Sex on Wax

Pop music, for all of its boundless depth and breadth, is generally about one thing: love. And as much as you might love your cat, your grandma, your vibrator, your liberty, your deity, or your own body, singing about any of these isn't likely to land you a hit record. For whatever reason, the least common denominator of mass communication seems to be romantic love. For most people romantic love has a great deal to do with gender and sexuality, so it makes perfect sense that if a man sings a love song originally performed by a woman he switches the pronouns around. Or does it? What exactly is the motivation here? Maybe it's out of consideration for the singer's identity, as it would be far too strange to hear a straight man professing his love for a him. Homophobia aside, he simply wouldn't be able to deliver the song with appropriate passion.

Well, no, that doesn't seem quite accurate. Here we have two famously gay men interpreting Dionne Warwick, with all of the pronouns feminized. It's absolutely dreadful, but not lacking in vocal passion.

Luther Vandross & Elton John - Anyone Who Had a Heart

What it does lack is recognition of the singers' real-life identities and desires. We have to conclude then that the motivation for changing the lyrics is the comfort of the audience, not the performers, and at this point homophobia seems difficult to rule out. This shouldn't come as any big surprise; if the masses are heterosexist then any media crafted for them will reflect that for the sake of sales. A more nefarious version of the story describes mass media as a tool of a powerful ideological minority imposing their homophobia on an otherwise indifferent public. Either way, this phenomenon has a historical point of origin. That is, this pronoun-switching business wasn't always the industry standard.

Here are just a few of many many examples of songs from the early 20th century that don't quite fit into the hetero-sexualizing paradigm described above.

1904 - J. W. Myers - Come Take a Trip in my Airship
I've only ever heard this song performed by men; Billy Murray and Dan W. Quinn both recorded it in 1905. All three versions describe falling in love with a male sailor who takes the narrator on aeronautical voyages through the heavens.

1905 - Franklyn Wallace - How'd You Like to Spoon with Me?

"In all my life I've never kissed a man,
I've never winked my eye.
But now at last I'm going to break the ice,
So how'd you like to try?"

1907 - Ada Jones - My Irish Rosie
In one of Jones' many Irish-themed tunes, she coaxes a young lass to come spoon with her.

1919 - Campbell & Burr - My Sugar-Coated Chocolate Boy
I'm sad that I couldn't find an easy way to share this recording with you online. While there are dozens and dozens of "coon songs" in which white men singers impersonate black women characters to extremely pejorative effect, this is possibly the first anti-racist song cut to wax. Albert Campbell and Henry Burr sing, with no affectation whatsoever, from the perspective of a black mother consoling her son. Lyrics by J. F. Mahoney:

"Honey, don't cry if they don't play with you.
It breaks my heart to see you pine, baby mine, baby mine.
You know the good Lord loves the darkies, too.
He draws no color line."

1927 - Annette Hanshaw - If You See Sally
This trend continued into the jazz age, even with prominent performers like Hanshaw and lyricists like Gus Kahn.

1927 - Irving Kaufman - The Man I Love
A literally gay (cheerful!) foxtrot version of this normally melancholic masterpiece from the brothers Gershwin .

193? - Wilmoth Houdini - I Need a Man
Houdini sings as both himself and a female suitor in this red hot calypso. With this example in particular we can hear how singers were able to portray multiple dramatic roles in music without being tied down by their own identities or even their voices.

"I need a man, I need a man,
But I don't want no good-looking man.
I need a man, that'll work and support me,
A man I can understand.
I need a man that'll love and caress me,
But not a second hand man."

What in the world is going on here? Do all of these songs have gay subtexts? Was the world a far more tolerant place prior to WWII? Or was homosexuality just so taboo that any queer reading of these songs would have been inconceivable?

All of these hypotheses have potential partial truth to them, but instead of considering how society has changed its relationship with queerness, we might consider how we have changed our relationship with pop music. Billy Murray exemplifies the old ways of the music industry: he recorded a version of practically every hit song for dozens of record labels from 1902 through the '30s. In the same way that you might select between competing brands of toilet paper today, a turn-of-the-century record store might offer up to a dozen different versions of the same song (and quite possibly half of them would feature Murray). The singer's own persona was displaced by that of the song, and as such the vocalist played a more flexible, histrionic part in the creation of music; consider the "trouser roles" in opera and traditionally all-male casts in English and Japanese theater. The commodification of singers as product-personalities, starting with the superstardom Al Jolson and disseminated by radio, movies, and later television, took the focus away from songs (and songwriters, bandleaders, and instrumentalists) and placed it squarely on the faces of this new generation of singers. Suddenly the personal lives of these celebrities became important consumer information, and we can imagine that record labels began to feel responsible for grooming their stars for the public eye. Rumors of sexual impropriety could sink even a well-established career, so any sexual ambiguity in song lyrics (not to mention the singers themselves) was necessarily censored.

At OCR we don't take kindly to censorship or heterosexism, and we value the integrity of art as it was originally conceived. If you still need to get that bad taste from Luther and Elton out of your ears, here's a more faithful cover from our very own Tomi.