Pop music, like queer sex, changes the world because it feels good. This is as good an explanation as any for the long history of gay men identifying with pop’s divas. But what of the divas who have, in turn, hailed their gay audience, making them the subject of a song rather than merely its demographic? Historically, homophobia had limited how openly a diva could acknowledge her homosexual fanbase, but with the loosening of sexual mores in the 1970s, we see gay icons like Mae West and Diana Ross begin to more directly pay homage to their queer devotees with songs like "You Gotta Taste All the Fruit" and "I’m Coming Out". Past generations of diva’s meta references spoke for gay men, giving representation to the fabulosity of gay subculture and a means to celebrate it. But in 2015, we are in the golden age of the Diva Address: these icons now speak to the queer audiences that have defined them as such.
Marina and the Diamonds' latest single "Can't Pin Me Down" begins with a strange invitation for the listener: "You can paint me any color…/ But you ain't got my number/ Yeah, you can't pin me down." When she later asks "Do you really want me to write a feminist anthem?" it becomes clear that she's addressing the expectation that female musicians offer messages of (f)empowerment. Marina both refuses this expectation and admits it as inevitable, resigned to how listeners will project or "paint" a feminist ethos onto her music just as mid-century gay men made Judy Garland into a figurehead of sexual freedom. "Can’t Pin Me Down" asserts itself against those who make claims to what a woman’s music means, or who dare to assign intent and meaning. Marina’s song points to the tension between their visions of the diva and the diva herself. This conflict is explored in queer critic Rohin Guha’s Jezebel essay "The Myth of the Fag Hag and Dirty Secrets of the Gay Male Subculture," a damning survey of "gay male diva worship" and how it "permits gay men to dehumanize women–viewing them as abstract objects." Guha’s argument highlights the stakes of the Diva Address made by a meta diva like Marina: the ability to author her own identity rather than circulate as an abstract token among critics.
And of course, none of these critics, including me, are pop divas themselves, begging a basic question: what does the diva have to say for herself? Or as Beyoncé's "Diva" puts it, "Where my ladies up in there that like to talk back?" The following playlist answers that question by charting out songs where divas address their divahood or being a queer icon writ large. Together, these selections represent a cursory archive of self-asserting divadom, divas who talk back to the culture that created them. This collection reveals some common trends among "Diva Addresses" that might support a range of theoretical speculation—mostly though, we get to revel in this compilation of divas talking back in all their cheeky, self-referential, and aggressive glory.
Madonna: "Queen"
A bonus track from her latest album Rebel Heart, "Queen" shows Madonna embracing her title as "the queen of pop," a distinction she has earned from both her musical accomplishments and, increasingly, the accomplishment of holding onto the title for so incredibly long. Yet as "4 Minutes", Madonna's last certifiable hit from 2008, has sank into the past, her pop cultural vitality has increasingly been questioned by detractors and fans alike. In "Queen", Madonna acknowledges her reign is ending, the melancholic chorus pronouncing "The Queen's been slain/ She'll never rule again." The verses continue Rebel Heart's end-of-days imagery, but only "Queen" explains why the apocalypse hovers over the album as its central theme. Collapsing the end of a queen's reign and the end of society, "Queen" shows that Madonna's realization of her own cultural expiration compels her musings on humanity's impending self-destruction. This overlap allows for clever double-meanings in lines like "No rain, no more rain" (or is it "no more reign"?), but more importantly it forges a new role for diva-queens. While divas have been widely understood as the saviors of embattled gay men, Madonna's "Queen" offers salvation to the entire world—a predictably ambitious transformation of the diva's cultural form from the queen of reinvention.
Lily Allen: "Sheezus"
Like Madonna's "Queen", "Sheezus" explores the anxiety inherent in the diva's quest for supremacy, especially for a "comeback" record like Sheezus. "The game is changing/ Can't just come back, jump on the mic, and do the same thing," she sings. Unlike "Queen", Allen resolves her anxiety not through indirect references to her competitors but rather through their invocation in the chorus that namedrops Beyoncé, Rihanna, Lorde and Gaga. Praising their individual strengths, Allen absorbs them, so that what first appears to be complimentary ends with "Give me that crown, bitch/ I wanna be Sheezus."
Although the song's title riffs on Kanye West's "Yeezus" moniker, "Sheezus" also attests to the religious power female icons wield over our culture and the fervor with which gay men worship them. Who hasn't been on the receiving end of a gay man's sermon on a particular diva and our need to recognize her supreme eminence, held captive by a demand we convert to fandom? For these queers, the diva (from the latin "goddess") is divine, and "stan" is just another word for "missionary." Over a panting dancehall beat, Allen makes an appeal to this audience of potential gay proselytes, announcing that she is "born again" and pleading "Tell all of your friends…/ Give yourselves to me…/ Let me be Sheezus." "Sheezus" captures how listening to a diva is for gay men a true ritual, a Catholic communion with their spiritual "leader" achieved through consuming her music.
M.I.A.: "Boom Skit"
Compared to the other women on this list, M.I.A. might not look like a "diva," but her anti-pop sound is exactly what makes her the hipster-gay's diva of choice—the queen of pop music's underbelly. "Boom Skit" is an aggressive send-up of her Western audience and their responses to her work. Lyrics like "Brown girl, brown girl, turn your shit down/ You know America don't wanna hear your sound" were probably what made Interscope executives shit themselves and delay the release of Matangi. More importantly, though, they give insight into what the diva's world sounds like, what she hears on a daily basis from fans and detractors alike. When she sings "Let you into the Super Bowl, you tried to steal Madonna's crown," she sneers at the idea of "the queen of pop" with a divalicious attitude that ironically only makes her a stronger candidate for the throne.
Christina Aguilera: "Glam"
Without a doubt the gayest song in a catalog full of gay classics, this cut from the now infamous Bionic has Aguilera urging listeners to "unleash the diva deep inside." Drawing on the lineage of "Vogue", "Glam" addresses a drag queen in front of her vanity. "Paint your face like a movie queen/ A naughty dream or a fantasy," the first verse begins, later describing the addressee as "superficial"—the emphasis on imitation and illusion evoking the essence of drag artists. "Glam" is a call to the (stage) floor for these hardworking performers. Anyone who's been to a good drag show knows how transcendent a diva impersonator's performance can be: The up-close intimacy and pitch-perfect lip sync can make the drag queen better than the real thing, realer than real. "Glam" earns Aguilera the unique distinction of having actively invited her drag impersonators to one-up her when she sings "Get on the floor in your best couture/ Come on and take me higher." While Bionic's "Prima Donna" also looks at diva identity, it's "Glam" that takes the cake.
Beyoncé: "***Flawless" [ft. Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche]
In the music video for "Bow Down", an early version of "***Flawless", Beyoncé dons an Elizabethean gown, bejeweled scepter and crown to mirror the song's royal proclamation "I'm so crown." Once again, we see a diva reckoning with her own reputation as a "queen." What sets "***Flawless" apart, though, is that Beyoncé doesn't invoke the queen persona as a ploy to win her fans' approval, as Lily Allen does in "Sheezus". Instead of doting desperation, Beyoncé models the queen as disciplinarian, checking fans who view her as merely Jay Z's wife and demanding "Bow down, bitches." Only after putting her subjects back in their place does Bey exercise the queen's role of empowerment; only after assuring she gets recognized as the origin of flawlessness does she offer up the refrain "We flawless." Her distinctive view of her following as subjects rather than electorate makes sense—because really, who else besides Beyoncé could get away with it?
Lady Gaga: "Born This Way"
It was the song that started a pop music revolution. While musicians like Diana Ross had long took measures to subtly attract gay audiences, "Born This Way" proved that outright courting a queer audience could be commercially successful. And everyone from Katy Perry to Pink to Kesha to Taylor Swift to Macklemore took note, as a wave of pro-LGBTQ songs washed over the world's airwaves. Released at the turning point in mainstream opinions on queer people, "Born This Way" was the right song at the right time, bridging the gap between the closeted "anthems" of yore and today's over-the-head empowerment jams. "Born This Way" opened the gates for all pop musicians to, well, express themselves.
Hi Fashion: "I'm Not Madonna"
Ultra queer EDM duo Hi Fashion give us the anti-drag anthem in "I'm Not Madonna", which is as straightforward as its title suggests. The singer constantly gets mistaken for Madonna everywhere she goes, including the Kaballah center and pilates class. Annoyed and exasperated, Hi Fashion rejects the trope of the queer who longingly identifies with or impersonates a diva, a popular stereotype we've seen other singers latch onto.
Madonna: "Veni Vidi Vici"
If anyone deserves two entries on this list, it's Madonna. She is after all the best selling female musician of all time, and lest anyone forget, "Veni Vidi Vici" makes a lyrical trek through her best-known song titles. Madonna's grown more fond of self-references as she's gained more material to reference, but this is Madonna self-referencing on speed: "I expressed myself, came like a virgin down the aisle," she spits in a single line alone. Madonna speaks the secret language of Madonna fandom, and if you're not gay, you probably won't catch every allusion she makes. After a lifetime of banking on gay consumers and culture, Madonna uses the word "gay" in a song for the first time when she pays homage to their early support: "And when it came to sex, I know I walked the borderline/ And when I struck a pose, all the gay boys lost their minds."
Donna Summer: "The Queen Is Back"
Although The Guardian dubbed the late Donna Summer "the accidental gay icon," she fully engages this legacy on "The Queen Is Back" from her final album, Crayons. It's a kitschy, self-aware answer to her gay fanbase's cries for new material. "I'm your dear fairy godmother/ Now you know your queen is back," she puns before retrospecting on when she first "crept into your soul."
"The Queen Is Back" is the most explicit exploration of gay icons and diva worship, and because of this we can spot in one place the many different key elements of diva back-talk. Like Madonna and Lily Allen, Summer makes her address in the context of a comeback album that is both highly anticipated and commercially uncertain—pointing to a relationship between how pressured (or desperate) a star is to succeed and how likely they are to directly call upon their gay following. Allen tells fans to tell their friends, but Summer takes it further and implores them to "Call the DJ/ Call the station." Like "Glam", the song also references the way gay or drag fans "want to be her." Finally, it plays on the presumed pain of her gay listeners à la "Born This Way", promising salvation and belonging through diva identification.
Thus, "The Queen Is Back" is the example par excellence of the Diva Address and its agency, an important forerunner to this decade's recent trend of explicitly LGBTQ-oriented "anthems." Summers' song may not have been a hit, but it makes for one hell of a last dance.