Gay-themed Songs Add Fresh Flavors To Hip Hop, Country
In my youth I was such an ardent fan of pop music that you could play the opening three bars to any song from Billboard magazine’s Top 40 charts (circa 1956 to 1980), and I could recite its title, performer, and the color of the record label that released it. But, as happens to most of us as we get older, I gradually became less enamored by the hits du jour. After all, since most music is downloaded electronically nowadays, the fun of memorizing label color is gone for good.
I’ve even been known to tell younger people something similar to what my father used to say about rock ‘n roll: In the current vernacular, “Your music sucks.”
There are notable exceptions, however, and leading the list right now is one of the summer’s biggest hits, “Same Love” by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis with Mary Lambert. The song is remarkable in many ways. It is a hauntingly beautiful hip hop ballad that challenges bias in its musical genre and calls for gay rights and marriage equality. What’s more it is performed by a straight, white rap artist who has no major-label record contract and was previously best known for a novelty rap song “Thrift Shop.”
I can’t say I was among the first to discover “Same Love.” In fact, I heard it for the first (second and third) time only days ago when its profound lyrics—enunciated surprisingly clearly —leapt from the speakers of my car radio:
If I was gay I would think hip hop hates me…
‘Man, that’s gay’ gets dropped on the daily
We’ve become so numb to what we’re saying
Our culture founded from oppression
Yet we don’t have acceptance for ‘em
Call each other faggots
Behind the keys of a message board
A word rooted in hate
Yet our genre still ignores it.
To give the song additional depth, writer-singer Macklemore (real name Ben Haggerty) and producer Lewis recruited openly lesbian singer Mary Lambert to provide a lullaby-like refrain:
And I can’t change
Even if I tried
Even if I wanted to
My love, my love, my love
She keeps me warm.
To hear those lyrics on a Top 40 station stunned me, and I was even more surprised when Ryan Seacrest declared “Same Love” the second most requested song in America. (It has been in the top 20 for several weeks and has even made the rap chart’s top 5.)
In the song, Macklemore links abusive language in hip hop to the bullying of gay young people, and he criticizes religious leaders who oppose same-sex marriage. He ends with an outright call for marriage equality: “I might not be the same but that’s not important. No freedom till we’re equal/ Damn right I support it.”
Pop music’s attitude toward LGBT people has certainly come a long way since the days when The Kinks’ “Lola” and David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel (You’ve Torn Your Dress)” made wink-wink statements about their singers’ sexual orientation. More recently, Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” in 2011 became an out-loud anthem for taking pride in one’s sexuality and gender identity. And last year rhythm and blues balladeer Frank Ocean won accolades for his album of male-male love songs, Channel Orange.
But “Same Love” is something even bigger, as it directly addresses the issue of gay equality within the traditionally conservative hip-hop community while playing to a huge audience of teenage pop music fans of all races.
Macklemore says he wrote “Same Love” to support his two gay uncles and gay godfather and because he remembers (as the lyrics describe) how he struggled as a teenager with thoughts that he might be gay; he knew how difficult it would have been for him to deal with such a reality. He penned and recorded the song last year, and it quickly became a popular anthem in the successful drive for marriage equality in his home state of Washington.
The song is available on CD as part of Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’ first independently released album, The Heist, and was issued as a single in June at the urging of a Denver disc jockey. The rest, as they say, is history, with “Same Love” having accumulated more than 50 million views on YouTube and selling over one million copies domestically.
Another young artist who has soared seemingly out of nowhere into the musical stratosphere is openly gay singer-songwriter Steve Grand, whose music video “All-American Boy” went viral within days of its release last month and has since garnered nearly 2-million views on YouTube.
The story is a classic tale of flirtation and unrequited love —the kind of material pop songs have focused on forever. But this time the protagonist (played by Grand) is a strapping young man who is drawn to another beefy guy as a group of friends gather around a campfire. Perceiving (or hoping for) a mutual flirtation, Grand wanders off with his intended, and the two go skinny dipping—during which they share a brief kiss. There is refreshingly little awkwardness in the moment. Even though the straight guy returns to his girlfriend, he smiles and shrugs to Grand as if to say they can still be friends.
As Grand sings it, “He smiles, his arms around her/ But his eyes are holdin’ me, just a captive to his wonder.”
It’s the kind of dreamy, wistful fantasy to which millions of gay men can relate, even though there’s no fairy tale ending. The story does allow both men to keep their dignity, and for the singer there remains hope that his next All-American boy will be the one.
Grand, a 23-year-old bar singer from Chicago whose parents had sent him to therapy as a teenager to try to cure his homosexuality, financed his professionally produced video with his minimal life savings of $2,500, recruiting friends in the industry to assist him. (A brief stint as a swimwear model several years earlier made him no money, he notes.) Having sung mostly covers of pop hits by artists like Billy Joel and Paul McCartney in his club appearances, Grand initially was terrified to launch such an upfront, out-of-the-closet song and film, but he knew he had to do it.
As he posted on his Facebook page the day the video and single became available, “I’m nervous/excited/horrified/anxious about the implications all of the choices I am making (and have made throughout my journey of discovering myself as a man and as an artist) will have on my future. But then I remind myself I never really had a choice. This is the story I’ve been aching to tell most of my life... I fought with who I was for most of my life… But starting today I’m laying it out there. I’m done playing it safe… I don’t believe the world sees change until it sees honesty.”
Steve’s honesty is taking him far, including appearances on Good Morning America and CNN, as well as interest from record labels and managers. He is trying to take his newfound celebrity responsibly and he jokes about the status the media has awarded him, especially statements that he is America’s first openly gay country star.
“There’s a lot of things wrong with that statement,” Grand said in an interview with BoyCulture.com. “I didn’t set out to be the first of anything. I just wrote a song that I really believed in and that I wanted the world to hear. There’ve been people who’ve been out in country music before me, like Drake Jensen and Chely Wright and k.d. lang. …But I do appreciate the media that picked this up because I had no means of promotion, so I certainly have no ill will to any press that said that. And I’m not a star! [Laughs] I have one video... I’m so grateful that it’s reached so many people so quickly, but more so, I’m grateful for the people who’ve reached out to me and are putting their trust in me.”
Like Macklemore, Steve Grand has a lot of new friends this summer.