of this aesthetic for such a traditionally conservative, masculine genre. Even though Trixie’s aesthetic might be a celebration of classic country fashion, it is subversive because it shows how the over-the-top element of country fashion isn’t that different from the gaudiness in drag culture. Furthermore, since country audiences are typically conservative, heteronormative, and even homophobic, the implication that the country icons they adore aren’t so different from drag queens seems to put homophobic audience members in their place in a sense.
Hopefully, Trixie’s bridging of the gap between drag culture and country will help to further diversify the genre. Even though Trixie is highly popular, I’m not sure if she has been or will be recognized in the country world outside of Drag Race, but perhaps the acceptance of Trixie as a legitimate country artist could lead to a wider queer acceptance. Moving forward, at least future country artists who are either drag queens, trans, or non-gender conforming will have Trixie as a predecessor and role model they can follow.
