In Search of Our Queer Gardens: Jamie Stewart

Content/Trigger Warning: This post may link/refer to material that contains graphic references to self-harm, bodily harm, sexual assault, domestic abuse and other forms of violence. Also, probably NSFW.

Greetings readers! As you may recall, a few weeks ago I wrote some of my brief thoughts  about my search for Queer Artists and what Queer Art may even look like. As I have been mulling over this topic in the time since then, one artist in particular keeps coming to mind as an artist who helps satisfy my request to find:

“a visceral, unapologetic expression of queerness that forsake[s] any notions of a heterosexual audience and plunge[s] fully into our experiences as a marginalized group that defies hegemony with our resistance to be pinned down by gender [and I should have included “hetero” here] normativity and/or socially constructed wants and desires”

This artist would be Jamie Stewart, better known as the man behind the despondently noise-filled indie band Xiu Xiu. While his brand of music is certainly an acquired taste, I think that his work is certainly worth looking into in order to begin to showcase the qualities that I am looking for when I am trying to define Queer Art.

I first discovered Xiu Xiu, through a friend, back in 2007. While I was at first put off by the violent-noise that is the signature of almost all of Jamie Stewart’s music, there were some innate qualities about his work that immediately drew me in. First of all, his voice (which is not generically “pretty”, but more on that later) drew me in because it was filled with an earnest and raw pain that I found simply beautiful. Secondly, the utter brutality of his lyrics and the narratives they contained: stories filled with despair, doubt, self-loathing and unrequited desires were a counter-narrative to how Queer men were presented in the mass media at the time (and largely still, I argue)– jolly, boisterous, brash and flamboyant like Elton John and Jack from Will and Grace. Being Queer wasn’t being reduced to sparkly bravado or a formulaic comedic routine, Jamie Stweart’s sparse narratives were ones that rang throughout my bones because they were so fraught with a social isolation that I had never heard addressed before by a fellow Queer. In fact, Stewart was the first Queer man I had ever heard sing about being a Queer man. No innuendo, no clever switching of gender pronouns or use of gender neutral pronouns in order to bolster record sales to a heterosexual audience; here was a man who was in love with men, whose heart was broken by men and who expressed a loneliness  that often comes from a lack of community when learning to cope with living in a homophobic society.

(I do want to note here that Stewart identifies as bisexual and I by no means, ever, want to erase his sexual identity but in 2007 his songs about queer relations with men are what caught my attention.)

So, where’s the music man? Well, let’s just dive into it, shall we? The first song that really forced me to (as uncomfortable as it was) sit with Stewart’s lyrical brutality was his song “Fabulous Muscles”, off of Xiu Xiu’s 2004 album of the same title.

While it would be completely dishonest to impose my feminist reading of “Fabulous Muscles” in 2012 on my naive 2007 self (I honestly had no idea what to make of it) I think this song is key as a representation of Stewart’s Queer voice. In it, the song’s narrator details being in an abusive relationship with what I imagine to be a physically built and attractive masculine man and the degradation suffered by the narrator. The line “cremate me after you cum on my lips, honey boy” graphically depicts a cycle of abuse in which a lover is a victim of masculine dominance which is often only portrayed in a heterosexual manner while the phrase “honey boy” inverts the heterosexual paradigm and reminds us that the perpetrator of the violent act is, like the victim, Queer. To sing so bluntly about domestic violence is no small task, but to also show that masculine violence is a disturbing trend in the Queer communities is to point to an often silenced problem in Queer communities. The song’s very title “Fabulous Muscles” is also an inversion: it shows the worship of  the perfect, masculine body and behavior in Gay culture but the word fabulous (a word often associated with gay flamboyancy) “feminizes” the  exalted muscles, making them  markedly Queer.

In the second song that I will link to by Xiu Xiu, “Pox” (which is probably my favorite song and video by them), Stewart’s narrator is a child that is trapped in a house that is dominated by masculine violence and whose occupants suffer as victims of domestic abuse from the alcoholic patriarch:

While the video depicts a female child, in my reading, particularly because of one line, I imagine the child being a queer male. “Jesus is wondering, if even he can love you” sings the narrator to the abusive father “this is where I live, a pox upon your house.” The narrator’s separation from familial space (your house, not our house) marks the narrator’s isolation and seperation from that space which should be inclusive of all its members. I find that this feeling of isolation is emblematic of most Queer children living in hostile and homophobic households, because they are Queer they are instantly on the outside of the family; cut off because their sexual identity is not embraced by their family, the most intimate of our personal communities. But the narrator’s utterance of “this is where I live” is a desperate claim upon the space, the child is dependent on this family, whether they are welcoming or abusive. The child then identifies themselves as some malignant force within the house, or a “Pox”, a curse upon the family (instead of the abusive, homophobic parent) and I would suggest that this could represent the internalized homophobia that is subjected upon Queer children within hostile and homophobic family structures. Finally, the incredibly heavy line “Jesus is wondering, if even he can love you” is a curious inversion because it reverses the rhetoric of using Christianity to excuse homophobic thoughts and behavior and reverses it onto the malicious party, questioning how moral their behavior is. In the video, the child commits the final act of violence that destroys both abuser and the horrific domestic space and this is reflective of cycles of abuse and while the video presents it as a happy ending, I would by no means call it a triumph or victory.

As a final point before I jump into my conclusion, I would like to explore the “aesthetics” of Stewart’s voice. This is something that I’ve only thought about recently and have not written on so if it is problematic, please say so in the comments. As Queers (specifically gay men), our physical voices are often an object of contention. If they are “effeminate” or “gay sounding” (I want to note that all who identify as men can have a multitude of vocal qualities and what is stereotypically known as “gay voice” (think the guy on Modern Family) by no means signifies that one is LGBTQIQ identified) they can be be a boon, a proud expression of identity but also something that earns scorn from homophobic individuals around us. Stewart’s voice is by no means “classically masculine” as other (popular) male singers can be classified as being and to me, his refusal to conform to how men should sing and sound (or, conversely, silence himself) are distinctly Queer because it flies in the face of heteronormative expectations for how men “should” sound.

I could continue to blather on and on about Stewart if not just because he has a huge discography, but also because there is a lot happening in his music that is certainly subversive and undermining not only aesthetics and narratives but, as being a part of the noise genre, what music is as an art form. To spare you, dear reader, from an even lengthier post I’ll pass on those elaborations for now, (and also his covers of popular songs by female pop stars such as Rihanna and The Pussy Cat Dolls, all KINDS of inversions there) and, with my first example of what Queer art can “look” (sound) like, leave you to ponder what other ways (and with what mediums) that it can manifest itself into as way of expressing the incredible multitude of voices and experiences that fall under the Queer umbrella.