November 23, 2021 1:33 PM
Reading Sasha Geffen’s book, Glitter up the dark – How pop music broke the binary (“Sprinkle the dark with glitter – How pop music broke the binary”) I was struck by an absence. In his documented history of the queer spirit in pop music, from the Beatles to Generation Z, Geffen leaves out an important name, that of Carole Pope, an openly and proudly lesbian Canadian post punk rocker since the mid-seventies.
Pope was born in Manchester, UK in 1950 but moved to Montreal, Canada with her family at the age of five. His father, Jack, was a merchant and also a circus wader and his mother, Celia, was a music hall singer. Sister Elaine has become known as a television producer and author (she won an Emmy award as co-author of the sitcom Seinfeld).
In 1970 Carole Pope met Kevan Staples with whom she founded her first rock band, the O, who soon changed their name to The Bullwhip Brothers, a first clear indication of the homoerotic and bdsm direction that the lyrics would take. of their songs.
In 1975 Pope gathers other musicians around this nucleus and forms Rough Trade. Another unmistakable name for those who had ears to hear: in old British gay slang the expression rough trade indicates a young heterosexual man, often a laborer or laborer, who agrees to be sexually satisfied by submissive homosexuals who pay to be humiliated. We are in the middle of the protopunk era and, albeit in distant Canada, Carole Pope smells in the air the fascination for the gay bdsm scene (leather, studs and whips), which was breathed in London in Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s Soho. Their boutique at 430 Kings road was called SEX and advertised early punk fanzines as “Specialists in rubberware, glamorware and stageware”, specialists in latex outfits, glam wear and stage costumes. Siouxsie Sioux made famous in those years a Westwood t-shirt that showed two naked cowboys in profile, facing each other, with their big penises almost touching. An image the British designer took from a 1960s illustration by Jim French, the co-founder of the Colt Studios gay porn empire.
Homoeroticism, pornography and gay slang are mostly an easy way to shock the public for London punks. For Rough Trade by Carole Pope and Kevan Staples they are the very fuel of imagination and music. Their purpose is also to scandalize, but instead of using certain words or certain images as stones to be thrown and then hiding the hand, they elaborate a complex poetics of fetish and sadomasochism that decline in a decidedly Camp sense. Theirs is not a brick thrown into a window, theirs is theater. And in this sense they are much more linked to the season of glam rock Than overseas punks were, they are more Ziggy Stardust and Rocky Horror Picture Show than Sex Pistols or Banshees.
And it is in 1980, with dead and buried punk, that Rough Trade’s pornotrash aesthetic comes to maturity and, incredibly, a radio hit arrives for them.
High school confidential is the first pop song with a lesbian lyrics to be played on English-speaking radios and to finish in the charts.
As is often the case with pop products born from queer subcultures, High school confidential (nothing to do with the Jerry Lee Lewis piece of the same name) is a ciphertext. To any listener, the song might have seemed sung by Carole Pope from a male perspective: she describes herself as a sexy and very casual high school girl, “a cross between Mamie Van Doren, Anita Ekberg and Dagmar” who drives her peers crazy and who (perhaps) he does it with the principal. The scene looks like that of a dirty comic, a setting and language that a young straight listener might find funny and a little hot. In reality, it is enough to listen to Pope’s hoarse and very expressive voice to understand that it is a woman who describes her sexual attraction for another young woman, this “cool, blonde, scheming bitch” (this very cool, intriguing and very bitch) that makes high heels ringing along the corridors of the school. The narrator of the song, the observer of the scene, reaches an obsessive erotic level of detail: she recognizes her perfume (“Tigress by Fabergé”) and says that just hearing it makes her jeans wet.
The unexpected success of High school confidential leaves a mark in Canadian pop and queer culture: lesbian singer-songwriter kd lang said that after seeing Carole Pope perform she realized that in rock there could be room for her too. And Toronto electro-rocker Merrill Nisker (later known as a polysexual performer by the name of Peaches) recorded a cover of High school confidential on his 1985 debut album, Fancypants hoodlum.
High school confidential was included on an album worth rediscovering: Avoid Freud (“Avoid Freud”, which rhymes perfectly in English), a title that would have liked the old Cole Porter, patron saint of the Camp song with multiple levels of reading.
The taste for the play on words, for the quotation, for the witty double meaning and for the short circuit between high and very low, is the basis of all the songs of Avoid Freud.
What’s the furor about the Führer? it is half a mockery of the old punks’ passion for Nazi iconography and half a political song about the danger of the new Nazisms. Lie back, let me do everything e Physical violence are two complementary songs with a strong bdsm flavor. In the first, the narrator of the song, “a played boxer, with his hair combed back like a Latin” describes himself as a submissive part when in a club he hears a persuasive voice (“that tastes like beer and mouthwash”) tell her in the ear: “Lie down and let me do everything, I want to get lost inside you”. In Physical violence instead the protagonist is fed up with the sadomasochistic game and being used as a gym bag: “I raise the white flag, go take a cold shower”, she sings: “I give up but enough physical violence”. And again: “I can understand that you have a floppy ego but I am not your ashtray”.
The real Camp masterpiece, however, is the song that closes the album, Grade B movie which, as the title promises, is a silly B-movie in miniature. Here the scene is a melodramatic caricature of heterosexuality, a heterosexuality of a secondhand film. He, cigarette between his lips, white shirt open on his broad tanned chest and she is virginal, trembling, her lips moist and full of desire. “When you look at me,” Carole Pope sings, “it’s like any B movie. I sigh: ‘Hi Johnny’. You tear off my dress and I’m under you moaning: ‘Oh Johnny, don’t stop, not now.’
It is the theater of stereotypes, a party game, a final revelation that tells us that we all play a part under the sheets. The important thing is just to find the part that suits us.
Rough Trade
Avoid Freud
True North Records, 1980
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