“Oh my god, NO! Fuck yesss, AH! Werrrrk!!”
And so they wiggle their asses, with much gay abandon beneath the strobe lights. Brat just came on. What a sight, these queer friends of mine, their heads raised skyward and shrieking from the height of their little sparkly lungs.
I smile supportively and bounce on my toes, striving to compensate for the words I don’t know with my pearl necklace and emerald booty shorts. Goodness I look cute but god, please, kill me now. I am out of my depth. What is this song?
I think I heard it on a load of people’s Insta stories – like, maybe? – but how can they be word-perfect already? It came out less than a week ago!
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Welcome to the inside of my brain on just about any night in which I step inside a gay club. For all my glittery crop tops and rainbow-coloured sports socks, I still feel at least slightly out of place 80% of the time.
But I am actually there on my own free will, if you can believe that. For all my Philip Glass CDs and classical music tattoos – yes, really – I do quite like pop songs.
Granted, they need to be about thirty years old to be committed to memory, but the odd newbie does sneak in. I know all the words to Rush, for instance. That one slaps.
But the vast majority of Zoomer hits, the songs that pop off on TikTok and trickle their way down to my Facebook reels? Totally over my head.
Which is a problem for a mismatched kind of queer such as myself. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy time-tested classics from Madonna, Kylie, and the odd ABBA banger. But the majority of playlists in LGBTQ+ venues today are comprised of so many hits that come and go within a month, it’s hard to remember their names, let alone their lyrics.
“Literally, how have you not heard [artist / song / album]?”
Sure, some releases possess such universal sticking power as to transverse geography altogether – we, too, in the Australian winter experienced the rest of the world’s “brat summer” – but do we really need to take one more trip ’round the sun with that neon green album art bombarding every gay club from Footscray to Fitzroy?
This high emphasis placed on modern pop songs within gay spaces results in an isolating experience of cultural turnover. It’s just hard to keep up. As much as queer spaces are revered as arenas in which minority figures can express themselves as boldly as they wish, there is still a mild degree of conformity present.
In a way that you wouldn’t really think about – or even particularly notice – failing to belt out the lyrics to the new ‘it’ song can actually be grounds for your exclusion.
There have been more instances than I wish to remember in which I have been asked, exclusively in italics, “Literally, how have you not heard [artist / song / album]?” The indignance and intensity with which this query is raised is such that I feel as though my own homosexuality were being cast under doubt.
A solution, I would like to propose, is the shift away from chart-topping pop songs and more toward house music and EDM. The kind of high-tempo, finger-flicking techno beats that anyone can shake their ass to.
When everyone is jumping off the floor to one ecstatic quaver of pulsating dance music, it has the potential of unifying the entire room. Without the risk of embarrassment that comes from cringing your way through a chorus that everyone around you seems to have committed to heart, you can just close your eyes and weave your hips through the hot neon air.
There is no language to house music other than that of harmonising your movement to the energy and dimensions of those fluorescent vibrations which detonate against the walls and off the ceiling. It is a genre of fantastic sound languaged by the swaying wrists and sweat-dampened hair of the bodies transported by its wordless, frenetic wonder.
The hardest nights out, and the ones in which I have returned home with the most endorphins prancing inside my skull, have been those soundtracked with two-hour DJ sets that scarcely featured more than two dozen words.
Beyond the weird, distancing conformity of learning candy-wrapper pop lyrics about guessing the colour of someone’s underwear, that is where we find the dancefloors democratised by EDM.
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