Pride
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There’s a question Joy Oladokun often finds herself asking when thinking about her career: “If Nina Simone had the internet, what would she do with that?” she ponders. “Like, what sort of Mavis Staples-meets-Azealia Banks tweets would we have gotten from her?”
The High Priestess of Soul is far from the only artist the folk–pop artists finds herself ruminating on: throughout her conversation with Billboard, Oladokun drops names ranging from Big Mama Thornton to Paul McCartney to Big Freedia. But the artists she often finds herself thinking about, she says, are the ones whose names she doesn’t know.
“I think a lot of my music comes from a place of knowing that not all Black queer people got to live this long or get this far,” she explains. “It feels like I’m fighting with both the idea of progress, the reality of progress and the cost of it.”
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A career’s worth of those feelings come roaring out on Oladokun’s stunning new album Observations From a Crowded Room (out today via Amigo Records). Written and produced by Oladokun in the 15 months since her 2023 LP Proof of Life, the new record sees the singer-songwriter wrestling with her current place in the music industry and the world at large. Employing electronic flourishes to accentuate her pointed songwriting, Oladokun examines why it seems that social advancement in the music industry is always two steps forward, one step back.
The idea for the record started after a whirlwind of touring in 2023 — after running through the summer festival circuit and performing as an opening act for John Mayer and Noah Kahan’s tours, Oladokun found herself at the end of a grueling schedule, sitting by a river with her guitar somewhere in Oregon.
“I was on mushrooms,” she giggles. “I was having an emotionally hard time, then. And when the shrooms hit, I saw this moose — and right there, I just wrote the first song on the album.”
That song, “Letter From a Blackbird,” provides the central argument for the album within its first minute. “These days I sure regret how much of me that I have given/ I feel my patience running out, I hear the water sing to me,” she sings, accompanied only by a vocoder chorus of her own vocals. “Blackbird: what did you think you’d run into out here in the wild?”
Throughout the record, Oladokun contends with managing the expectations of her community (the hip hop-infused”Hollywood”), examining the history of marginalized artists (the pop-leaning “Strong Ones”) and her own desire for recognition from the industry (the fiery folk ballad “Flowers”). Punctuating those songs are brief “observations,” interludes scattered around the project that see Joy speaking directly to her audience and telling them, point blank, how she’s feeling.
While she’s become known in industry circles for her tell-all lyricism, Oladokun acknowledges that Observations is something entirely different that her past albums. “In a sort of unhinged way, Proof of Life was a democracy, and this was more of a dictatorship,” she says. “When you’re working with [other songwriters], sometimes you have to sacrifice a feeling or pull a punch just to get something through. The benefit of making this alone was just that, for 40 minutes, I could just be unfiltered. I’ll give you the choruses and hooks you can hold on to, but I also want to be as honest as possible.”
While Oladokun serves as the sole songwriter and producer on the vast majority of the album’s records, a few other songwriters appear in the liner notes — including Maren Morris (“No Country”), Brian Brown (“Hollywood”), Edwin Bocage and Theresa Terry (“Strong Ones”). As she puts it, Observations wouldn’t have been possible had she not made early connections with songwriters throughout her growing career.
“This album is the fruit of so many lessons learned, and people like Dan Wilson and Ian Fitchuk or Mike Elizando, or even like contemporary great songwriters like INK,” she says. “These were people who took time to really pour into me, and said, ‘Here’s what’s great about what you do, and here’s how we can elevate it.’”
The songs where Oladokun gets the most raw see the singer calling out Nashville, and the industry system therein that she says failed her. “Letter” opens with the thought that, if she drowned in a river, the city wouldn’t cry for her, but rather “breathe sighs of relief.” Penultimate track “I’d Miss the Birds” sees Oladokun calling out the town by name, decrying its willful ignorance of her and people like her, while “Proud Boys and their women” continue to thrive.
In the year since she wrote those songs, Oladokun’s feelings on Nashville have only calcified. “Put it in ink, Nashville should be ashamed of itself. I’ll say it as long as they don’t gun me down; this town is so full of s–t,” she says, staring directly into her Zoom camera. “It’s not even because Nazis can walk around freely — that’s a problem, but Nazis are gathering all over the states. My genuine issue is the people who only want to do enough to appear good, but will never lift a finger to actually help.”
In the eight years she’s spent living in the country music capital of the world, Oladokun says she’s watched firsthand as artists and executives praise the “progress” that the city has made socially while Black queer artists like her continue to be ignored. “I am the Ghost of Christmas f–king Past for this city. I am where I am at in my career in spite of this city. In spite the utter lack of support,” she says. “For all the f–king country girls in glitter shorts dancing around with drag queens, how many of them have offered me features or responded to even one of my f–king DMs?”
As she goes on, Oladokun catches herself and clarifies her point. “I want to separate the part of it that can seem personal, the part where it’s just, ‘Oh, people aren’t paying attention or being fair to me,’” she explains, addressing Nashville directly. “I’m not the only Black and gay talent in your city. I am one of a huge, growing faction of artists in your backyard who you don’t support, because you know what it will cost you.”
Her desire to take a breath and zoom out also happens during Observations. On the stirring soul anthem “No Country,” Oladokun looks to the various genocides occurring throughout the world — in an Instagram post, the singer named Palestine, Congo, Sudan and Nigeria as direct inspirations — and yearns for a moral imperative to protect people from harm our increasingly fractured world.
On an album that deals so much with her own personal struggles, Oladokun felt it was important to put her grievances into a larger context. “My job just isn’t that important. Like, my job is hard — but everyone’s job is hard,” she says. “It’s important for me to remember, because I as a human being never want to let this job stop me from being the best version of myself. I can’t let my tunnel vision of what my day-to-day is like distract from what I think the purpose of sharing my music is, which is to give people something to listen to in a weird world.”
That’s also, in part, why Oladokun never tries to offer big-picture answers to the problems she presents on Observations. Not only does she not have all the answers, but she points out that we all have to agree on what the problems are before we can talk about solutions. “It’s so important to name things, and I think a lot of the problems we have as a society comes from our refusal to name things,” she says. “The goal of this record was never to give an answer, but to say, ‘Ow. This hurts.’”
When Oladokun began writing Observations From a Crowded Room, she was considering quitting the music business altogether. When asked where she’s at with that internal conversation today, she shrugs. “My relationship with my job right now … there’s sort of an agnostic quality to it,” she explains. “I believe my career has a future, but it’s so rarely demonstrated in front of me of what it’s like for someone like me to do so. This is the beginning of a conversation — it’s me saying, ‘This is what it’s been like.’ And it’s a little bit up to other people to say, ‘That is what it’s like.’ I can’t be the only one trying to change the culture.”
A wry smile appears on her face: “Ask me again in a year.”
Anyone who has been involved, even tangentially, in pop duo Tegan and Sara‘s fanbase over the course of the last two decades can attest to just how tight-knit the Canadian performers are with their followers. Seen as a community of like-minded (and largely queer) individuals keen on making safe, inclusive spaces for one another, the Tegan and Sara fan community is commonly lauded as a good example of what pop fandom can look like.
Seated at a desk in her hotel room, Tegan Quin describes to Billboard a very different feeling she’s developed about her fans. “If we’re being truthful and honest, then I have to say that I’m afraid of our audience,” she offers, grimacing as she says it.
It may sound like an odd statement coming from Tegan — that is, until you’ve watched the new documentary Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara (debuting Friday, Oct. 18 on Hulu). Over the course of an hour and a half, Tegan, Sara and documentarian Erin Lee Carr (Britney vs. Spears, Mommy Dead and Dearest) walk audiences through an elaborate scheme that began around 2008, in which an anonymous individual posed as Tegan online and proceeded to exploit, manipulate and harass both the duo and their fans for over a decade.
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Throughout the course of the film, the Quin sisters and Carr detail how Fake Tegan (often referred to in the doc as “Fegan”) hacked the singer’s personal files in 2011, giving them access to everything from unreleased demo recordings to photos of her real passport — much of which they used to convince fans and friends alike that they were the real Tegan. As they try to uncover the culprit, Tegan and Carr simultaneously interview a number of the fans who found themselves on the receiving end of Fegan’s scheme, examining how these scams work, and the emotional toll they take on their victims.
It’s a story that Tegan originally never intended to tell the public — the doc details the band’s efforts to protect themselves and their fans by not giving more voice to the online imposter. But after listening to the hit podcast Sweet Bobby, which details a similar true story of a woman caught in an intricate web of internet deception, she felt the urge to finally speak about her own experience.
“I ended up telling the Fake Tegan story to a friend, and he said, ‘You should write that down,’” Tegan tells Billboard. After writing out everything she could remember from her experience with her catfisher, Tegan approached podcaster and Rolling Stone contributing editor Jenny Eliscu to ask for advice on what to do with it. Eliscu introduced Tegan to Carr, who urged her to tell the story on camera.
“Obviously, I wrote the story, so I was ready to tell the story. Was I ready to hand it off to somebody? Was I ready to have a full film made about this? No,” Tegan says, still squirming in her seat. “I was projecting fear — fear that we’d alienate our audience, fear we would agitate Fake Tegan, fear that people would be like, ‘Who cares?’”
Even before Fake Tegan began terrorizing their community, Sara describes how she and her sister had begun to grow slightly wary about the reality of fame. Where the early days of their career saw the duo regularly interacting with their fans after shows, continued success and more frenzied interactions with fans forced the pair to reconsider their approach.
“It was such a part of indie and punk culture to bro down with the people in the audience, to go sell merch and have a beer with your fans after the show,” Sara says. “To then say at some point that you don’t want to stand outside in the dark with strangers after we’ve played a show and done press all day … those were such small changes we made, but they had such a big cultural punch within our community.”
Enter Fegan; after successfully hacking an iDisk for the pair’s management, the catfish began posing on early message boards and social media sites like Facebook and LiveJournal as Tegan, creating connections, friendships and occasionally even romantic relationships with fans. They would send through unreleased recordings and unposted, personal photos of both Tegan and Sara, using them as supposed proof that they were who they said they were to the fans they were scamming.
In detailing multiple fans’ conversations with Fegan, Fanatical does not aim to criticize or mock people who fell for this scheme — it often does the opposite, taking great lengths to show that, given the right set of circumstances, anyone could be entrapped by a scammer.
Tegan even explains that earlier cuts of the documentary featured an FBI investigator hired by Carr to talk the band and their team through just how complex Fegan’s operation was — and how they created multiple accounts using a variety of different IP addresses to fool everyone. “Witnessing that forensic investigation removed any part of me still thinking, ‘Why would people fall for this?’ This took time and money and sophistication, and yet we so often just go, ‘Well, that person clicked on a link, what an idiot,’” she says. “You can’t watch this film and think that our fans fell for an easy-to-figure-out ruse — Erin was so clear that she wanted people to watch this film and actually feel compassion and empathy for these fans.”
As the documentary goes on, Carr and the Quin sisters begin to examine how fan behavior can turn toxic. The film shows how, as time went on and the band’s fan base grew, online interactions with fans began to grow scarier, where addresses and phone numbers for the band’s family members and significant others would getting posted on message boards, leading to the kind of harassment that’s become all too common for celebrities in the modern day.
“This happens to almost every celebrity [who reaches that level of fame] — actors, politicians, athletes. musicians, you name it,” Sara tells Billboard. “And I think we, as a culture, have to look at the way that we treat people in positions of power and celebrities.”
It’s a refrain with renewed significance in 2024, as artists like Chappell Roan begin to confront the harsh reality of what bad behavior from fans looks like. But Sara points out that this kind of behavior was perpetuated long before Roan asked her fans to leave her alone, and yet we only find ourselves at the beginning of this conversation today.
“What’s the real problem that causes this? Why is it a story right now, and why wasn’t it a story when other people asked to be left alone?” she posits. “This is a product of the culture we’ve created. If we don’t like the behavior — and it seems that most of us don’t like it — then what does that say about the culture we’ve built around art?”
That culture, Tegan notes, was largely built by one specific group of people. “The billionaires that own the record labels and the streamers and the people working for them are guilty,” she says. “They are driving artists to build obsessive, parasocial, frantic fanbases on social media platforms where we basically have to pay to access our mailing lists. So many artists are walking around, millions of dollars in debt so that our fans can listen to music for free on streaming services but spend $5k to go see a show, which only builds even more frantic competitiveness among the fans. Every part of our industry is broken, so I understand why people in the industry say ‘I don’t know how to fix bad fan behavior,’ and then run away.”
In one particularly wrenching scene of the doc, Tegan participates in a tense phone call with a fan (referred to anonymously in the film as “Tara”) who fell victim to Fegan’s scam. In earlier scenes, it’s revealed that this fan also actively fought with and bullied other fans, and even wrote and published a fan-fiction story about Tegan and Sara involving incest.
When Tegan called out this behavior and asked Tara to explain why they would do that, she’s immediately met with a stunning response: “You weren’t affected in that capacity,” Tara said, claiming her actions had no impact on the pop singer’s life. “It barely skimmed the surface.”
As shocking as the scene is, Tegan says that it’s a refrain she heard from multiple victims of Fake Tegan. “[There were] multiple victims who didn’t think that I would care about what was happening to me. That I was rich and famous and didn’t give a s–t,” she explains. “I was like, ‘Oh no! We’re f–ked if we think that just because someone is in a band, they are somehow impervious to judgement and vulnerability and sadness!’”
It’s why, as Sara points out, so many artists feel fear when it comes to their fans. “We seem like we have all the power, and in a lot of cases we do — we have security, and barricades in place [at concerts]. But that security and those barricades are there because we are vulnerable to the mass of people who are coming to see us perform,” she explains. “We don’t say to our audience, ‘Hello, Cleveland! We’re super afraid of all of you, because there are 5,000 of you, and if you decided to, you could overrun Bill, John and Mark here up at the barricade and tear us limb from limb!’ The power structure is weird.”
At the film’s screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, both Tegan and Sara say they found themselves surprised when the audience began laughing during a section of the film that showed social media messages from other fandoms threatening to dox their favorite artists’ critics. While Tegan says they likely laughed because “this is the first time in the film that it’s not about us, and they’re trying to get that nervous energy out,” she couldn’t help but feel a little concerned.
“They were also laughing because that’s just what we do now — we laugh at each other. We watch videos of each other failing and doing stupid s–t and saying dumb s–t, and we take glee and pleasure from that,” she says, sighing. “It’s why I hope people just experience some compassion watching this movie.”
Every year on Oct. 11, the LGBTQ+ community in the U.S. comes together to commemorate National Coming Out Day, celebrating the millions of people who have decided to open up to the world about who they are, while also providing encouragement those who have yet to speak publicly about their identity. It’s an especially important […]
Seven years ago, Drag Race stars Jinkx Monsoon and BenDeLaCreme saw an opportunity to ring in the holiday season the way they wanted to — as two friends just gabbing to one another in front of a live audience.
“We could have just sat on stage and shot the s–t for an hour and a half,” Monsoon explains to Billboard. “That’s how this whole idea started, with us saying ‘Let’s just sit on stage, maybe do a couple numbers and bulls–t about the holidays.”
Today, that original concept has grown into an annual tradition for the pair that extends far beyond just chatting and singing in front of a crowd. The Jinkx & Dela Holiday Show, instead, transformed over multiple iterations into a spectacle of costumes, dancers, high-production performances and an ever-evolving story — one that usually pits the two performers’ disparate dispositions against one another.
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Each year, the pair use the plot of their show to tackle topics of the moment, including the oncoming approach of AI technology and adjusting to a post-COVID world. For this year’s show — which kicks off its 33-date North American run on Nov. 7 in Charlotte, N.C. — the pair recognized that there’s really only one topic they felt needed to be addressed; our current, fractured political discourse. “There’s a lot of fear right now,” DeLa explains. “We have never shied away from taking on those hard topics, but doing it in a way that also can bring joy and hope.”
It certainly helps that the pair are well-versed in the political challenges of this election — in July, Jinkx and DeLa joined forces with fellow Drag Race stars Alaska, Willam, Monét X Change and Peppermint to create the first-of-its-kind political action committee Drag PAC. Aimed at engaging young voters to exercise their rights in the upcoming election, the organization has already provided prospective voters with the tools needed to register to vote and spread the word about the high-stakes election taking place on Nov. 5.
Below, Jinkx & DeLa break down the creation of their latest special, their thoughts on the upcoming election and their approach to young voters who don’t feel represented by either candidate in 2024.
Let’s talk about the special! What made you want to continue your tradition of doing this holiday tour?
Jinkx: It’s grown through the years — it started as something special, and just becomes more and more special each year, and that’s because there was always true heart and intention from the very very beginning of this project. We are writing a two act musical spectacular for the seventh time, because what we created that first year resonated with an audience that wanted to come back the next year. Their support through the years has allowed us to grow and take more time; now, we take off four months a year to devote to this project. As freelance artists, that’s crazy. But it pays off, because it is not only a wonderful artistic endeavor, but it is one of our best ways to stay in communication with our audience.
DeLa: It’s really about the spirit of this thing. It’s so great to be able to do this, but also, Jinkx and I love spending this time together, we love spending this time with our show family. We wanted to create a new tradition for us and for our audiences, and now, this is coming home for Christmas for us.
What can you tell us about this particular Jinkx and DeLa Holiday Show? What are some of the new areas you wanted to explore with this year’s version?
DeLa: Every time we come at this, you can always expect that special Jinkx and DeLa flavor — we have a very specific brand of comedy, we have a very specific odd couple dynamic that makes for a very good time, and we come at it with a lot of humor, and camp, and sparkle, and spectacle, and original music, and pop parody. But we’re always also coming at it with keeping what is culturally happening around us in mind, so that will always dictate what is happening in the show. And this year, there is a lot of division happening, politically and otherwise.
Jinkx: I feel like drag queens are expected to be funny. Not every drag queen is funny, but there is an expectation that we’re going to tell some jokes and we’re going to entertain you, right? DeLa and I both chose comedy because it is a wonderfully effective tool for communication and for introducing new ideas. Throughout the years, I’ve learned that even though comedy kind of gets treated like this light-hearted, frivolous art form, it actually has been the most powerful way for me to convey very important messages to my audience.
When you double that with Christmas and what a difficult time of year this is for our community, it’s a no-brainer that people resonate with the work that we put a lot of passion into. This time of year is hard for all of us, and you don’t even have to be queer for it to be hard for you.
The two of you clearly have an excellent working relationship as artists — what, in particular, about the other person makes them a good collaborator, to you?
Jinkx: I think if you asked us at different points over the last seven years, we might have had different answers. But right now, it’s pretty easy to say that there is trust and respect here. We have so much trust in one another that you can actually believe that this person is making a suggestion that we should wear specific costumes not because she thinks it’s the best option for her, but because she thinks it’s the best option for the show. To find another artist who wants to remove their ego from the conversation and put on the best show possible is rare. It’s hard to get there as an artist, but when you find an artist who brings that out in you, it’s a unique privilege as a performer.
DeLa: Jinkx and I have just continued to propel each other to get better at everything. We come at this with very specific skill sets, and with different strengths — throughout the years, we’ve built each other up, we’ve helped each other, I feel like I am a freer, more comfortable improvisational artist because of it. I know that Jinkx feels like she’s gotten to learn a little bit about storytelling from me. It’s something that comes out of that incredible inspiration from each other. As a result, we not only are a stronger pair on stage, but we’re better comedy writers together.
The other project the two of you worked on earlier this year was the creation of Drag PAC. What made the two of you want to engage in this specific way in the election?
Jinkx: The credit actually has to go to a wonderful member of our community, someone who has helped create a lot of work for drag queens and queer entertainers since the pandemic, and that is our good friend Big Dipper. He really is the brain behind Drag PAC, and I don’t mind saying that because he puts in a lot of work so that we can come together as a group of very busy entertainers and use our platforms and our voices in a way that hopefully — actually, no, that will empower our community and give us voice in the political arena.
This is a very high-stakes election, especially for the LGBTQ+ community. With less than a month until Election Day, how are you feeling about the outcome of the campaign and our collective future as a country?
DeLa: I, personally, am feeling a great sense of gratitude for the way I’m seeing our community come together. I feel fortunate to get to step up and be a voice in the way that I do, and I feel inspired and grateful to see so many other queer people in the public eye doing that, as well as just seeing queer individuals across the board realizing that, collectively, we can make a lot happen, we can protect things and we can make change. That has been true of the queer community for decades, and I think both Jinkx and I feel very fortunate to be a part of the legacy of drag that has fought for queer rights and for the rights of all disenfranchised communities. As scary as what’s happening can be, and as infuriating as it can be, the counter to it is us knowing our extreme power. I feel a sense of knowledge that we are unbreakable, and no matter what happens in the next couple months, we will not stop fighting.
Part of Drag PAC’s aim is to engage young voters specifically, and there are a lot of Gen Z voters who have made it clear that they are not satisfied with either candidate in this election. As two people hoping to mobilize young voters, how do you approach conversations with people who don’t feel represented by the candidates?
Jinkx: In my lifetime, I’ve never lived through anything more tumultuous or divisive than the last eight years of politics. I know that those people who do not want to endorse either candidate, in many cases, are thinking about the fact that endorsing either candidate makes your friends from Palestine, your friends from the Middle East, your friends who are being actively affected by what Israel is doing, feel like you don’t care about what’s happening to them because it’s not happening to you.
I am not the most satisfied person when it comes to our government, but I’m at a point where I understand that if we want to have the kind of future where we can really dissent to things and have more options than just two candidates, then there’s only one option to vote for right now to make that future possible. I think it’s pretty obvious that, under Trump, we would lose our ability to protest, to dissent, to speak out against our government. He’s made that very clear. If you want to talk about what you can do right now to try and ensure that future that undecided voters are trying so hard to manifest, then there really is only one option right now.
DeLa: It’s important to note that Drag PAC, as an entity, is about motivating Gen Z voters, and there is no endorsement for a specific political candidate there. The intention is to encourage people to do their own research, find the candidates that align with their own values, and then take the steps to make change through our system. That free thinking is an important piece of all this. But as individuals, yes, Jinkx and I absolutely have our personal endorsements.
I also think there’s so much nuance here. I think about Rep. Ruwa Romman from Georgia, who is a Palestinian-American who was not allowed to speak at the DNC. There’s so much to say about that, and I think it’s also important for people who have strong opinions about this to go and listen to this person that they are upset they didn’t get to hear from at the convention — she has a very nuanced approach to this. She cares deeply for the Palestinian people, but she also has a lot to say about how voting Democrat is an important part of this process when you zoom out and see the full picture. That’s something we’re trying to tackle in our show this year — the importance of larger thinking, of listening, of not getting so entrenched in your own story about what’s going on, but really connecting to others face-to-face and listening to what people have to say. Sometimes, it’s not what you assume it’s going to be.
Before we wrap this up, is there anything else you want to add?
Jinkx: Yes — we’re comedians, I promise. [Laughs.]
DeLa: One hundred percent. I mean, one thing Jinkx and I are so proud of is that we’re not afraid to come at the hard stuff directly. At the end of the day, though, we are both inspired by drag. We love to make people laugh. The point of this show is that, at a hard time of year, in a hard year, a bunch of people get to come together and look at some beautiful visuals, outfits, props and performances from our brilliant cast, and get to reap the benefits of some really skilled performers who have developed a very real camaraderie over the years. Hopefully, people will come and experience some joy from this thing, and also come out feeling a little better about some of the harder stuff.
Jinkx: We’re not just spokespeople for the community — we benefit from being members of this community, too. The audiences charge us to keep going, and we only hope to charge our audiences to keep going, too, and to provide some food for thought.
As he continues on his trek around North America with Charli XCX, Troye Sivan stopped by Billboard News on Friday (Oct. 4) to take a look back at his latest musical era.
In the interview, Sivan reflects on his time creating and releasing Something to Give Each Other, his third studio album that arrived on Oct. 13, 2023. The project’s first single “Rush” gave Sivan his highest-charting solo release since 2015’s “Youth,” reaching No. 77 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart dated July 29, 2023.
“I’m so used to releasing music to this group of people that I love that have been with me for like 10-plus years at this point, and then all of a sudden, this was so much wider than that,” he says. “I didn’t expect that. I hoped for it, always, but it was really, really cool.”
But with attention came some criticism — upon its release, the “Rush” music video came under fire for its failure to include diverse body types. But, as Sivan points out, he had learned how to handle online critics thanks to a decade of his career already spent on the Internet.
“I think one of the perks of being chronically online since I was 10, basically, is that I kind of understand how the online conversation moves and changes,” he explains. “[I know] when to listen, when to not listen — because it’s important to protect your sanity. Listening, learning and engaging in conversation, while also knowing when something is just somebody sitting in their basement and trolling just to troll … having an understanding of how to navigate that has been really helpful.”
Sivan also spoke about filming the music video for the album’s other breakout hit “One of Your Girls,” in which the star dressed up in full drag while giving Austin & Ally star Ross Lynch a steamy lap dance. Describing the single as his “favorite song on the album,” Sivan says he wanted the track to serve as the “centerpiece” of Something to Give Each Other with an eye-catching video.
“I didn’t even really think about it as me doing drag; I thought about it as me being a woman,” he says with a laugh. “It was a crazy experience, and I think the biggest risk was, ‘What if I look super busted?’ I’d never done drag before, I’d never worn makeup like that or had a wig like that. So, we did a test the day before … and by the end of the test, I felt good about it.”
After having a groundbreaking 2023, Sivan is now bringing the album to U.S. audiences on the Sweat Tour with Charli XCX. Speaking about his longtime friend and collaborator, Sivan says that he’s proud to share the stage with someone who is actively shifting the culture of pop music in real time.
“Seeing her win has just been one of the greatest pleasures of the last year for me, especially seeing her win at something where it’s Charli at her most Charli,” he says. “She’s always had that power in her, and always had that vision — [she’s] just been waiting for culture to catch up to her. It’s been so rewarding to watch.”
Check out Troye Sivan’s full interview with Billboard News above.
Sitting in her childhood bedroom and noodling on her guitar in February 2024, 24-year-old Gigi Perez was thinking about the scope of her songwriting. She’d been ruminating for a while on the idea of a frantic kind of love, and how to connect it to her lyricism. “When that person is so constant in your life, it’s kind of like you fall into it, and you have nothing else to grasp on to,” she tells Billboard. “It came from that desperate place.”
All of a sudden, a line popped into her head: “Kiss me on the mouth and love me like a sailor.” As she kept strumming and writing out new lines to add to the chorus of her growing song, the singer-songwriter realized she wasn’t the only one listening. “My door happened to be open, and my little sister walks by and says, ‘Oh, Gigi, that’s really awesome,’ ” she recalls.
And as the idea has moved from work in progress to completed product, it’s clear that the world feels the same way. After Perez began teasing the track in earnest on her TikTok in the spring, users quickly latched onto the hook, clamoring to hear a full version. They finally got to hear it on July 26, when Perez unveiled “Sailor Song,” a stirring, emotionally raw ballad that sees Perez turning her feelings of longing into a sweeping, queer-coded love song. The song debuted on the Aug. 31-dated Billboard Hot 100 at No. 98, and it has since spent six weeks on the chart, reaching a No. 46 high on the list dated Sept. 28.
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For Perez, the sudden, rapid success of “Sailor Song” feels like a culmination of all the work she’s put into her independent career — and one that enabled her to accept a record deal with Island Records in September. “I feel truly ready for this,” she says. “And I know exactly what I’m looking for.”
Perez walks Billboard through the writing process of “Sailor Song,” explains why she learned how to produce her own work and breaks down what it means to have a queer love song making waves in modern pop culture.
When did you first start working on “Sailor Song”? What was the original idea that led you to making this?
A lot of the process for me is typically just having my guitar and freestyling, and that’s mostly how the songs come — I was in that progression of writing, and I just said, “Kiss me on the mouth and love me like a sailor.” So, I kept going; I had the chorus done that night.
It really just stayed as a chorus for a while, and the lyrics had changed. There were certain little words that changed the meaning of what [the song] was. Once I had written the verses, I pulled a melody from another song I had written and put that into this song. It really is one of those things where it was a puzzle putting it together, but there wasn’t much resistance. Other times, in order to get something like that, you have to really dig for it.
I love a song that is good at creating imagery without having to explicitly spell out the imagery — the use of the sailor as an image almost makes the song feel mythical in scale, which is really effective.
There’s something about this thought — and I don’t know if it’s because I grew up by the water and spent so much time in my childhood at the beach — that little by little, these beach and sea and water themes just kept appearing in my songs. It’s really sweet because I was thinking, “How do you compile the things that are on your heart and that you want to say in a way that makes sense?” It wasn’t until “Sailor Song” that I looked back and was like, “There’s been a whole path being laid subconsciously,” which is very cool.
I was struck by the fact that your voice sounds like it’s in the distance on this track — what did your setup look like when recording and producing “Sailor Song”?
I went into this chapter of my life [feeling] in my soul like I hit a point where I wasn’t collaborating with people because I wanted to, but because I relied on it. There was a lack of expression on the production side, [but] I think things ended up falling together perfectly. I moved back home, and in the same way I taught myself the guitar, I watched a bunch of YouTube videos and messaged the collaborators who I really admired to ask them questions about producing. It was a lot of throwing things at the wall and learning little things here and there. Like, how does EQ [equalization] really work? What is a compressor? I was allowed time to really experiment with production and recording. It makes me feel the same way that I felt when I was 17 — that’s something I keep coming back to: That first rush of recording, when I was just doing it with my high school band, and we were just uploading files on Spotify and SoundCloud.
As far as the recording and what happened, I use an SM7 [microphone], and I started doing this thing [while recording my voice] where I do three vocals and I pan [one] a little bit to the left, [one] a little bit to the right and one right in the middle. And then I threw in certain kinds of reverbs that give it a roomy kind of sound. I also have an amazing mixer, Matt Emonson, and he just takes it away from there. I just wanted something that felt really intimate and yet really big.
Once you started teasing this song on TikTok, it blew up and fans were itching to hear the full thing. What was that like for you to witness in real time?
I was really happy. I feel like I’d gotten to a certain point where I just started enjoying music again in a way that I truly felt like was honoring my happiness. That was the main principle that I felt through being independent and being able to work on music in a different way. And then when I saw that people were really enjoying it, I was like, “That’s so genuinely awesome.” It was a slow burn in terms of getting to where it’s gotten to now but to know that it was something that really pulled on people means everything to me.
One of the things in life that I’ve struggled with — and part of why I decided that I wanted to be an artist — is the feeling of loneliness that comes with the lie that no one understands you. I think about the artists that changed my life in that way, and one of the first gay projects that I had that with was Troye Sivan’s [2015 debut album] Blue Neighbourhood. That changed my life. I couldn’t even imagine that somebody could be there for me during a time when I couldn’t express or understand what I was feeling. I didn’t grow up in a space where that was something that existed, and if it did, it was very taboo. It’s so beautiful now that there’s so much media that really highlights the gay and queer experience. Kids need that. Actually, people in general, not just children. There are still people all around this world [who] live in an online world and escape through music. It’s very special to me that, in any capacity, I could be a part of that.
To that point, it feels like queer messaging in music is having a genuine moment this year where songs that are about queerness are hitting the charts in a major way. What is your reaction to that level of visibility in the mainstream?
I think we’re only scratching the surface right now. Representation is so, so important. It’s the thing that gives people the courage and the ability to dream that you can do whatever. You, as a person, can take up space. I think there’s an identity part of it, and then there’s just the actual human part of it, and those two things are very important to me. Every queer artist is going to share their story and their identity differently. I’m only one person, and my message is only going to connect [with] and reach the people that it’s meant to. That’s why I think it opens up the bridge [for other artists], and I’m really excited to see everything that’s happening in queer music.
You recently signed to Island Records — what has the transition from independent artist to being signed at a major looked like for you so far?
I feel so blessed. It’s been such a weirdly spiritual experience, in terms of things happening behind the scenes. It feels like this thing is really guided. I didn’t know a year ago that any of this would happen, and I think I had a very clear vision where I said, “I’m going to stay independent, and this is the way I’m going to do it.” The fact that that has changed [means] I’m so grateful for all of the experiences that I’ve had over the last few months to lead me to this moment. They’re going to be an amazing home.
A version of this story appears in the Sept. 28, 2024, issue of Billboard.
The back room of New York City’s Heaven Can Wait doesn’t usually have a name, but on a breezy September evening, it has become the “Chaos Room.”
Red streamers, moody lighting and torn-out pieces of notebook paper with the words “I’M YOUR GIRL” scrawled across them adorn the walls. And sitting on a small side table is a portable Studebaker CD player, with a set of instructions set to its side.
“‘I’m really excited to share this project with you all, hope you love it,’” Orla Gartland reads aloud, giggling to herself as she arrives at the final sentence. “‘Please don’t take the CDs.’ God, I hope they read that part.”
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Gartland has good reason to feel protective over the disc — on it is the entirety of her sophomore album, Everybody Needs a Hero (out Oct. 4 via New Friends). She’s invited an intimate group of her stateside fans to come listen to the project and watch her perform stripped-down versions of a few of its tracks. Before the cozy club’s doors even opened, the Irish singer-songwriter had already greeted some of the attendees queued up outside.
“They are so cute,” she says. “Someone made a badge of my face! I was like, ‘Oh my God, you really put that in your badge machine?’ I respect it.”‘
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It’s an auspicious moment for the 29-year-old: since sharing her first cover on YouTube back in the late 2000s, Gartland has spent the last decade-and-change steadily growing a dedicated online following. With a penchant for confessional lyrics speaking directly to the generational experience of growing up online, she’s developed a reputation for her DIY approach to crafting emotionally arresting pop songs.
There’s still much of that homemade spirit present on Everybody Needs a Hero — Gartland is listed as a writer and co-producer on each of the album’s 12 tracks. But the LP trades in the quieter sensibilities of a young woman singing acoustic songs in her bedroom for bold, bombastic pieces of production. Blaring guitars and clashing drums are paired, and piercing synths turn up the volume on Gartland’s alt-pop, making for a dynamic project exploring the inherent chaos of romance.
“When I was younger, I dealt with a lot of imposter syndrome, where [I] felt inferior in certain spaces. This time, I was willing to take up more space, willing to commit to things, whether it was a guitar tone or a vocal,” she explains. “I was ready to push myself, and be a bit more indulgent; now I just love the drama more and apologize less.”
Where her critically acclaimed debut album Woman on the Internet leaned into softer, more detached songs about the trials and tribulations of twenty-something life, Gartland aimed to make the entirety of her second album revolve around one of her last long-term relationships, tracking all of its complexity in a single LP. As she explains, “I wanted the good, the bad and the very ugly.”
With that approach came an understanding of what Gartland felt was missing in a lot of pop music: nuance. “I think some pop music has a tendency to dumb things down, to be honest. It’s either ‘I love you,’ or ‘I want to break up with you,’ or ‘I’m so much better without you,’” she says. “My experience is so much more mushy and conflicted than that, and I’m much more interested in that as an idea. All of these feelings can co-exist, they do not cancel each other out.”
Throughout the 12-song LP, Gartland deftly handles themes of baggage (“Late to the Party”), self-doubt (“Backseat Driver”), manic decision-making (“Three Words Away”), being the messy one in the relationship (“Little Chaos”) and much more. When constructing the tracklist, she says that she thought about the “seasons” of a relationship, from the “reluctance and excitement” of spring, all the way through to the “humbling moments of embracing the darkness” in winter.
That thematic approach marks a pointed departure from Gartland’s past work. Starting in 2009, Gartland — then a 14-year-old living Drumcondra, a Northern suburb of Dublin — started posting cover songs to YouTube. Armed with only with a guitar, a camera and her distinct voice, Gartland covered everyone from Natalie Imbruglia and Fleetwood Mac to Lorde and Charli XCX before graduating to releases of her original songs.
Where most people look back on their earliest days on the internet with utter embarrassment, Gartland feels a sense of pride. Sure, there are some old videos that make her cringe (“I really thought everyone needed to hear my Nelly Furtado cover,” she winces), but she acknowledges that her time spent as a self-described “YouTube girlie” molded her into the artist she is now.
“At one point I really resented the YouTube stigma — I was worried that I wasn’t going to be taken seriously,” she says. “But I realized that, at least with putting music online, you are the master of your own destiny. It’s not like going on The Voice or American Idol; those shows are great for the right kinds of artists, but you have so little autonomy in how you are presented. I feel very grateful, even more so in hindsight, that it’s been a slow, steady marathon, not a sprint. I feel so lucky to have been in control.”
Moving to London at age 18, Gartland began to pursue her artistry professionally in what she lovingly refers to as the “garage years” of her career. “If you think about the trope of a band practicing in their garage, that’s what that was,” she says. “You get to have your garage years before you get to play your first live show. But when you grow up on YouTube, your garage years are online and readily available for everyone to see, which can be weird!”
During that time, Gartland met and befriended Lauren Aquilina, a fellow artist with a YouTube following looking to find a career in the music business. Aquilina would go on to live with Gartland for five years while breaking into the music industry as a sought-after songwriter, working with artists including Demi Lovato, Rina Sawayama, LE SSERAFIM, TOMORROW X TOGETHER and others.
Despite their shared aspirations, Gartland says that before she began working on Everybody Needs a Hero, she never wrote with her former roommate. “I have never been more nervous to ask anyone to write a song with me, because the closeness can make it harder,” she says. “It actually turned out to be just the most effortless thing in the world — you skip the whole ‘getting acquainted’ phase, where this person just knows your humor, they know the chords that you like. You get to feel very heard.”
Orla Gartland
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As Gartland began releasing a string of singles and EPs in the mid-2010s, she decided to start a Patreon for her fans, creating a curated community where experimentation was encouraged. For the last seven years, Gartland has been releasing one demo per month to her loyal subscribers, a move she says proved to be the most beneficial collaboration of her career.
“Sometimes [the feedback from fans] is like, ‘This is great,’ and other times it’s like, ‘The second verse could be better,’” she explains. “I’m up for their critiques, because those are the people that I want to come to shows. I want them to feel like they’re a part of the process.”
While the development of an engaged fan community has been crucial to the rising singer-songwriter’s success, Gartland admits that audience growth was something she rarely found herself strategizing about. What sets her fandom apart, she says, is the importance she places on the people who already follow her.
“I have a strong sense of what the people who already listen to my music want. I care about them the most,” she explains. “If I manage to catch some passing traffic and it grows a little bit, then great. But I think my response is to listen to the audience I have.”
Gartland experienced the highs of finding viral success in 2022, when her song “Why Am I Like This?” received a prominent sync on the first season of Netflix’s Heartstopper, soundtracking an episode-closing scene in which main character Nick (Kit Connor) begins to question his sexuality. The song quickly picked up steam online, earning Gartland her first entry on a Billboard chart when the track peaked at No. 4 on the Top TV Songs chart in April 2022.
But Gartland still flinches at the idea of the immediate, viral fame that apps like TikTok can occasionally provide to artists. “I’ve had a couple friends who had big surges of attention in one way or another, and it seems like that can be really hard,” she says.
Though the singer has a steady presence on the app, she says that she tries to keep the social media facets of her job at an arm’s length. “You cannot be an independent artist and be above doing a few TikToks,” she says with a sigh. “Even though I grew up online to a degree, some of it feels like work. Some of it I really have to motivate myself to do. But, I see [TikTok] as a useful tool more than anything else.”
As she considers the role of TikTok in the modern music business, Gartland mimes a U-shape in front of her face. “I see the whole album cycle as a horseshoe. The bits that I love are at the top,” she says, pointing to the upper prongs of the invisible arc. “That’s writing, recording and being in the studio on one side, and then touring at the end once everyone’s heard it.” Her fingers then follow the horseshoe down to its lowest curve. “It’s everything in between that feels difficult — filming myself miming a song I’ve listened to one million times can get very annoying.”
After spending 2023 working with her friends Dodie, Greta Isaac and Martin Luke Brown in the glam-pop supergroup FIZZ, Gartland had a renewed taste for the dramatic. Working in a band proved to be an important learning experience for Gartland, and a welcome break from the pure ego of a solo career.
“With my own music, there’s this very direct ownership to it all. You have nothing to hide behind, and you’re thinking about yourself a lot, which feels very odd,” she explains. “There was something really fun about FIZZ — the goal was literally to just have fun and be theatrical, be camp. There was almost a cockiness to it that feels so much easier. The otherness of it made it much easier to lean in.”
While she reached one end of the horseshoe with FIZZ in 2023 — the group played multiple festivals and embarked on a 7-date U.K. tour — Gartland found herself at the other end in her solo career. Teaming up with Aquilina, her longtime co-producer Tom Stafford and FIZZ co-producer Peter Miles, Gartland began to craft her sophomore opus.
On the album’s closing, cathartic title track, Gartland arrives at something of a thesis statement. Over loud, fuzzy guitars, Gartland narrates a story of trying and failing to look brave in front of her ex, finally crumbling and asking for support as they navigate their breakup. “Honey, I don’t have much time/ My parachute has come untied/ I need you to hold me/ Stroke my hair and tell me it’ll be alright,” Gartland sings on the emotionally raw chorus.
“I’d been thinking a lot about superheroes at the time — not in the Marvel sense, but in the sense that I observe in myself and in a lot of my female friends this want to do it all,” she explains of the song. “This wanting to be a great friend to everyone, and to be good with your family, and thriving in your career and everything else. I liked the idea of the self-appointed hero; this slightly manic girl trying to do it all, and saving everyone but herself.”
As an artist who spent much of her creative life showing others what “doing it yourself” can look like, Gartland acknowledges that the “self-appointed hero” can easily serve as a stand-in for herself. But as she looks ahead in her career, the singer says she’s not interested in becoming pop music’s new champion, especially if that means signing to a major label. Thanks to the work of artists like Taylor Swift, Gartland says she doesn’t feel the pressure to sign anywhere offering her anything less than ideal terms.
“I think in a post-Taylor’s Version world, the signal-boosting of what it actually means to own your own masters, what it means to be locked into a record contract, to be shelved — all of this jargon is out there now, and it’s really good for artists,” she says. “You’re seeing it happen now with RAYE, where there are all of these artists who are really proudly independent and thriving, and I’m just really happy to see it.”
That same concept, she says, applies to the trajectory of Gartland’s future career aspirations. “I would much rather have a slow rise at a glacial, snail’s pace, as long as it’s heading in the right direction and it’s sticking around,” she offers. “If I can do it on my own terms, then that’s f–king excellent.”
With so much at stake in the upcoming U.S. election, five queens from RuPaul’s Drag Race season 16 are urging their fans to make their voices heard by voting.
In a PSA shared on Drag Race’s X account, the five queens — Amanda Tori Meating, Dawn, Megami, Plasma and Xunami Muse — shared what issues felt most important to them in the upcoming election, with every queen stating that they were worried about the status of rights for the trans community in the U.S.
“I am very, very concerned about making sure that my trans family are protected, and that we have someone in office who actually sees them as human beings and will fight for their rights to healthcare and to just exist as humans,” Megami said in the video. Plasma added that it was “hard to fathom” that trans people’s “right to be who they are, intrinsically [and] autonomously, is at stake in this election.”
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Dawn pointed out that LGBTQ+ people are an actively important voting block in the 2024 election. “We’re such an important demographic of people,” she said. “Because our rights are under fire right now.” As Amanda Tori Meating put it, “there are a lot of us, and they don’t think that we’ll all vote.”
In closing the video, Xunami Muse called on fans to make sure they did their civic duty in November. “There are so many policies trying to take our rights just to exist away,” she said, while a graphic directing viewers to Headcount’s voter registration website appeared on screen. “So it’s not an option … it’s a must. It’s our right. It’s our duty as an American to go out there and vote.”
RuPaul’s Drag Race has a long history with presidential elections — since the show’s fourth season in 2012, every season of the show taking place during an election year has included at least one election-themed challenge, including performances in mock debates (seasons 4 and 12), creating attack advertisements (season 8) and even writing lyrics to a political anthem (season 16).
While none of the five queens directly stated which candidate they would be voting for in the 2024 election, all of them focused on the attack on LGBTQ+ rights happening in the U.S. The ACLU is currently tracking over 500 anti-LGBTQ+ bills across all 50 states, with the vast majority of those bills introduced by right-wing legislators.
Former president Donald Trump’s official platform includes promises to “keep men out of women’s sports” (a reference to ongoing attempts to ban transgender athletes from competing in school sports) and to “cut federal funding for any school pushing … radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.” Vice President Kamala Harris’ platform, meanwhile, includes a promise to pass the Equality Act into law “to enshrine anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQI+ Americans in health care, housing, education, and more.”
Watch the full PSA from the queens of RuPaul’s Drag Race below:
“It’s not an option. It’s a must. It’s a right. It’s a duty as an American to go out there and vote.” 🗣️ Make sure you and your friends are ready to vote by taking action at https://t.co/0wvFl34pxL and be entered for a chance to win a trip to RPDR Live in Las Vegas! pic.twitter.com/en28HiyIwi— RuPaul’s Drag Race (@RuPaulsDragRace) September 30, 2024
Randy Rainbow is back in his election era, and he’s using the music of pop superstar Taylor Swift to ridicule former president Donald Trump.
In a new parody video posted on Monday (Sept. 30), Rainbow created a “Donald’s Version” of Swift’s hit 1989 single “Blank Space,” switching up the lyrics to openly mock the Republican nominee’s latest statements in a divisive campaign for the White House.
Rainbow started off his new clip pretending to be the moderator at the presidential debate earlier in September, using clips of both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris to underline his jabs at the former president. “Mister former fake president girl sir, you have been critical of your opponent’s immigration record. Would you care to elaborate by making up some crazy-a– bulls–t?” Rainbow asks in the introduction before replaying clips of Trump making the false claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were kidnapping and eating pets.
Launching into his song, Rainbow donned his best Taylor Swift drag and immediately went after Trump’s increasingly strange public comments at both his rallies and the Sept. 10 debate. “Pushin’ garbage, playin’ games/ Got more tall tales than bankruptcies,” Rainbow jabbed in his first verse. “Hey girl, you OK? Do you believe a word you say? Can’t believe a word you say, ’cause we’ve been tryna ditch you for damn near a decade.”
On the song’s choruses, though, Rainbow opted to sing directly to his audience, urging them to get to the polls on Nov. 5. “Soon it’s gonna be November, and we’re gonna get the final say/ Better get your act together, or he’s gonna take your rights away,” he sings. “Got our foreign rivals rooting, he’d be their Christmas gift/ ‘Cause he loves Kim Jong and Putin, but hates Taylor Swift!”
The pop singer made news shortly after the debate when she publicly endorsed Kamala Harris, stating that the vice president “fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them.” Swift also made it clear that she would not support Trump’s election bid, despite AI-generated photos (shared on social media by Trump) that claimed to show her lending him her support. “It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation,” she wrote. “It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter.”
Closing out his parody video, Rainbow dressed up as Swift in her endorsement post to deliver one final string of insults at the former president, calling him a “narcissistic weirdo,” a “low-IQ, hot-headed nutjob” and even an “orange fecal stain.” For his final punchline, Rainbow called up Swift’s classic lyric to taunt Trump: “He’s got a blank space, baby/ And it’s in his brain.”
Watch Randy Rainbow’s parody of Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” above.
One day after Chappell Roan announced she was pulling out of 2024’s All Things Go Festival to “prioritize [her] health,” MUNA paid tribute to the Midwest princess during their set at the music fest on Saturday (Sept. 28) night.
“We acknowledge that somebody very special is missing tonight,” said Katie Gavin, the band’s singer, from the stage at the Forest Hills Stadium in Queens. “We just want to say that we love Chappell so much. We started as a queer band in 2014, and we’ve really been given the time and the grace that we needed to be nourished as artists. We wish nothing but that times a million for her.”
Roan, who had been scheduled to play All Things Go NYC on Saturday and All Things Go D.C. on Sunday, explained she was feeling “overwhelmed” in a statement on Friday (Sept. 27) and would be canceling her All Things Go appearances to focus on her health. Prior to the cancelation, Roan had received flak from some fans and pundits for refusing to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for president, though Roan explained she would be voting for Harris in the 2024 election.
The rock band – made up of Gavin, Josette Maskin and Naomi McPherson – went one step further than just talking about Roan, too, performing a “tribute” to the pop supernova that they pulled together at the last minute. Guitars in hand, the trio delivered a gorgeous, stripped-down cover of Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!”, which currently sits at No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100. Prior to MUNA’s set, a coterie of drag performers (including RuPaul’s Drag Race winner Yvie Oddly and NYC queen Beaujangless) led the crowd through a joyous Chappell Roan dance party during what would have been her time slot.
Roan wasn’t the only one MUNA dedicated a song to. Prior to “Kind of Girl” from their self-titled 2022 album, Gavin said, “We’re gonna dedicate this song to all the trans cuties that are here with us tonight.” Nor was it their only cover, with MUNA leading the Forest Hills Stadium in a sing-along to Vanessa Carlton’s 2002 smash “A Thousand Miles.”
Near the end of their set, MUNA got explicitly political, with Gavin reading a pre-written statement.
“We are staunchly against the American far-right, and we’re terrified of the way that an anti-queer and anti-trans attitude has manifested itself in our current political climate,” Gavin said. “On top of this, we want abolition. We want the wellbeing of people and animals and land to be prioritized over the wellbeing of the global market. And we want total disarmament and world peace now. And there should be nothing f–king controversial about saying that.”
As her bandmates nodded and the crowd cheered, Gavin continued. “We want to say ‘f—k fascism’ and very importantly we continue to say, ‘Free free Palestine.’” Gavin then started a brief “free free Palestine” chant that some of the crowd participated in.
Gavin’s comments dovetail with what Roan said in a TikTok video that posted on Wednesday (Sept. 25). “Obviously, f–k the policies of the right — but also, f–k some of the policies on the left. That’s why I can’t endorse. There is no way I can stand behind some of the left’s completely transphobic and completely genocidal views,” Roan said. “F–k Trump, for f–king real, but f–k some of the s–t that has gone down in the Democratic Party that has failed people like me and you, and more so Palestine, and more so every marginalized community in the world.”
MUNA’s comments arrive almost a year after a terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas militants killed more than 1,200 people on Oct. 7, 2023, including around 360 people killed at the Nova Music Festival, according to officials. During the attack, more than 250 people were taken hostage by Hamas, with around 117 of them being returned and eight freed by Israeli troops since then. The bodies of 37 hostages have been recovered, including three mistakenly killed by Israeli troops. Israel’s retaliatory military strikes in Gaza have killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, including more than 10,000 children, according to health officials in the territory. More than one million people have been displaced, leading to widespread famine and an ongoing humanitarian crisis.
Elsewhere in New York City on Saturday night, Doja Cat also addressed the ongoing wars from the stage at Global Citizen Festival in Manhattan’s Central Park. “Right now, millions of men, women and children in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, the Congo and all across the world are suffering. In times like this, it is important to remember that together we have the power to bring change, love, light and hope to those that need it most,” the rapper said. “Please keep using your voice to help those fleeing violence get the food, shelter and education they need and deserve.”