by Rakesh Satyal
Wherever you went in 2011, you could hear Adele’s 21 catapulted at you from every open car window, open apartment window, and open mouth. That album has its charms, but I see a much more long-lasting and powerful influence in Rufus Wainwright’s Poses, and its tenth anniversary has passed without appropriate fanfare.
It was the oddity of the singer’s name and his striking picture that enticed me to buy his first CD with not even a minute between first look and printed receipt. What I heard when I popped the CD into my stereo was astounding and peculiar, a heady mixture of Jon Brion-produced clangs and strums and insistent beats. But most of all, there was that voice, a robust croon that was somewhere between two Kings — Nat Cole and Carole. I had seldom heard such a distinctive tone, deployed by someone whose music was, as many critics attested, a worthy heir to that of the Tin Pan Alley era.
That debut effort, though thrilling and highly ambitious, was merely an aperitif to the gorgeous album that would follow. Poses somehow manages to portray exactly the kind of disillusionment — born from an air of glamorous emotional detachment — that embodied New York in the summer of 2001. Beautifully enough, it did not lose its relevance afterwards; it still shows how the landscape of one’s romantic devastation persists despite all larger events. Knowing the potentially superficial tendencies of his concerns, Wainwright nevertheless finds fair weight in them, making songs that read specific and universal at the same time. Yes, it is very much about Rufus Wainwright, troubadour and gay man-about-town, but it captures the milieu of New York at that time with the utmost breadth and accuracy.
The summer of 2001 was, after all, most surely a Rufus Summer. Not only had Poses come out, but, in an inspired pairing, Wainwright had taken part in the most flamboyant melee of the season, Moulin Rouge! On that film’s soundtrack, he sang a plain but beautiful rendition of “Compliante de la Butte” (a song that, Wainwright himself noted, often became misunderstood as “Complaint of the Butt”). That summer, it felt like every gay boy in the city had a Rufus crush. He had become our pied piper, the boy who could appear in a variety of gay venues and hold court at them all. Britney was still dancing up a storm, and the height of J. Lo’s reign was imminent, but it was more comforting to see one of our own get up on stage with a piano and a guitar — and an unapologetic queeniness — and rack up the accolades.
I bought a ticket that summer to see him open for Roxy Music at the Theater at Madison Square Garden. There I was, dorkily waiting in the lobby to have Rufus sign a T-shirt for me. When he spoke, I felt like I was still an adolescent, back home in my bedroom with posters on my walls and my mom cooking dinner downstairs. (This feeling would be multiplied ten-fold that fall when, miraculously enough, Wainwright visited my college campus and I got to interview him at-length for our school paper. Rarely have I felt like so dithering an idiot.) He had adopted a signature look by then, which usually involved a flowing shirt and tight pants and an inspired collection of accessories, and against the leather pants and spiked hair and punked-out style of the Brian Eno devotees at the show, his persona still managed to stun. “Who,” I thought, in a turn of mind that occurs with the most besotted of admirers, “could wrong a person like this? Who could possibly break Rufus’s heart?” The sprawling “Evil Angel,” in which Wainwright recounts an aborted tryst with a lover who promptly disappears, seemed especially cruel. It seemed clear to me that anyone capable of treating him in such a manner was malignant indeed. The same sentiment defines “The Tower of Learning,” a wonderfully modulated piece of music that builds and builds until it practically shatters with longing and the disappointment of unrealized love.
Still a great deal of the allure of Poses derives not from what others to do Wainwright but what he does to himself. The album — and this would be true of the albums to follow it — is quick to admit that the person who breaks Wainwright’s heart is often Wainwright himself. In it he confesses to a fair share of hedonism and masochism; “cigarettes and chocolate milk” are not foisted upon Wainwright, but are willfully chosen by him. The title track continually trains its blame on the singer himself; he is his own cautionary tale. This was, self-reportedly, a time of much wanton drug use for Wainwright — he had written the album while staying in the Chelsea Hotel, so — and the album is the firmest craft of a poete maudit. (When Wainwright recasts the chorus of “Rebel Prince” in French, late in the song, he might as well be inscribing his name and a date on a copy of Rimbaud’s collected poems.)
One of the album’s most poignant moments occurs when Wainwright covers “One-Man Guy,” written by his father, Loudon Wainwright III. A brilliant (if borderline misanthropic) ode to living by one’s own rules and habits, it is remarkable not only for the way in which the younger Wainwright flips its sexuality for comedic effect but for the bookend it seems to create: here is a perfectly written song, via pere, that foreshadows all that is possible from Wainwright fils. When the tenderly rendered “In a Graveyard” follows suit a couple of tracks later, we yet again understand the surety with which the younger writer takes inspiration from the older. It is similarly rich yet reserved, and as with many songs on the album, it deals with mortality and other weighty matters so smartly that it reinforces the album’s status as a tool of catharsis and confession.
Take, for example, the deceptively buoyant “California.” Although Wainwright’s songwriting ability has been compared to that of Joni Mitchell, this song is decidedly the opposite, in spirit, to her song of the same title. The Sunshine State, in Wainwright’s view, is hardly “home” but a freon-fueled mess hall of vapid, self-conscious poseurs (sure). There’s hardly a more damning conclusion than “Life is the longest death in California,” but what a deliciously delivered pronouncement it is: Wainwright’s specialty is the beautiful pain behind the bruise. The song’s gift lies less in its misery than in the insidious glee of its tune. If New York brings out the brooding sweep of Wainwright’s voice and lyricism, then California shellacs his melancholy and shoves it out with a bright fuck-you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtuyzOxTfs8
There is the lovely but anxious movement of “Greek Song” (“I’m scared to death,” Wainwright proclaims), the percussive and insistent thrum of “Shadows,” the courtly love of “The Consort,” one of the album’s calmer moments. But the album’s title song is its most masterful and it captures from head to toe the self-absorption mixed with self-criticism that was the style among gay men at the time. It was the kind of song that you would play to yourself after stumbling home from Beige, the long-running gay party that finally met its end earlier this year: a gaggle of suited-and-booted, roving-eyed, antsy-yet-effete gays who could easily fit Wainwright’s profile of having no more grave matter than “comparing our new brand-name black sunglasses.” (Cole Porter comparisons abounded at this stage in Wainwright’s career, and this is a song quite worthy of them, as heartbreaking, aching and needy as Kiss Me, Kate’s “So in Love.”) It has a measured rhythm paired with lyrics as world-weary and contrite as they are tender. The song is sung as an apostrophe — “You said watch my head about it,” Wainwright sighs over each chorus — and the unidentified “you” of the song could, it seems, be a variety of people or things: friends, lovers, New York, desire, identity. The most touching moment occurs when Wainwright sings:, “Now no longer boyish / Made me a man / But who cares what that is.” I would have a hard time naming one of my gay friends who has not felt this interior struggle, this desire to slough off the demands of being a “strong man” while accepting his sexuality. At the same time, it does not capture only a queer sensibility. It is a song that could apply to many a fledgling New Yorker, struggling to reconcile superficial concerns with much deeper ones.
During that luxurious summer of 2001 — a far funner recession than the one preceding it and following it — the City teemed with a range of sexual options and experiences, and with that freedom came the accompanying doubts and sadnesses and worries. This is exactly the aura conveyed by the album’s cover. On it, Wainwright’s shiny coiffe of brown hair is both combed back and spilling forward; his features are so pronounced and his lips so dark as to be rouged. He hangs his head in profile, in apparently some mixture of remorse, shame and rumination. It is obviously a pose, but one with an earnest bearing to it. It’s perfect for an album that aims to address such a wide scope, an ambition that elevates it from being a collection of songs to being a social document. It is a break-up album and a coming-of-age album and a work of singer-songwriter angst and then some; it encompasses a vast landscape of feeling.
And what of New York? With the tumult-ridden year we’ve had, there’s a similar blend of melancholy and hopefulness these days. New York seems very much like the former Beale home that Wainwright recasts in “Grey Gardens”: it is a partly abandoned, partly occupied playground, gnarled and labyrinthine but possessed of a simultaneously diverting and unsettling atmosphere. The cliques of New York are as segmented as ever, but there also seems to be a shared sympathy about this, as if we are all aware that the scene is fraught but that we must be resilient. We’re like “Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk,” which not only begins Poses but ends it in a slightly peppier reprise. Wainwright was saying that every period has its challenging foil, that we exist between times of fulfillment and frustration. Put this album on and marvel at its still ferocious presence, its moments of clarity, apology, and romanticism. The deep in which it rolls, as it were, continues to stun.
Rakesh Satyal is the author of the Lambda Award-winning novel Blue Boy. He also sings a popular cabaret show in New York, an installment of which was “Roofies: The Songs of Rufus Wainwright and Fiona Apple.” Photo by Ben Beaumont-Thomas.
