He is the nuclear family’s worst nightmare, a sick gay artist parading himself through the straight world unashamed.Īfter releasing his third album, Too Bright, in 2014, Perfume Genius appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman to perform Queen. “No family is safe when I sashay.” The rock instrumentation nods to a vision of normative masculinity, but Hadreas’s voice undoes it.
“Don’t you know your queen? / Cracked / Peeling / Riddled with disease,” he taunts. It’s not exactly a pride song in celebrating himself as a gender nonconforming sexual other, Hadreas explicitly names the straight world’s fears. Catchy and assertive, Queen grapples with the uneasy position of living visibly queer in a world that’s not always eager to accept deviations from the heterosexual norm. In 2014, Perfume Genius released the full-band pop single Queen, a song that would expose Hadreas’s music to an increasing number of listeners. They proved an excellent musical match, and while playing Hadreas’s songs together, they also fell in love. He enlisted help from Alan Wyffels, a friend who had taken Hadreas to AA meetings in the early days of his recovery. The album was quietly popular and Hadreas soon had to figure out how to tour his new songs. He wrote Learning, a raw collection written on piano, while living with his parents and in recovery from drug addiction. In 2010, the Seattle songwriter Mike Hadreas released his debut LP under the name Perfume Genius.
Communication didn’t depend on the presence of the physical body, and even the voice was no longer necessary to speak instantaneously to another person in a different town or a different continent, which was useful if you were trans and still literally finding a voice that felt right in your throat.Īgainst this cultural backdrop, an increasing number of musicians have begun to make work that unstitches the gendered body from its usual schematic of meaning. Trans kids no longer had to move to New York or San Francisco to speak with others like them they could use Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and YouTube to find community. I n the 21st century, the proliferation of internet-equipped consumer electronics enabled a new generation of gender nonconformists to communicate across any distance.
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