Dinner Music 140: The weekly lineup
queer icons, fire island disco, pioneering country
This week we’re listening to music from queer artists across place and genre. We have country, avant-pop, disco, funk, alt-rock, and more. Selecting this week was a difficult assignment — I can’t stress enough how much incredible music has come from LGBTQ+ artists. So, on this last day of June, here’s a tiny fraction of it.
We begin with Bibi Anderson (112), also known as Bibiana Fernández, an iconic and pioneering Spanish trans actress, singer, model and performer who rose to fame in the late seventies after working with Pedro Almodóvar. Her only album, released in 1980, sits at the boundary between disco and the eighties, being neither and both at the same time. The sounds are sexy, glamorous, high-energy, placing her with other disco era queer artists like Sylvester or Divine. Her track Girls Will Be Boys feels very ahead of its time. The disco era represented a time of boundary-crossing and self-expression, but it was nearly fifty years ago and then, as now, that is a radical act.
We move into Patrick Cowley (100), a longtime favorite of mine, and into a compilation of his instrumental, astral disco tracks, Afternooners. Cowley is often considered a pioneer of early electronic music and father of hi-NRG. These tracks are sexy and beach-y, in the Fire Island sense, and would pair well the novel, Dancer from the Dance, which includes the best depictions of clubbing culture I’ve ever read (“When the people finally left, the blood-red sun was perched in the fire escape of a factory building silhouetted on the corner, and the cornices of the buildings were all golden-edged, and they would strip off their T-shirts, in the cold fall morning, and wring them out over the gutter.”). I recommend reading this essay from
, adapted from his intro to a new edition of the book.Next, have António Joaquim Rodrigues Ribeiro (122), better known by his stage name of António Variações, a pioneering Portuguese musician subject, even now, to academic study (in 2024, a university on Portugal organized a colloquium entitled ‘Looking back, thinking forward' – Variations around António’) for his influence and cultural impact as one of the first openly queer figures in Portuguese society. Anjo da guarda crossed fado, a traditional Portuguese musical style which translates to “destiny,” and contemporary pop-rock sounds and newly emerging electronic styles (note the synths on “…O corpo é que paga”), making it one of the first albums from the region to experiment with electronic music. The sound of “Visões-ficções (Nostradamus)” calls to mind Patrick Cowley and the legacy of queer musicians that have pushed (and continue to push) innovation in music. Both died in their thirties from HIV/AIDS complications. From António on why he changed his name: Variações is a word that suggests elasticity, freedom. And that is exactly what I am and what I do in the field of music. What I sing is heterogeneous. I don't want to follow one style. I am not limited. I am concerned with doing things in different styles.
Mitski blessed us with Be The Cowboy in 2018 and I’d like to think, collectively, we’ve never recovered. In 2016, she tweeted: I’m a libra so my sexuality is essentially ‘you can be any gender as long as you treat me like a princess.’ Is she gay? Bi? Her point is to resist labeling, to embrace fluidity, the way her music also resist labels, lacking any clear genre in favor of reaching higher, toward artistry and feeling. Perhaps her songs transcend the argument altogether, because her songs are often about a universal state — longing and desire. “Give me one good movie kiss and I'll be alright.”
We end with Lavender Country’s self-titled country music album from the early seventies. At once an indictment on the treatment of queer people and a love letter to themselves and the people they loved, the album shifts between funny and serious, representing the double-bind of that time (and now). This is a pioneering album that is still tender and wholehearted in its crooning. “The country music we were listening to was not about our lives. It was about straight people, it was about men loving women, women loving men. And nothing really applied to us. We could identify with it but I really wanted to have country music that was specifically about gay relationships,” said Doug Stevens, in a profile that included Lavender Country.
Enjoy.
Paid subscribers have access to the full Dinner Music archive (via Spotify and Apple Music), an after hours playlist, a “New York Grooves” playlist and more — hundreds of hours of groove, jazz, folk, samba, hi-life, disco, funk and more, lovingly selected.
Plus, paid subscribers get a monthly playlist (check out the playlist for May here + June comes this week), albums recs for new music, and access to the “for consideration” weekly playlists (2-5 hours of additional music!).