Sam Smith and the Right Amount of Gayness for the Grammys
Pop music is gay. Scan the Billboard Hot 100, and you’ll see that it’s undeniably so. Our most prominent pop icons in 2015 are singers like Beyonce, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift and Nicki Minaj—females whose music is aimed at least as equally at their adoring gay male audiences as it is at women. They sing about sexual empowerment and liberation in the face of a traditional hetero-masculine society. They sing about self-acceptance, independence and defiance in the face of deeply ingrained oppression. They make songs like “Partition” and “Firework,” “We R Who We R,” “S&M,” “Born This Way,” “Shake It Off,” and “Anaconda.”
Beyond just lyrical themes though, these women have adopted myriad elements from gay and drag culture into their looks, branding, and sound; colorful wigs, theatrical makeup and sequined leotards have become the de-facto uniform, and house beats are often the medium. Even the guys—Macklemore, Bruno Mars, Maroon 5’s Adam Levine, and the twinks of One Direction—are either slyly or directly peddling their product, and bodies, to gay men. Indeed from one vantage point, the contemporary pop music scene is one big explosion of gay culture.
The giant pink elephant in the room, of course, is that while “gayness” is more front and center than it ever has been before in pop music, there are few actual gay male artists contributing to that conversation. So few, in fact, that when Frank Ocean came out in a letter on his blog on the eve of his debut album Channel Orange in 2012, it was a radical move.
On that late summer day, Ocean was at the precipice of being crowned alt-R&B’s newest prince; his previous mixtape, 2011’s Nostalgia/Ultra, had been a smash viral success, and the hype around Orange had reached critical fervor. I remember being floored by Ocean’s boldness when he admitted in a blog post that his first love had been with a man, and the majority of the music on Orange was inspired by that relationship.
Ocean’s move to address his queerness, both in his music and in his blog post, was a landmark not just in a pop music context. It was even more profound because Ocean also belongs to the hip-hop community, a subculture even less friendly to openly gay artists than mainstream pop. It was certainly the first time I, a gay R&B and hip-hop fan for most of my life, had heard a male artist in these genres openly declare a romance with another man. It was jarring, in a great way, to hit play on Channel Orange and to hear an R&B song like “Bad Religion” with Ocean uttering the words, “I could never make him love me.” Woah! It was equally as mind-blowing to retroactively understand just how little I’d heard homosexual romance rendered, as it was so specifically across Channel Orange, in mainstream music before.
The truth is that gay pop music lovers and gay pop culture consumers in general are used to feeling like willing outsiders peering in. We so frequently find ourselves having to transpose hetero-normative images and lyrics into our lives that having an artist like Ocean sing directly to our experiences is unique and powerful. And while Ocean and Orange went on to thrive—the album debuted at #2 on the charts and went on to receive a couple Grammy nominations—Ocean still exists as a popular fringe artist. He ultimately didn’t win those awards. This is, perhaps, partly because he came out, partly because he is black and distinctively R&B, and mostly because his music is a little too eccentric to be fully embraced by pop audiences and American pop radio. He is successful, sure, but Katy Perry he is not.
Enter Sam Smith, 2014’s breakout pop star and, perhaps, the most prominent gay male pop singer of all time, or at least the most prominent gay male singer to have come out before the release of his debut album. Smith first garnered attention abroad in 2013 as a featured vocalist on Naughty Boy’s “La La La” and Disclosure’s “Latch,” the latter of which went on to be a hit in America during the following year. Smith released his debut album, In the Lonely Hour, in May of 2014, and it has garnered massive success—more than a million copies sold (twice that of Ocean), two top ten singles, and a slew of Grammy nominations, including all four majors: Record, Song and Album of the Year, and Best New Artist. Many pundits expect him to dominate Grammy night, favoring him to snag Album of the Year, even over Beyonce.
Smith officially came out of the closet in a May 2014 interview in The Fader, and much has been made of that piece. Namely, the way Smith chose to address being gay when he was writing the lyrics for In the Lonely Hour. “I’ve tried to be clever with this album,” Smith claimed, “because it’s also important to me that my music reaches everybody. I’ve made my music so that it could be about anything and everybody—whether it’s a guy, a female, or a goat—and everybody can relate to that.” Smith has reiterated this approach, as well as other questionable commentary on gay culture, throughout last year. And listening to In the Lonely Hour, an album of subdued blue-eyed soul ballads, is definitely a gender-neutral experience. It’s maybe even a neutered one, at least in terms of lyrical content.
In fact, any gayness on In the Lonely Hour is implied at best. Smith has often said in interviews that the album is written about one particular unrequited relationship he had with a guy. However, the nuances of that male-on-male interaction, or even the use of any gender specific pronouns like “he” and “him” are, by Smith’s own design, almost completely scrubbed from the record.
“I’m Not the Only One,” the album’s second single, is about being cheated on and features the chorus, “You say I’m crazy, ‘cuz you don’t think I know what you’ve done / But when you call me baby, I know I’m not the only one.” The album’s most effective song and, perhaps, its central thesis statement, “Not In That Way,” goes, “You’d say I’m sorry, believe me, I love you, but not in that way.” And “Leave Your Lover” climaxes with the sexuality-neutral hook, “Just leave your lover, leave him for me.” Choosing to write from these shrewd angles has allowed Smith to talk off record about being an out and proud man without representing that clearly on wax.
In the same Fader piece, Smith said, “[Coming out] felt great. But I had to be careful—I want my music to be sung by absolutely everyone, just like I listen to straight people every day of my life, and I’m not straight.”
Which, frankly, is bullshit.
Smith’s implication that in order for his music to “be sung by absolutely everyone,” it must omit gay signifiers, perpetuates some disturbing notions about gayness. Namely, it furthers the idea that straight people are unable to do what gay audiences have been doing all our lives—transposing a romantic dynamic that is not precisely our own onto our own lives and appreciating it all the same.
Would Smith say he can’t relate to the feelings expressed in Bruno Mars’ “Just the Way You Are,” a song that contains the line “Girl, you’re amazing,” just because he, Smith, is gay? What about Kanye West’s “Heartless?” What about Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean?” What Smith is really saying is that unlike traditional male/female love and sexuality, gay romance still makes many people uncomfortable, and he is unwilling to confront that injustice merely by being himself in his work.
Furthermore, Smith’s intention to go broad is a tragedy not just because it undermines his vocal and melodic talents, but because it also undermines his decision to be out at all. As one of the most visible gay men in mainstream culture at the moment, Smith has certainly shirked an important responsibility in these artistic choices. Namely, he’s done so as an incredibly rare bird—a hugely popular, out gay recording artist and role model.
I’ve thought a lot lately about what it means for young gay men to lack a clear gay voice from Smith. Watching shows like HBO’s Looking and Amazon’s Transparent over the last couple of years has highlighted just how few out and proud representations there are of gay people in popular culture. It’s only later in my life that I’ve realized, through these shows, through films like Weekend and The Celluloid Closet, and through albums like the Scissor Sisters’ Night Work and like Channel Orange, how few out gay male voices I’ve had to relate to in pop culture and particularly in pop music.
Given how much of our lives are shaped by the images we consume, the effects of that lacking in my own life, as for many gay men, have been far-reaching. Imagine how many young women are figuring out who they are against the backdrop of Beyonce’s music, her lyrical assertions on womanhood, her sexuality, her views on feminism, and her specific experiences navigating a man’s world. Gay boys have no such superstar role models, no big-tent musicians who are speaking to us and to our experiences directly. And no matter how much we worship her and how many sequins are on her leotard, Beyonce will never be a gay man.
Of course, Smith’s lyrical ambiguity also renders his music perfect fodder for the Recording Academy—a conservative organization that has only once given Album of the Year to a rap record and that consistently lavishes awards on legacy acts rather than progressive ones. There’s no question that Smith’s music, as opposed to Ocean’s, is primed sonically for Grammy voters and mainstream audiences, regardless of pronouns or content details. It’s no surprise that the sounds and textures on In the Lonely Hour find their closest kin in Adele’s blockbuster 21, which broke out similarly and took home seven awards in 2011.
But we’re also on the eve on national gay marriage. The call for our nation to accept homosexuality on a large scale is ringing quite loudly. Certainly, the Academy knows that.
The bottom line is that Smith’s heretofore success, culminating with his Grammy coronation, has likely proven that de-gay-ifying his music was savvy. He’s had it both ways—he is “out” technically, but his gayness flies fully under the radar when it comes to his music. In turn, he’s allowed the Grammys and the general music-buying public to appear forward-thinking, but he did so with a pop album that does nothing to help normalize what it means to not be straight. He did so with music that did nothing to speak to young gay fans who may be looking to him to feel okay or to see themselves in his songs. He did so without offending anyone. Maybe that’s what it takes.
I guess part of my disappointment is due to my own expectations. When I first heard “Latch” and found out Smith was gay, I thought he might be the one. Maybe we were ready for an actual gay male superstar. And after all the accolades heaped onto Smith and In the Lonely Hour, I guess we are. Just not in the way that I’d hoped. In his work anyway, Sam Smith is still very much in the closet and we gay pop-music fans are left in a very familiar situation—feeling like outsiders peering in.
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