This year will go down as the first "post-gay" year in popular music. With so many LGBT-friendly gestures and artists coming out, sexuality suddenly stopped being the issue. The sweeping opinion changes brought by the national battle for marriage equality had a lot to do with it but, whatever the reason, 2014 was far more friendlier for LGBTs in general in music.
This was a year where queerness overflowed in the press, on the concert stage, online, in hardcore scenes and all over the radio, and it was impossible to deny our presence. For starters, after moving to Chicago a year ago, trans rocker Laura Ann Grace took her band, Against Me!, on a sellout tour behind the critical hit Transgender Dsyphoria Blues.
Adam Lambert fronted the resurrected Queen, filling the boots of late out icon Freddie Mercury for a massive stadium tour while Ty Herndon became the first mainstream male country star to come out. [Editor's note: Country singer Billy Gilman also came out—later that day.] Betty Who's single "Somebody Loves You" hit big when the song went viral via a gay marriage proposal on YouTube. Then there were the high-profile debut of Mary Lambert and coming out of Neon Trees' front man Tyler Glenn with the sudden ascension of the biggest new star on the planet, 22-year-old out Brit crooner Sam Smith. ( Smith topped the Grammy nominations recently, so if you don't know who he is, rest assured you will know who he is. ).
There was irony to be had in 2014 as well. Hetero pretty-boy rocker/actor Jared Leto snagged an Oscar for playing a trans woman in the hit movie The Dallas Buyers Club. It took a duet CD of jazz standards with Tony Bennett to rescue Lady Gaga from the fall out of her largely reviled ARTPOP and make her respectable again. Then, Macklemore and Ryan went and used the historically LGBT hostile art form known as rap music on the song "Same Love" to send an altogether more inclusive and embraceable message to the world via a performance at the Grammy Awards. The punchline of all of this is not "How 'gay' can it get?," but the realization that LGBTs of every shape, flavor and mindset have always been a part of the universe. This was the year when queerness became as acceptable and commonplace as a lunch in a brown paper bag.
Only two things are clear from what sold and what filled the headlines in 2014: The record-buying public will buy what it wants ( not what it is told to buy ) and that that same public has begun to embrace personalities from a divergent background that they would've shunned a short time ago.
There have been many articles celebrating the 30th anniversaries of Cyndi Lauper's She's So Unusual ( Portrait/CBS Records, 1984 ) and Prince's Purple Rain ( Warner Brothers Records, 1984 ), but there is a much larger story here. This year marked the first time in those 30 years when popular music embraced a sweeping mass climate change that not only expanded an audience beyond demographics, but also inspired said demographics to relate/feel/enjoy/embrace an entirely different point of view from what they had experienced in daily life. Michael Jackson's groundbreaking Thriller ( Epic/CBS Records, 1983 ) cracked the door but Lauper, Prince, Bruce Springsteen ( with Born in the USA, Columbia Records, 1984 ) and Tina Turner ( with her surprise "comeback" Private Dancer, Capitol Records, 1984 ) conquered playlists, race barriers, gender lines, class barriers, sexual preferences and age groups. For the first time, denim-wearing rural white boys from Ohio, sassy Black girls from urban ghettos, punked-out girls, femme boys, and barefoot hippies could all dance and sing to the same soundtrack—and embrace an understanding that their struggles were not so different or that the very factors that made them different actually made them similar. It's no wonder that Springsteen, Lauper, Turner and Prince sold more than 10 million albums each in 1984, but what is a wonder is that none of them had reached that zenith before or since.
In 1984, the barrier-crossing may have been about skin color and gender, but the change that is taking place now is about something far deeper and transformative. Sex, sexuality and music are such powerful and personal forces in this day and age—but the reality is that they are what tear the world apart ( Conservative Republicans, are you listening? ) and binds it together. That "popular" music is evolving to dissolve those barriers ( at least in what the public is buying ) implies that men and women, regardless of who they love, are recognizing that the "differences" are far less then what we have in common.
Okay: Stuff is changing—ya got that? Now onto the lists for 2014.
Music event of the year
There's a tie—and no it is not cheating.
—Riot Fest 2014's edition featured a tricky new location, cold rain, oceans of mud and swarms of benign bees, but I wouldn't have missed it for the world. There were fake zombies ( Lollapalooza had a real one ), but this was the only place to see hot local bands ( Netherfriends, The Orwells, Vamos ), old-school icons ( Naked Raygun, The Buzzcocks, Television ), LGBT icons ( Patti Smith, Tegan and Sara ), buzzy up-and-comers ( Wavves, Tokyo Police Club ) and major headliners ( The Flaming Lips, The Cure, Weezer ) in one well-organized weekend. Riot Fest is not only an institution that keeps getting better as the years tick by—it still retains an all-inclusive personality as well.
—Fed Up Fest: This was an entirely different kind of punk rock fest— designed, implemented by and aimed at homocore youth. This smaller more intimate three-day festival set in Bridgeport ( of all places ) not only featured a nightly jamboree of hardcore queer bands ( including a surprise set from queercore legends Limp Wrist ) but also seminars, presentations, and workshops on trans-issues, body image, self-awareness/care, and racism. With so many LGBT youth traveling in from outlying states with an attitude of friendship and sharing, Fed Up Fest was the most engaging, spiritually nutritious and empowering event I've ever witnessed.
—Special mention: City of Chicago Office of Special Events: Compared to last year, 2014's Taste of Chicago was a bit anemic, with a routinely half-filled seating area and no "must-see" headliners, but the numbers miss the point. There were thrilling sets by Janelle Monae, Emmylou Harris, AWOLNATION, Aloe Blacc, and newcomers Parker Millsap and Gary Clark Jr. The "iffy"-ness of the event could hardly diminish the large scale musical events that the city put on, which included a blues festival topped with Bettye LaVette and Aaron Neville running wild, and the Monday Music Series that featured stunning performances from Richard Thompson, Jason Narducy and out musician Bob Mould.
New bands of the year
I hate to say it, but nothing on the international front blew my skirt up nearly as much as the newer bands in Cook County. There were so many that I feel terrible that I could not write about them all ( Ne-Hi, Melk Belly, The Holy Motors, The Peekaboos, MAMA, White Gold and Richard Album, among them ) but there were three that stuck out in a major way.
1. Soddy Daisy: Between Maureen Neer's demented siren wail, Joey Eichler's feral yowl and the savage combination of guitarist Phillip Christian Swafford and drummer/producer Chris Lee, this band is the very essence of rock and roll. Soddy Daisy creates messy globs of psychedelic-blues slop that reeks of whiskey breath, gasoline and grease-caked fingers and toes—so don't say you weren't warned.
2. Donkey Hotel: Fronted by uproarious queer lovers "Chill" Bill ( vocals/ukulele ) and Honey Hole Johnson ( guitar ), Donkey Hotel is all about charismatic pop twisted into baroque opera. That the band ( Danny Backer on bass, Joseph Keery on drums and Amy Rose on guitar/vocals ) "treat" Bill's confessional songs while turning them into arias of bare emotion, sincerity and oddball charm is not only emotionally pungent and engaging but sonically addictive and adventurous to boot.
3. Landscapes: The mix-up of front man/vocalist/guitarist Stephen Simko and guitarist Drew McBride could only be called a total bliss-out. Landscapes' music is fragile, otherworldly, enchanting, spooky ,and delicate and the debut cassette was altogether haunting and addictive.
Concerts of the year
1. Baathhaus and Big Dipper @ The Empty Bottle. The "entertainment" portion of the Alaska Thunderfuck/Yo' Mama symposium was stuffed with ribald, bald-faced gay humor and inventive high octane queer theater.
2. Wanda Jackson @ SPACE. Sure, Wanda Jackson is 78 years old, but that didn't stop her from destroying all of Evanston in a single night.
3. Alice Cooper @ The Horseshoe Casino/The Venue
4. Vanessa Davis Band-"The Birthday Bash" @ Fitzgerald's
4. ( tie ) Bob Mould @ The Pritzker Pavilion
5. St. Lucia @ The Metro
6. Suicidal Tendencies with Slayer @ The Horseshoe Casino/The Venue
7. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers @ The United Center
8. JD Samson @ The Empty Bottle
9. TV on the Radio @ Empty Bottle
10. Betty Who? @ Schubas
11. Judas Priest with Steel Panther @ The Horseshoe Casino/The Venue
12. Lydia Loveless @ Lincoln Hall
What I listened to in 2014
1. Pennsylvania, by Melk Belly
2. Somewhere Else, by Lydia Loveless
3. "Take My Picture," by Ignacio
4. The Soddy Daisy/Donkey Hotel split cassette debut
5. The Landmarks cassette debut
6. When the Night, by St. Lucia
7. Beauty and Ruin, by Bob Mould
8. "The Runaround," by Sharon Corr
9. "Train," by Brothers Moving
10. Memphis, by Boz Scaggs
11. "Kings and Crosses," by �sgeir
12. "Afraid," by The Neighborhood
