Adam Lambert: The Envelope Pushes Back

 

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The lights go down and it’s just you up there

Getting them to feel like that

-Joni Mitchell

 

Eeeeya.  I find it so freaking fascinating to watch celebrity unfurl.  Adam Lambert is my reward for enduring what is, for the most part, the tedium of American Idol.  I get to be in on the process – in on an emergence. 

 

I love this voice.  His singing voice is so beautiful – the tonal range, the emotional range, the genre range.  His voice feels good on my skin.  I also love the voice of who he is.  He’s dealing with the ramifications of becoming one fulcrum of the culture wars with considerable grace. 

 

My readers (that sounds good, doesn’t it?) know that I’m a slavish Adam fan.  More on the slave part later but suffice it to say I’m wearing through the 1’s and 0’s on the new album, following Adam’s Twitter, have a subscription to Adamofficial.com and have been combing the web for interviews.  Don’t miss Michelle Collins from VH1.  Her Adam interviews are fresh, fast, witty – the perfect wannabe BFF.  Other great pieces: Ken Tucker (music critic often heard on NPR’s Fresh Air) and his colleague Michael Slezak who actually manages to ask Adam some interesting questions.  Which is a good thing cause pabulum questions ring particularly dumb on this highly aware person. 

 

The American Music Awards (AMAs) firestorm has created the perfect moment to check in.  The living-under-a-rock recap:  Adam got a position of major honor on the AMAs – the music industry promotional extravaganza that was carried by ABC November 22.  He performed the title track from his new release, For Your Entertainment, and in the spirit of the BDSM flavored lyrics, dragged and groped dancers and led them around on leashes.  What he did that was unrehearsed was to grab a couple of dancer’s heads and hold them briefly to his crotch.  The “simulated fellatio” that got all the blow-by (haha) was (not surprisingly) the male dancer’s head.  After an unplanned tumble (which he likened to feeling like a cockroach after being sprayed) and a tuck and roll (nice aikido, Adam!) he proceeded to lay an aggressive holding-the-back-of-your-head make-out on a male band member (who is straight but was not offended and had invited Adam to grab his hair.)  Adam wound up the performance with a middle finger to the camera.  I’d include a link here but Dick Clark Productions got all the clips pulled.

 

The next day Adam’s appearance on ABC’s Good Morning America was canceled but he was picked up by CBS’s The Early Show.  Lots of kerfuffle ensued including intervention by GLAAD (The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation).  Album sales have been brisk (though less than one-third of the music industry’s largest debut  week to date by Susan Boyle.)   A right wing group has filed a complaint with the FCC with the intent to have ABC fined for showing “filth and indecency” on broadcast TV.  Adam performed at 10:55 pm, long after the 10 pm cutoff for children watching.  The FCC complaint is based on a 9:55 pm time in the Central time zone.  As I learned after Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” at the super-bowl some years ago, FCC fines are no trivial matter.  They can fine every affiliate that carries a show and it can run millions.  ABC has cancelled other upcoming gigs but Adam still appeared on Barbara Walters Ten Most Fascinating People of 2009 on December 9.  Lest we celebrate too much, Glenn Beck was also included.   

 

The other major Adam conversation has been around his degree of suitability as a gay role model.  Adam appeared in a group shot on the cover of Out magazine (the “Out 100”) – Out apparently wanted him solo.  Out’s editor Aaron Hinklin then proceeded to publicly grouse about Adam’s not appearing solo or soon enough on Out and also the heterosexy spread Adam did for Details.  Apparently, one of Adam’s managers asked that Adam not be portrayed as “too gay” in the Out piece. 

 

Whew.  Not bad for the first post-Idol month in the public.  Adam has been surprisingly adroit in addressing his critics in a way that is both nuanced and non-defensive.  On the Ellen DeGeneres show he admitted that on the AMAs he went a bit too far for a first post-Idol impression and understood that ABC would be somewhat taken aback by material that the didn’t see in rehearsal and that got them hot water with the FCC. Adam says that adrenaline and competitiveness go the best of him after watching AMA acts he admired.  In interviews Adam also takes Out’s Editor Aaron Hinklin to task for setting gay rights “back a few steps” in not allowing him his freedom to be politically responsible or not as he chooses.  As Adam explained in extensive MTV interview,  the AMAs middle finger was in part for Hinklin.  More on that.  Ah, so juicy. 

 

Here’s where I want to dig around: the actual performance, the album, the sexual politics and all the wonderful and fragrant combinations of ”we-spaces” and how they lie writhing around in my particular interior.  What are “we-spaces”?  A we-space is the unique energy, communication and understanding of any group of people, from a group of two to millions.  In Adams emergence as a celebrity, there is a lot to unpack: the messages around Adam, the “meta” information – that is the information about the messages telling us what kind of messages they are – and the implications for Adam, and for culture and politics.  And, not insignificantly, all these are filtered through my perspective and experience. 

 

Before Idol, Adam Lambert was a talented singer with a part in the touring company of Wicked.  The people on whom he had an intense impact were people with whom, for the most part, he had personal interaction.  And then celebrity happened and fairly suddenly millions of people (myself included) feel an investment in him.  In each of the we-spaces that we feel a part of, we’re using what we can touch of him to make meaning and that meaning is an irreducible combination of him and us.  For the right wing group that filed the FCC complaint, that meaning has to do with “indecency and filth” and the possibility that Adam’s charisma will lend itself to the furthering gay rights.  That is a not an unreasonable – it’s why he’s on the cover of Out magazine. 

 

For the we-space of Adam and his devotees, much meaning is around defending his freedom to be artistic in the way he chooses, regardless of politics.  Adam is commanding tremendous public mindshare: the reverberations of all this meaning-making layer and collide.  That is the power of celebrity and one of the many prices of fame.  So Adam’s Twitters that it’s “not that deep” are a little lame: of course it’s not that deep for the individual artist.  But when that artist starts meriting mindshare, it’s deep for various we-spaces in various ways.  If Adam went a little over the top lewd in a club years ago, there were few reverberations.  Now there are. 

 

Adam hopes that those who don’t like him will “turn their attention elsewhere.”  That’s like Jane Fonda hoping that those supported the war in Vietnam would not try to suppress her famous voice.  Her art was pretty much inextricable from her politics.  When Adam sings, “there he goes, my baby walks so slow...sexual!” it’s political.  His comfort with his homosexuality is hard-won; it’s the result of explicitly political work.  Gay politics has been crucial to his having a space to be a mainstream artist.  In turn, his art defines a space within the cultural dialog surrounding gay politics.  The chances that those who oppose gay rights will turn “turn their attention elsewhere” are low.

 

What about the actual performance?  It wasn’t Adam’s best art, a fact he’s humbly acknowledged.  The slight irony is that the controversy around Adam at the AMAs diverted attention from an uncharacteristically weak theatrical performance and vocal (the only time I’ve ever heard Adam off key) probably saving him from getting royally slammed by the critics. 

 

A few of the songs on Adam’s debut album read as a dialog with his audience.  The title single, For Your Entertainment is a double entendre that compares BDSM with the control Adam takes of his fans for their arousal. 

 

Oooh, do you know what you got into

Can you handle what I’m ‘bout to do?

‘Cause it’s about to get rough for you

I’m here for your entertainment

 

Oooh, I bet you thought that I was soft and sweet

Your fallen angel swept ya off your feet

Well I’m about to turn up the heat

I’m here for your entertainment.

 

Unfortunately, at the AMAs, one of the entendres got lost.  The song is about sex and control of the audience but the performance was only about sex.  If there’s anything a BDSM “master of pleasure and pain” must do is control space, energy and attention.  The number had too many dancers, too much movement and too much groping for Adam to control the visual focus.  The music video of this song hits both entendres perfectly.  When, on the video, Adam pops an eyebrow at the camera and sings, “once I’m in I own your heart,” he does. 

 

Excuse a slight digression here on public references to and depictions of coercive sex.  There is a crucial dynamic in BDSM between acts of bondage, dominance and sado-masochism and a meta environment of performance and play.  In a meta context of respect, limits and safety, consensual participants can experience the arousal of coercion. 

 

When a broad audience is exposed to arousing messages about coercive sex there is justifiable concern.  A broad audience, almost by definition, implies a continuum from people who would never coerce sex regardless of arousing cultural messages to people who would act out their brutal impulses without any arousing images of sexual coercion in the culture.  In between these extremes are people who may allow themselves to act out impulses to coerce sex because their cultural context is making these look acceptable or even cool.  Here it is the meta message that is even more critical than what is depicted.  The rape in the 1988 film The Accused starring Jodie Foster gives a meta message of horror and pain rather than arousal, inviting the audience to identify with Jodie rather than her attackers.  The rape in the 1971 Stanley Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange invites the audience to identify with the rapist and to see rape as an act of individual freedom and rebellion against an oppressive state. 

 

Richmond, California is still reeling from the two and a half hour gang rape of a fifteen year old girl at a high school homecoming by at least ten men during which at least ten to twenty others stood by, laughed, took pictures and came and went from the scene.  It would be naïve in the extreme to suppose that complex cultural messages don’t contribute to brutal behavior.  An incident like this – with so many participants and so many witnesses – reminds us that sexual predation is more than just individual pathology. 

 

Eminem also sang on the AMAs, announcing himself as

 

Ooww Ladies and gentlemen
The moment you’ve all been waiting for ..
In this corner : weighing 175 pounds,
with a record of 17 rapes, 400 assaults, and 4 murders,
the undisputed, most diabolic villain in the world :
Slim Shady!

 

Eminem may be naming Slim Shady as a villain but the clear meta message is that this villain is a cool and rebellious rap boy.  Naming Slim Shady as a villain almost gives Eminem deniability; he can say that he is not condoning rape, assault and murder while still, at a meta level, inviting identification with brutality.  This is a huge concern when presented to a mass audience. 

 

The meta message of For Your Entertainment is clearly about consensual play (although I’ll register an objection to the lyric, “there’s no way to ring the alarm/so hold on until it’s over.”)  But the difference between the AMA performance and the video allows us to look at how delicate meta messaging can be.  What is so clearly play and performance in the For Your Entertainment video got dampered down in the forced and frenetic AMAs performance making it just the teeniest bit creepy in a very un-Adamish way; it became a little bit more like real – not play – coercion.   

 

Watching the meta message also helps us unpack the tension between Out magazine’s editor Aaron Hinklin and Adam.  If a representative of Adam’s management did in fact ask that Adam not be portrayed as “too gay”, we can understand why Hinklin bristled.  It is precisely a homosexual’s right to be authentically homosexual that everyone in the gay rights movement has worked so long and hard for and it is why we are rooting so loudly for Adam.  When a manager or a publicist seems to undermine that authenticity, the gay rights community will send up an understandable howl and feel a resonance of Rock Hudson.

 

For Adam, though, what’s the use of the gay rights movement if he doesn’t get to be any way he wants to be?  If he’s held to a standard of gayness doesn’t that defeat the freedom the rights movement has ostensibly built for him?  It’s like Wanda Sykes joking that Barack Obama’s being president allows her, as an African-American in the public eye, to be able to relax a little and not be so constantly on good behavior because “white people are watching you!”  Once a marginalized population starts achieving the mainstream, there’s room for a breadth of behavior with less risk of stereotyping. 

 

But I think Hinklin underestimates the power of the context – the meta environment.  Adam’s management’s comment was in the context of a mainstream star who has been unequivocal in his statement of sexual preference, even refusing to hide behind bisexuality when confronted with his willingness to occasionally make out with a girl.  The Barbara Walters special commercial even used Adam saying, “I’m a homosexual.  You better deal with it” as a sound bite.

 

So when Adam does a truly beautiful and erotic spread (why does writing about sex make everything a double entendre?) in Details with a woman it is, again, in a context of his very public stance asserting his sexual preference.  Adam said there was one word to describe the photos – “heterosexual.”  Which, in itself, is interesting but heterosexuality – being the dominant and default modality – rarely gets named or called out.  The photos invite us to a dissonance that, in my opinion, furthers gay awareness by creating a confict between the heterosexual message and the meta message of Adam’s homosexuality.  The further meta message of that gorgeous photo series is, to me, what Adam has so wonderfully called the universality of sexiness; that eros and arousal don’t necessarily mean sex in the Clinton-esque sense. 

 

In the protest against Adam’s censure, many (including Adam) point to a “double standard” wherein Madonna’s kissing Britney Spears could be shown on TV where Adam’s kiss was pixilated.  I agree with the political strategy of pointing this out but I’m not the tiniest bit surprised at the different reactions.  As Adam has pointed out, gay men have been portrayed on TV as very safe and asexual (note Queer Eye and a pretty sexually suppressed Will on Will & Grace.)  But more than that the meta context of Britney and Madonna is that they are well known to be (at least partially) straight.  That straight men find sexual interactions between women (always women who look and act straight) so erotic and unthreatening is a testament to their assumption of heterosexual dominance.   Saturday Night Live’s Wayne’s World did a hilarious take on this. Wayne and Garth were eager for a video of some girl-on-girl action.  When the video turns out to be real lesbians, Wayne and Garth do a long “eeeeeuuuuwww!”  Straight women kissing don’t threaten heterosexual dominance; gay men kissing do.  The double standard isn’t about homosexuality per se; it’s about homosexuality that is liberated from the dominance of heterosexuality.

 

All of the controversy is making the For Your Entertainment album more complex and interesting to me. I find it particularly satisfying in that it seems to deepen and reveal Adam, despite the fact that most of the songs were contributed by industry heavyweights.  These songs are his choices and he’s a co-writer on four of them.  The album is not Thriller or Born to Run – seminal albums on which every song is amazing – but Adam did a good job of pleasing the breadth of his fans from dance/club to rock to power ballads to his signature wailing to the emotional vulnerability that I love.  The fear for Adam’s debut was that overproduction would make that gorgeous voice untouchable.  That is partially true.  The heavy synthesizer sound seems appropriate for the dance tracks but a lighter touch would have been better, in my opinion, on the more emotional material.  My favorite track on the album is the song I believe Adam was most active in writing: Broken Open.  It’s sweet, sad and poignant (if not grammatical; there’s the ubiquitous lay/lie error lying – not laying – smack in the middle of the lyrics.)   In a pop world that’s mostly about as original as a suburban mall Chili’s, the song is a haunting one about supporting a loved one through emotional upheaval.  Also a standout for me is another dialog with the audience song contributed by Pink, Whataya Want From Me? Adam is singing this one on various TV shows displaying his emotional vulnerability and safe-enough-for-kids side.  Buy For Your Entertainment.  It’s well worth it.

 

So, yeah, I continue to be drawn to Adam’s development and I continue to root loudly for him.  And I’ve often pondered (since my love of John Lennon days) the real meaning of this odd thing that is celebrity love.  I do feel a kind of love and I think he must also feel a kind of love for his fans – this anonymous we-space that is allowing him to finally make a grand living as a singer.  But what really arouses such strong feeling?  Why can we feel something from a song, in an audience, that is sweet in its own way and so different from what we feel with lovers, friends or family?  And performers have been notorious for expressing depth and vulnerability with an audience that they may find difficult with those close up.  Is it the anonymity itself that allows us that special emotional space?  Our knowledge that we can experience what we experience without accountability?  What an odd thing it is – a kind of anonymous presence. 

 

So, yeah, I’ve still got my middle-aged woman crush on my Adam.  He’s theorized that middle-aged women love him because they remember the feeling of 70’s rock.  Nope, that’s not it at all for me.  I wonder if this crush is related to that deep and strangely intimate bond between straight women and gay men.  Gay men are also legendary in their devotion to powerful straight women stars such as Madonna, Barbra Streisand, Cher and Bette Midler.  Interestingly, the gay man/lesbian woman friendship seems way less…how to say it…ferocious.  Maybe it is that in a context where male heterosexual sexuality is the paradigm of sexuality itself, both gay men and powerful women bond over their mutual marginalization in the way they erotically relate to men.   

 

Maybe it’s the implication of erotic flexibility that arouses both strong women and gay men; the possibility of exchanging power and playing with roles and dominance.  I’ve always been pretty turned off by the 70’s Led Zeppelin version of “Whole Lotta Love.”  But from the mouth of a gay man, (one stroking his microphone stand), the suggestion that he be my “back door man” feels, meta message wise, way more consensual, less dominating, more playful and, frankly, way more erotic.    

 

So Adam, you go.  We’re with you.  I have to admit to being a little worried about the possibilities for his love life.  To experience a deeply satisfying love he’ll likely need a boyfriend who’s highly complex and sophisticated and aware and vulnerable and they’re few and far between.

 

Adam, I hope you find your Yoko.

 

 

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