Bottoms up

Michelle Santiago Cortés on ‘Something to Give Each Other’ and “searchable tags.”

In the lead single for Troye Sivan’s new album, Something to Give Each Other, party-boy-Troye foregrounds his bones, his sweat, and his spit. The music video for “Rush” begins with a literal bottom. A sly poppers anthem, it includes a lot of twinning between skinny guys with the same haircut and just one gratuitous boob shot in three minutes. It is, of course, set in Berlin.

The tight little bodies of his dewy dancers and his scallion-esque frame ignited gay Twitter. The memes have been relentless, comparing the cast to Halloween skeletons on a lawn. Another meme captured the video’s Brandy Melville energy by assigning its set the world’s narrowest doorway. And Sivan is aware of the criticism, he hears you, but he doesn’t have much of a defense: “We just made the video, and there wasn’t a ton of thought put behind that,” he told Billboard. Sounds like the average night out in Berlin!

The fevered pleasure-seeker of “Rush” is not trying to be a hero or a perfect embodiment of the Queer Community. He just wants to party and have sex and make friends. But the press materials for the album itself, Something to Give Each Other, dash all hope of a selfishly embodied Troye Sivan. The album is billed as “a celebration of sex, dance, sweat, community, queerness, love and friendship.” It insists on Troye Sivan: the Queer People’s Prince of Pop.

Prince or not, Troye Sivan makes good songs: He writes and produces a lot of his own music, which has been described as “inherently commercial pop” that holds tension with “the urgency that defines its writing.” His TikTok content is self-aware, viral, hilarious, and intelligent all at once. He has the most enviable house to be recently featured in Architectural Digest. And he turned a parasocial flirtation with Stray Kids’s Hyunjin (K-pop boy band star) into a feature on a “Rush” remix along with PinkPantheress.

Troye Sivan had one of the least offensive interesting roles in The Idol, which should be embarrassing, until you see photos from the world premier’s afterparty at Cannes: Sivan is dancing with Blackpink’s Jennie and you realize that is exactly where he belongs—with the popular kids. Why then, isn’t the blue-eyed singer with a fashion week body and catchy songs not more popular? A Met Gala fixture? Or even a Top 40 regular?

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The years preceding the 2018 release of Troye Sivan’s Bloom were a fruitful time for capital-Q “Queer pop stars.” Tumblr was fading out of its golden age with the usual fanatic fervor, coalescing into enthusiastic audiences for everyone from Sivan to Hayley Kiyoko and Kehlani, largely thanks to the pioneering careers of artists like Janelle Monaé and Frank Ocean. Sivan had been releasing self-produced music since 2007. He came out to his millions of YouTube followers in 2013 and Time magazine included him in a list of the 25 Most Influential Teens of 2014. But despite the mild successes of his debut studio album, Blue Neighborhood (2015), Sivan’s cultural relevance still lived in the relative isolation of the very queer, white, and online.

With Bloom (2018), Troye Sivan became “The Gay Prince of Pop,” or at least that’s what journalists started calling him. As Pitchfork hoped, Sivan could be part of a new generation of queer artists “whose identity is as celebrated as their art.” Because he came out before signing onto any label, his sexuality might have been a non-event in his career. But just because his sexuality wasn’t breaking news, it didn’t stop most of his 2018 profilers from writing about it as if it was the only thing that mattered: The New York Times said he was “Here, Queer, and Used to It!” While Pitchfork explained, “Why Troye Sivan’s Success Marks a Milestone for Queer Pop.” The album’s namesake single is a radio-friendly hit about bottoming. This July, Sivan went on Emily Ratajkowski’s podcast and was compelled to make one thing clear: “I think in the sort of consciousness of gay people I’m some crazy power-bottom or something, which is just not the case, and I just wanted to put that out there.” (Breaking news: Troye Sivan Bravely Comes Out as Vers.)

Because Sivan’s fame is predicated on his ability to represent one thing—The Gay Prince of Pop, a bottom—he’s always coming out despite himself. And it leaves little room for anything else.

I became a Troye Sivan fan in 2020, when he released In A Dream. It’s a heartfelt and diaristic set of songs. Some hedonistic, others melancholic, all a little bit weird. In “Easy,” he outs himself as a shitty boyfriend as he sings about warping wood and smoldering relationships. In “Take Yourself Home” he’s “tired of the city” looking to escape and “die somewhere pretty.” It’s 2020 and the songs are treacherously catchy (of course he made his own slowed n reverb remix) and Troye is angsty, indulgent, and selfish. I love this self-centered side to Troye Sivan, the internet nerd turned toxic ex that might be too hot for his own good.

“Got Me Started,” the new album’s second single, marks his return to collectivism: The jaunty “Shooting Stars” sample makes it a party song, but the lyrics are about being turned on and out of heartbreak. Sivan always sings in the first person, almost always about his personal experiences and this new album is no exception. However, this music video indicates that he is just a soundtrack for some Wong Kar-wai hues (and a Happy Together reference) and cheerful makeovers with the queens of Drag Race Thailand. There is too much b-roll of anonymous and perfectly curated queer couples and not enough of that electric choreography. This video also got a lot of heat for not being inclusive enough. Heavy is the head that wears the Prince of Queer Pop crown. :(

It would be great if Troye Sivan became a more self-ish pop star, if he only had to represent himself and not a community or YouTube following. Unfortunately, it’s all too apparent this is the Troye Sivan we’re going to get in Something to Give Each Other—princely, diplomatic, for “the community.” As Jason Farago recently wrote in the New York Times Magazine, responding to such demands means “identities keep being diminished, brutally, into a series of searchable tags.”

But at least this Troye Sivan is a lot sexier, which gives me hints of the heathen that turned me into a fan. And the songs are good.

PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

• Julia Fox’s memoir, Down the Drain is out (Washington Post)

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• WordPress.com blogs can now be followed on Mastodon and other federated platforms (TechCrunch)

• The New ‘Frasier’ is a Tiresome Update of a Tiresome Series (Boston Globe)

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• Tomayto Tomato, A Centuries-Long Obsession (Mold)

• An Alabama sculpture parks “Unflinching” look at slavery (New York Times Magazine)

• Theaster Gates on Tabi’s (Tank Magazine)

• From the Dirtyverse: Why Culture Has Come to A Standstill (New York Times)

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