Baby Steps in America

It’s pretty amusing to see how I failed to totally mark out over Franz Ferdinand when I first heard it, especially considering that I now am convinced that no other album comes even close to being as good as it from this year (well, at least none that’s available in the US). The parts of the album I have in mind when I dismiss it in that post remain kind of irritating to me, but as I’ve been listening more and more, certain songs (”Darts of Pleasure,” perhaps most obviously) have just exploded to the front with a greatness that remains completely enjoyable. But there’s a quiet genius work lurking at the end of the album. It’s now, by my count, the fourth single off the début, which might reek of abandonment, but, in some ways, that may be the only appropriate place for “Michael.”

Getting ready for Turkey Dance, I made a mix CD of songs I thought would be successful or at least interesting on the dance floor. The songs were more or less grouped by genre, and I noted the genre beside each group. The penultimate group was the synth dance pop group (hi, Annie!), and the last song was “Michael,” all by itself. For genre, I wrote, “Crypto-Queer Abercrombie Rock Anthem.”

The first time I heard the song, I was completely struck by the lyrical content—not, like, shocked, but startled. It was just so brazen, so obvious, and I really liked that Franz Ferdinand, whose members’ sexualities I didn’t know or particularly care about, had the balls to make one of the best songs of the album such a frankly gay track. Or maybe they didn’t need balls. Maybe it’s not that big a deal to have guys singing about wanting to dance with guys and stuff.

Then I saw the rather ambiguous video for the song. Franz Ferdinand have the early-80s/late-Weimar aesthetic down perfectly (well, that may be slightly redundant; I wonder how much all early-80s fashion was indebtted to Weimar Germany), and it returns in this video, in which the ambiguity is foregrounded by the degree to which everyone there is so weirdly uncomfortable about the whole thing, or at least that’s how I read all the copious personal space on the dance floor. Yet there’s still space for misreading. Here’s everyone, and the gaze is going strong, and then the object of the gaze starts dancing with everyone else, and then they all stop, and he’s, what, arrested? He’s grabbed, but violently, and what could be understood as an instant setup for some sort of sexual violence, instead becomes totally unclear—like readings of the video, the image itself fractures into two different directions after that grab, before collapsing into a flury of superimposed images.

The point here is that the lyrics are not at all ambiguous. The song is not at all ambiguous about being awesome. But the video is a little. And the fact that the song can be so unambiguous means that I must imagine that there was some sort of editorial crisis over Franz Ferdinand’s growing popularity. What I mean here is that whenever “Michael” is mentioned, it’s always not too far from a sentence swearing—swearing—that the lads in Franz Ferdinand are all straight. I think it was in Spin that I read Alex Kapranos’s insisting that the song is about something between underlying sexual tension to homosociality (like, you know, Top Gun), and being a fantasy piece about being, actually, a guy seriously lusting after another guy at a club. This may be, of course, my own overreading of what Kapranos said… But anyway,

No other song was given space in the article to be “explained.”

In the meantime, I’m liking “Michael” more and more—I’m starting to like it and “Darts of Pleasure” more than even “Take Me Out,” which I onced liked a lot. And I’m getting more and more excited about its totally bizarro subversive sensibility. Who knew that the best way to get a song hot like this out there would be to have Franz Ferdinand write it? So it goes on the Turkey Dance CD. I tell Sandy on the drive to the ‘burbs, as the song comes on, that if this song gets played, the house will come down. All the guys will get weirded out, since they’re idiots, and the girls will flip.

It so happened that my CD was the filler CD for the first hour of the dance, then. And, yes, “Michael” got dropped. And, yes, it was maybe the most popular song of the night (ahem). The girls (and, yes, they were all girls—teenagers) clapped their hands and had a riotous time. The DJ followed up with a Doors song, I think, and the dance didn’t recover, from what I could tell. I felt some small level of vindication, and thought that was that.

On Saturday, then, I’m talking about the song with two friends, and I call it “maybe the best crypto-queer anthem ever.” They look at me like I’m from Mars. “It’s not a gay song,” they tell me. “Franz Ferdinand are straight.” OK, I respond. I know that. But, still. “No,” they insist. “It’s not gay.” I’m starting to be sort of mind-boggled here. If my iPod had not been smashed by a car door, I would have immediately told them how foolish they were by playing the song. Lyrics like “Michael, you’re the boy with all the leather hips, / Sticky hair, sticky hips, stubble on my sticky lips” and they still insist no?

“Didn’t you see Euro-Trip?” one finally asks. “I heard in Europe, Michael is a name used for girls.”

The above-quoted line I couldn’t remember off the top of my head, so I just stuck to the one I could remember (”This is what I am, I am a man / So come and dance with me Michael / So strong now, its strong now / So come and dance with me Michael”), which wasn’t making the case well enough. They insisted on this “In Europe, ‘Michael’ is a girl’s name,” despite the lyrical evidence, despite the interviews, despite the fact that Kapranos is from Scotland, where Michael is most certainly only a boy’s name. They also insisted that it’s spelled “Michel” when it’s for a girl. This is, of course, “Michael” in French. When the French want “Michel” to be a girl’s name, it becomes “Michelle.”

Finally, the payoff came. I explained that no matter what, it was maybe the best song on the album. The guy (it was a guy and girl talking to me) then agreed, but added the caveat that it would be better if it were about a girl.

Luckily, I was destroyed enough not to immediately start yelling at the guy, but the politics here are, of course, covert and problematic. “Michael” is such a threatening song, apparently, that people will invent complete, wilful fabrications about onomastic conventions in Europe to justify its heteronormativity. Who the hell, upon listening to the song, thinks it’s about a girl in Europe? How is that even possible, unless you are really, really threatened by homosexuality?

Is the threat, maybe, that Franz Ferdinand have no problem about playing gay for the sake of the song (while always, of course, insisting, still, that they’re straight–and Kapranos’s camera-equipped mouth only kisses ostensibly female lips in the “Darts of Pleasure” video)? That, unlike regular straight guys, who should be out thanking god every day that they were born straight, Franz Ferdinand is willing to appreciate / understand / imagine / play in the lusty position of a gay dance club? Maybe. It might just be the bigger threat here.

Kapranos et al. aren’t totally faultless here, either. I’ve read one interiew where he, borrowing a page from T.A.T.U. (a group I fell on my sword defending…), just ambiguously explains away the song by saying it’s all just fantasy. All the questions, though, seem to suggest that some sort of better nuanced position is needed. I just don’t know what that could be without being patronising.

So on the subject of questions, why have I not read a single interview talking about the assassination motif in “Take Me Out”? No one cares about the pretty fucked up lyrics to that song—but “Michael”—that everyone is ready to explain.