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Sugarbutch Says: k.d. lang maintains her female masculinity

I can’t stop playing this new song from k.d. lang and her new band, the Siss Boom Bang. Oh where do I even start with the awesome? The rockabilly bright colors? The fishnets? The red tie under the cowboy-style suit? k.d.’s eager and precise guitar strumming? How about the girl couple which borders on the butch/femme side – at least, we’ve got one androgynous genderqueer type and one in a skirt, eventually playing in a car wash and getting all soapy and wet – and that’s not even to mention k.d.’s delicious expressions that go from ravenous to snarling to aching, all in a couple of frames.

So she’s got a new band, and her voice is just the perfection you’d expect, except maybe a little bit more gruff and even more aged in a beautiful tough way, and her hair is shorter than I’ve ever seen it. In short, good lord I hope I look and sound that good at 50.

I don’t know how k.d. feels about the label of “butch,” but clearly she’s got a masculine of center aesthetic. She’s been wearing men’s clothes and keeping her hair short for decades, and has long been revered as an icon of that badass swagger. But still, I don’t know if she’s ever looked as good as she does in this new video. I stumbled upon some of her older videos on the newly revamped kdlang.com and got to thinking about butch identity through the last two decades, and how things are evolving.

It isn’t that she didn’t used to present quite “as butch” as she does now – she has always been butch, has always been masculine, and in fact that has been part of her appeal. I wonder if she has been a representation of the cultural norms for butchness, and if perhaps butch – and masculine of center identities in general-are simply evolving to be more and more attractive, dapper, and intentional than they used to be?

Consider her 1988 Olympics performance of “Turn Me Around.” Swagger: check. Short hair: check. Sneer: check. Her next album, Absolute Torch and Twang, in 1989, continued to showcase her masculine aesthetic, seen here in “Trail of Broken Hearts.” And just a few years later, after she came out in The Advocate in 1992, she won Best Female Video at MTV’s Video Music Awards for “Constant Craving” in 1993. 1995’s All You Can Eat brought even more success, including this great track “You’re Okay:”

Already her masculinity has more polish to it. Her albums continue their successes and she eventually released Drag in 1997, an album of other’s songs all with smoking content. But how smart is that cover-up, such that she could appear so unapologetic in a men’s suit on the front of the album? When she released Invincible Summer in 2000, her hair was probably the longest I’ve seen it, but she doesn’t loose the swagger. After that, k.d. came back on my radar in 2005 with Hymns from the 49th Parallel, which was covers of songs from Canadian singer-songwriters, and featured beautiful tracks like “The Valley.”

Then 2007 rolled around, and Watershed happened. And her image blew me away. By then I was deeply into butch analysis, and looking for butch icons, and her increasing short hair and button-downs were very familiar, something I saw and that deeply resonated. I saw her live in 2007, and I think my mouth hung open through the entire thing. She wore a white suit and kept her feet bare, and every note out of her mouth was perfect. With her age is coming even more acceptance and reveling in this masculine expression, as she just continues to explore the looks she’s been playing with for decades. You probably remember her 2010 version of her cover of “Hallelujah” from her 2005 album Hymns from the 49th Parallel, it made a huge splash at the Olympic games in Vancouver, BC.

Her new album is due out April 12 and is her first with a full band since the Reclines in the late ’80s. If this first video is any indication, the rest of the album will be phenomenal, and I can’t wait to see her live again this summer.

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