With a swish, the queenier gay guy turns to his butch boyfriend and asks “Do you think it’s too much?” At that moment of dis-identification, Cher arrived into my consciousness already heavily over-determined by the idea that this was Music That Gays Like, and that part of becoming gay myself would have to involve somehow appreciating or enjoying Cher or, horrors, Dressing Up As Cher. I’ve never felt completely at peace with this dynamic, personally, and (coughs nervously) I blame Cher! Looking at gay porn magazines in high school when I was a teenage closet case in Kentucky, I would encounter cartoons from the exotic world of actually out gay people in major cities like New York and Los Angeles, and I can recall a memorable cartoon from a dog-eared copy of In Touch magazine in which two queens are sitting in their apartment, one of them dressed exactly like Cher on the cover of her Take Me Home LP, bare flesh girded in spiky brass Frank-Frazetta-esque fantasy gear like some kind of Exotic Dragon Princess.
Go read them if you’re curious about how to locate this emotional weather system against the bigger backdrop of affiliations and tensions between straight women and gay men. Abler critics than I have assessed this complex braiding of love and theft at length (see Jack Halberstam’s Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal and Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, David Halperin’s How to Be Gayand Hilton Als’ The Women and many more). A great deal has been written about the tradeoffs of cross-identification and misogyny implicit in gay male fandom of female singers, and Cher’s membership in the promiscuous pantheon that includes Maria Callas and Judy Garland and Britney Spears and Lady Gaga constitutes something of a stumbling block for me. Though if that’s you, Cher, ego-surfing at 3:00 AM, and you’re reading these rantings, my apologies.Įxcept that I have a bit more throat-clearing to do, because I’m going to take a wild guess that I just might have been asked to review Cher because I’m gay. I am reasonably certain that her team will keep whatever critical remarks I venture forth here far from her prying eyes, so I think I’m safe in just carrying on, and as she herself puts it, “I don’t give a damn if you ever love me.” Fair enough.
Qua Cher, she looks great, her voice sounds full and muscular, and nobody’s going to stop her from doing her thing, least of all me. Someone with this extensive of a back catalogue does not merit some critical variant of the “that dress looks great… on you” put-down logic in which compassion and contempt huddle up in bad faith with each other.īesides, in what world is Cher an underdog? Let’s consider the economic backstory here: as a performer who has had a top ten hit in every single decade since the 1960s, Cher is doing just fine, and is going to continue to do just fine, regardless of what some punk-ass like myself says about her new album on a website. But suspending one’s standards and condescending to Cher as if she needed excuses, handicaps or low bars also feels unacceptable, given the quality of this album’s best moments.
Carping at the occasionally questionable production choices and ill-fitting arrangement ideas and just plain aw-shucks Vegas hucksterism of this album at its worst moments still feels wrong to me, because it feels cheap, a little too pat. Quite simply, it feels mean, ageist, and sexist to critique someone in Cher’s category euphemisms like “trouper,” “survivor,” “stalwart” and “unsinkable battleship” seem to avoid the rudeness implicit in assessing the longevity of a diva of a certain age. Having listened to the album multiple times and passed through moods of enervation, disdain, mild amusement, and snorts of hostility hushed by the dawning of a newfound respect, I’m confronted by the emotional reality that assessing Cher critically in 2013 is as much an ethical as an aesthetic quandary.įor a good reason: it’s not cool to beat up on old ladies, especially a cool old lady whose politics seem basically admirable and whose persistence has become something of a cultural given.
I will confess that it was in the spirit of a perverse gamble that I agreed to review this album Talkhouse editor-in-chief Michael Azerrad asked if the prospect of assessing the new Cher album appealed to me, and I agreed to this jeu d’esprit without worrying too much about what it would actually entail.