Claire Biddles

[msbiddles]

CALL FOR ENTRIES: FUCK WHAT YOU LOVE ISSUE FIVE Fuck What You Love is a zine about popstar crushes, featuring writing from women and LGBTQ+ people. The zine celebrates the importance of crushing on musicians to marginalised music fans, and gives voice to passions that are often dismissed as silly or trite. The essays in the first four collections, released from 2016 to 2019, are dedicated to crushes including BTS, Patrick Wolf, Janelle Monae, Rihanna and Harry Styles, and addressing subjects such as fanfiction writing, the discovery of self through queer crushes, and male popstars’ embodiment of aspirational dyke-glam. I’m really excited to get started on the fifth issue!

This is where you come in!

I’m looking for writing by women and LGBTQ+ people about any aspect/experience of crushing on pop stars. If you want to join in, please send a short description of the piece you want to write, along with a link to a couple of examples of your writing (if you have some, don’t worry if you don’t!), to [email protected] by Monday 9 March 2020. Put the name of the musician that you crush on the most in the subject line. If I’m into your idea then I’ll ask for your completed (400-1000 word) piece of writing by Saturday 21 March 2020. I hope to include as many contributions as I can - if I like your idea but don’t have space for it this time, I will consider it for a future issue.

The zine will be launched in April, and will be available to order online, at zine fairs, and IRL at a few shops in Scotland and England. I’m looking for a wide range of women and LGBTQ+ people to write for issue five, and I would especially encourage trans people, disabled people, and POC to contribute.

As is the nature of zines, the project doesn’t earn me any money, so getting involved is unpaid. All contributors will receive a copy of the zine.

If you want to take part but aren’t sure exactly what you want to write about, or want to chat further, please drop me a line in the meantime - you can also hit me up on twitter at @msclairebiddles.

[msbiddles]

CALL FOR WRITERS: FUCK WHAT YOU LOVE ISSUE FOUR Fuck What You Love is a zine about popstar crushes, featuring writing from women and LGBTQ+ people. The zine celebrates the importance of crushing on musicians to marginalised music fans, and gives voice to passions that are often dismissed as silly or trite by cishet male music critics. 

The essays in the first three collections were dedicated to crushes as diverse as Adele, Justin Moore, Harry Styles, Lee Sungyeol, Rihanna and Gerard Way, with writers from around the world addressing subjects such as fanfiction writing, the discovery of self through queer crushes, and the straight girl’s attraction to the gay male popstar. I’m really excited to get started on the fourth issue!

This is where you come in!

I’m looking for essays by women and LGBTQ+ people about any aspect/experience of crushing on pop stars. If you want to join in, please send a short description of the piece you want to write, along with a link to a couple of examples of your writing (if applicable), to [email protected] by Sunday 24 February 2019. Put the name of the musician that you crush on the most in the subject line. I’ll then respond to everyone within a few days of the deadline. If I’m into your proposal then I’ll ask for your completed (400-1000 word) essay by Friday 8 March 2019. I hope to include as many contributions as I can - if I like your idea but don’t have space for it this time, I will consider it for a future issue.

The zine will be launched at the end of April, and will be available to order online, at zine fairs, and at a couple of brick-and-mortar places too. I’m looking for a wide range of women and LGBTQ+ people to write for issue four, and I would especially encourage trans people, disabled people, and POC to contribute.

If you want to take part but aren’t sure exactly what you want to write about, or want to chat further, please drop me a line in the meantime - you can also hit me up on twitter at @msclairebiddles.

[oneweekoneband]

That’s it for Troye Sivan week on One Week One Band. It was an absolute delight to write about my favourite popstar for a whole week – there’s so much more I could have written about, but hopefully I can come back in five or ten years’ time and do it all again. I’m so grateful to everyone who read, liked, reblogged, messaged me on Twitter etc – special thanks to Hendrik for once again lending me this space, and to Alison, Emily, Julian and Vikram for the wonderful guest posts. Also extra thanks to Julian for his constant behind-the-scenes encouragement during the week.

Here’s a masterpost of all the posts this week:

Introductions Juvenilia  TRXYE EP

Blue Neighbourhood WILD SUBURBIA

Romance Blue Neighbourhood Trilogy  Strawberries and Cigarettes  Troye Sivan and Love Stories  Animal (guest post by Alison Ames)

Queer Joy Introduction My My My! Bloom 

Becoming Introduction Troye Live Queer Adolescence (guest post by Vikram Joseph) The Good Side (guest post by Emily Clark)  The Good Side and Guilt (guest post by Julian de Valliere) 

Epilogue YOUTH

If you’d like to keep up with my thoughts about Troye and other queer pop princes, I am on Twitter here and on Tumblr here. See you on the Bloom UK tour! XClaire

[msbiddles]

I had the best week doing this! here’s all the posts if you would like to catch up.

[oneweekoneband]

Epilogue: YOUTH; or, Mortal body, timeless souls

“A temporizer procrastinates. He forfeits the present. He moves elsewhere in time. He moves from the present to the future, from the past to the present, from the present to the past… He firms up the present by experiencing it from the future as a moment in the past” - André Aciman, “Temporizing”, from Alibis (2011)

I first heard Troye Sivan when I was 28 years old. Our lives have never been parallel: I’ve never listened to “YOUTH” and felt like the kindred peers that he’s addressing. But this version – I get it. 

The acoustic version of “YOUTH” is a manifestation of nostalgia for the present; a theme so integral to Troye’s work from “WILD” to “Postcard” to “Plum”. Recorded when the song was Troye’s current single, it moves perspectives from the present to the present-past-future: It’s being at the party, thinking about when you’ll be able to be wistful about the memory of it on the night bus home. Here “My youth is yours” isn’t Troye talking to us, his presumed peers – it’s present day Troye talking to all the Troyes in the future and the past. 

The Bloom tour started last night. Troye posted pictures of himself on stage in a soft gray suit, head thrown back, hair slick with gel or sweat or both. I thought about him on the tour bus after the show, in the quiet of his cabin or maybe at the table with a few other people, with his body language open but wrapped up in his phone, checking which pictures to post. Thinking about the show. Thinking about that moment on stage, and how during that moment he was really in this moment now, trying to grasp onto it through an Instagram post. Temporising.

[oneweekoneband]

Troye live; or, Go slow, no, now go fast

I’ve only seen Troye Sivan live once: in the relatively unglamorous surroundings of the Glasgow University Students’ Union on his solitary trip to the UK in April 2016. On the way in, the woman on the door thought that I was the responsible adult for the group of teenagers in front of me. No, I said, I’m here by myself. I got served immediately at the bar – everyone who wasn’t an accompanying adult was under 18. I took advantage of the near-empty balcony and experienced the concert with the full front seated row to myself.

Troye had only been performing live for a matter of months at that time: a string of dates in the US and Australia, and a couple of performances on late night TV. His small band was flanked by a blue neon house, and Troye took to the stage in a hoody and jeans. His sleeves were pulled over his hands; a comfort to ease him in to the performance.

The first song was “BITE”, and I remember thinking it was an odd choice to start with one of Blue Neighbourhood’s tricksier songs. As the performance progressed, however, the tentative opener made sense: although eventually a confident performer, Troye took a while to get there, maybe something to do with the transition from performing to camera (on film, on YouTube) to performing for a live audience. Eventually, he was talking directly to the audience, and moving more confidently across the stage. By the encore of “YOUTH” I was spellbound, but it felt like he had just got started. I left my seat feeling like an exposed wire. I bought a £30 Troye-branded candle from the merchandise stand in a kind of trance.

The promotional push for “My My My!” was considerably more robust than that of Blue Neighbourhood, so Troye made a lot more appearances on TV – I woke up to performances from SNL and Ellen, watching them on my phone before I got out of bed. I was heartened by what I saw. The process that took several songs at my show was wound up by the chorus. Troye was strutting the length of breadth of the stage, echoing his Madonna-esque presence in the music video.

In May, my friend Ashley sent me a video of Troye performing “Bloom” in a sheer yellow shirt on stage at the Today show in New York, and I watched it at my desk beaming with pride. Even through the filter of a fan-made video on an iPhone screen, I could see his face, smile wide with disbelief at his accelerated confidence. I felt proud. He hasn’t announced a UK leg for the Bloom tour yet, but I can’t wait to go.

[oneweekoneband]

Becoming, an introduction; or, No angels could beckon me back and it’s hotter than hell where I’m at

Welcome to day five! Thanks so much for sticking with me through the week. Today we’re going to be exploring the theme of becoming in Troye’s music: and I say we because I’m excited to share three guests posts today! Today’s posts are all about how we come of age, how we find ourselves in love and sex and performance – how Troye has done all of this, and how it reflects and encourages all that we have done. 

We’re also going to be discussing queer adolescence, which is something I think Troye expresses and embodies particularly well. By way of introduction, I wrote about this previously at The Singles Jukebox in a review of “Bloom”:

“Queer adolescence can happen at any age. We can have our first times — our real first times; sexual or self-actualising or both — at 26, or 32, or 65. How many of us have laid on our beds or sat at our desks or stalled in the front seat of our cars listening to “Genie in a Bottle” or “Saving All My Love For You,” thinking about what we want but isn’t ours yet, feeling simultaneously too old and too young? We’ve all narrowed our eyes so that these familiar anticipatory stories go out of focus and re-form to fit our own narratives, like sonic fanfiction. “Bloom” is a bottoming virginity rewrite of “Teenage Dream,” may as well be note-for-note, but that’s the point. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it were the lead single from a thousand song queer cover version compilation album of teenage rush-of-love, fully-formed-for-the-first-time, I’ve-waited-my-whole-life top 40 hits rewritten for rights of passage that could be our own?”

First post coming up in a moment!

[msbiddles]

guys I am SO excited about today’s posts!!!

[oneweekoneband]

“Bloom” and Queer Audaciousness; or, Put gas into the motor and boy I’ll meet you right there

I loved the perverse bubblegum of “Bloom” on first listen, but that video. I can barely scroll through the gifs – surely the perfect vehicle for its gestural, costumed camp – without giggling with delight. This Pierre et Gilles fever dream! Troye drapes himself over countless mise en scène in infinite opulance; outfits and outfits and feathers and makeup and dresses and nail polish and I feel sick with how much wonder it’s stuffing into my mouth. It’s so much, and it’s so audacious, and it feels like Troye is finally catching up with himself: like he’s had all these outfits in storage since the beginning, and now he’s not scared anymore he has to show them all off in three minutes.

The Bloom era is well-titled: if Blue Neighbourhood was a coming-of-age story then “My My My!” was the announcement that Troye had come of age, pun absolutely intended. The “Bloom” video acted as the show-off presentation of his new normal, an externalised expression of his psyche: I’ve been fucked and I’m in love and I’m queer as fuck and look at me now. Troye’s queerness has always been present in his visuals – kissing boys in “YOUTH”, the LGBTQ+ activist footage in “HEAVEN” – but it’s never been this ingrained and vital.

[oneweekoneband]

My My My! or; Got my name on this treasure

“My My My!” was released on 10 January 2018, cutting through the January ice like a firework. I woke up at 5am to listen to it the second it was released; the hot, orgasm-shudder of the introduction made me laugh aloud with utter delight, alone in my freezing cold bed. I spent the day with seven chat windows open to friends across the world, all somehow simultaneously typing thousands of words, whilst being rendered speechless with joy over this perfect, precious jewel of a song.

“My My My!” also cut through the fog of melancholia that had cushioned Sivan’s music during the Blue Neighbourhood era. It was still characteristically Troye, but it was a distinct level-up, turning tentative introspection into exhibitionist action. It’s a song of liberation that comes from romantic and sexual bravery, inspired by Troye’s real life – the loosening of muscles that had been tensed against the world for years and years. “I was looking for that exhale of relief,” Troye explained in a radio interview.

I wrote yesterday about Troye’s music not needing to be revolutionary. “My My My!” is just (just!) a perfect pop song, but it’s also a ten foot tall queer declaration of joy, advertised on billboards in Times Square, that would have been fit to be projected onto nearby planets if the record company had the technology and/or the budget. Let’s stop running from love, Troye pleads to himself, to his lover – but more importantly, to us; bundled up in blankets at 5am in January, in bed alone with photographs of our long lost loves still pinned to our walls. Troye understands that his queer joy could be ours, if only we could find it in our hearts to be brave too. That’s revolutionary, even if only one person feels it. I know I felt it.

[oneweekoneband]

To round off love stories day, I want to share the first guest post: an essay on “Animal” by my friend, writer Alison Ames

I wanted to make an epic, timeless love song about how whipped i am

by Alison Ames

“Animal” starts off soft and sweet and small. I told you something safe, something I’ve never said before. This is the ideal, right? Your heart in someone else’s hands, protected. True romance. Being vulnerable in a relationship is never easy, but too often there’s an extra layer of something  – shame, maybe, a lifetime of social conditioning – that you have to get around if you’re gay. I’m generalizing, of course, but I’m twenty-seven and I only came out to my parents this year. Even when Troye came out he was nervous, and we all already loved him. No matter how confident you are, how sure of the righteousness of your love, we still live in a world where we look twice before we hold hands. So there’s the normal human fear of expressing love, of being rejected, and then there’s the kicker: not only am I in love with you, I’m in gay love with you. No one’s got me quite like you.

The gay narrative we usually get is very tender and PG-13, which I am not at all knocking. I love a Love, Simon. But I love also the idea that you can be deeply, tenderly, life-shatteringly in love with someone and also be deliriously, blurrily, insatiably horny for them, and that both of those feelings will continue in equal measure until your eventual simultaneous Notebook-style death. I want you all to myself / all laid out like a tarot / boy I’ll die to care for you. We don’t often get that! We get one fuck, faded tastefully to black, to demonstrate that we are not in fact best friends opening a chocolate shop together, and that is all. We’re still fighting to be able to tell our own stories, and we’re still having to tell them to a world that is not uniformly on board. Don’t get too explicit, they say, because otherwise they can’t relate. They don’t want to think about the mechanics of it, the covered all in the night before, the physical ways in which we love each other, but we do. We do, and we’re going to talk about it, because we’re tired of not talking about it. You’re mine, mine, mine.

All this to say: Bloom is an album that is one hundred percent about gay sex and, more specifically, about gay sex with someone you are madly in love with. “Animal” is for me the purest encapsulation of that idea. Troye tweeted, “I wanted to make an epic, timeless love song about how whipped i am” and he snapped, as the kids say (I think). And, god, the voraciousness of it. I am an animal with you. I will never get enough of you, in every sense, for as long as we have together. Desire and love and everything in between, not in spite of or notwithstanding sexuality but because of it, celebrating it, reveling in it. An ode to the boy I love. We’ll be more than getting through.

[msbiddles]

I love what Alison wrote for the OWOB so much

[oneweekoneband]

Troye Sivan and love stories; or, forever ain’t half the time I wanna spend with you

My lockscreen was flooded with notifications when I looked at my phone the morning after this photograph was posted to Instagram.

Since reading it a decade or so ago, I’ve been trying to persuade everyone I know (and sometimes people I’ve only just met when I’m a little drunk) to read my favourite book, Andre Aciman’s luscious summer romance Call Me By Your Name. This used to be quite difficult – it was out of print for years, only turning up as an occasional dog-eared copy for pennies on Ebay. After the 2017 release of Luca Guadagnino’s film adaptation, however, the book was reprinted. It got considerably easier to just shove a copy into a friend’s face, imploring them to drop whatever they were reading and delve in to the story of heady first love between precocious Italian-American Elio and his father’s research assistant, Oliver. Tonnes of people read it, and it felt like a well-tended personal secret had been revealed to the world.

And so, one morning, I found out that Troye Sivan had read it too. In six hours, according to his Twitter: he was reading fast to get to the sex scenes. In the book, sex and love are so closely related that they become the same thing. Sex is a miraculous act that elevates the lovers to a shared higher consciousness: “the kind of lovemaking that runs rings around time.” In ordinary life, sex can come from love, and love can come from sex: in Call Me By Your Name, these already abstract concepts become even more immaterial, growing together and into each other until they become the same thing. It’s classic fairytale, once in a lifetime, I’ve-waited-my-whole-life love (“we saw the stars you and I; and that is given only once”) but it’s headier than that: like love, like sex, it exists in the space where language falls apart.

It didn’t surprise me that Troye was so into Call Me By Your Name. His reading of it in December 2017 neatly aligns with the tipping point between Blue Neighbourhood and his second album Bloom. Showing a more sophisticated trajectory than the average ‘mature’ second album, Bloom held on to the wide-eyed romanticism of Blue Neighbourhood and introduced sex as an equal partner. On lead single “My My My!” he is sexually assertive in the verse, breathlessly instructing his lover to “go slow, no, now go fast” while proclaiming in the chorus that “I die every night with you” – the drama of Blue Neighbourhood transposed to an erotically-charged sweatbox. On “Seventeen”, Troye takes the intellectual cruising anthems of George Michael as his blueprint, but holds on to his characteristically romantic, hopeful core – even in this context, he’s ultimately looking for love not casual sex. I don’t even think he believes in casual sex.

“Bloom” is the most explicit example of this coexistence of love and sex. A rewrite of another love story trope – the teen pop virginity confessional – it’s simultaneously about loving someone so completely that you can’t fathom it, and about allowing them to fuck you in the arse for the first time because you love them so completely that you can’t fathom it. When I listen to it I think about the scene in Call Me By Your Name where Elio cracks Oliver’s egg at the breakfast table, with great care and attention and love, because “last night, he let me be his top”. The roles are reversed – Troye is obviously the Elio in all situations – but the singularity of love and sex is overt.

When Bloom was released, I saw some tweets suggesting that its inherent romanticism held up heteronormative ideas of monogamy; that a so-called ‘revolutionary’ queer pop record wasn’t queer enough, or revolutionary enough. I personally don’t think that the record is revolutionary (not everything by a queer artist has to be!) and I have a gripe with anyone who tries to homogenise LGBTQ+ experience towards some kind of gold standard of queer culture (in this case, non-monogamy). Troye’s queerness is integral to his music, and Bloom is based on his real-life experience – specifically his relationship with model Jacob Bixenman – so of course it is queer enough.

Maybe I’m just taking it personally because I’m also a queer person harbouring unrealistic expectations of fairytale romance. In “What a Heavenly Way to Die” when Troye gushes that “forever ain’t half the time I wanna spend with you” I nod in agreement, although I have no “you” to relate it to. Then I read that Sivan wrote the song while picturing him and Jacob as “two old gay guys” 30 years in the future, and then I think about the epilogue of Call Me By Your Name when time rushes forward, the only constant being Elio and Oliver, stunned at the resilience of their love that still runs rings around time, and I think, that’s what I want, too.

[msbiddles]

look, I didn’t say this one week one band wasn’t going to be self-indulgent

[oneweekoneband]

Strawberries and Cigarettes; or, I can still smell you on my clothes

If Blue Neighbourhood was the soundtrack to an imaginary coming-of-age film, it was inevitable that Troye’s music would turn up on the soundtrack of a real coming-of-age film. Love, Simon is an adaptation of Becky Albertelli’s beloved YA novel, and the first major studio teen film to feature an LGBTQ lead character. Troye’s contribution to the soundtrack is Blue Neighbourhood outtake “Strawberries and Cigarettes”, a vignette of just-lost love filled with yearning and gentle melancholy. The song plays over the car radio when protagonist Simon comes out to his friend in the wake of heartache.

It’s obvious that “Strawberries and Cigarettes” was written for Blue Neighbourhood – its suburban crush imagery (“blue eyes/black jeans/sugar and smoke rings”) and low-key electronics meant it jarred slightly when it was released in the midst of the more mature Bloom campaign. Jack Antonoff’s production sounds… like Jack Antonoff’s production, but the lyrics are a reminder of how honed Sivan’s teen dream aesthetic was during the Blue Neighbourhood era: the specifics of the couplet, “Nothing on my phone/But I can still smell you on my clothes” are heartbreaking and wholly contemporary.

Troye is returning to acting this year, taking a supporting role in Joel Edgerton’s gay conversion therapy drama Boy Erased – joining a starry cast that includes Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe, Lucas Hedges and Xavier Dolan. His song “Revelation” plays over the trailer – I haven’t heard it in full yet, but its ambient atmospherics and co-write from Sigur Rós’ Jónsi suggest a cohesion with the artistry of Bloom. It’s eligible for an Oscar, so Troye’s EGOT campaign starts here.

[oneweekoneband]

The Blue Neighbourhood Trilogy; or I see swimming pools and living rooms and aeroplanes

The Blue Neighbourhood Trilogy is a visual manifestation of its parent album’s mood. A short film or extended music video, it connects three of the album’s songs – “WILD”, “FOOLS” and “TALK ME DOWN” – into a tragic love story: the wide-eyed rush of “WILD” into the self-doubt of “FOOLS”, concluding with the self-destruction of “TALK ME DOWN”. Sivan sings in his bedroom, wrapped up in his boyfriend, intercut with scenes from a childhood spent at close quarters. The other boy’s father is abusive, and beats Sivan’s boyfriend when he finds them together. The “TALK ME DOWN” section takes place at the father’s funeral, where Sivan sees his now ex-boyfriend with a new girlfriend. The film ends with the boyfriend’s implied suicide, a jump off a cliff that is intercut with the two boys in childhood, jumping off a pier into a lake together, laughing and shuffling their tiny feet.

The film is directed by Tim Mattia, a music video director who specialises in these self-contained sagas: his credits include The 1975’s True Romance tribute “Robbers”, and The Killers’ Vegas showman drama “The Man”. It’s somewhere between an after school special on LGBTQ+ teen suicide and an old-fashioned melodrama: A premiere event was held at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles, just to further emphasise the latter. Today I’m going to be writing about Sivan’s love of love stories. The Blue Neighbourhood Trilogy is the most literal expression of this love: a film adaptation of the album’s classic coming-of-age romance.

[oneweekoneband]

SUBURBIA, or there’s so much history in these streets

Songs of suburbia are all about the duality of life in an in-between place: wanting to get out for good while sharply sensing the yearning you’ll feel once you’re gone. There’s a sense of resignation to the present moment, however temporary. Songs of suburbia create romance and drama from the banal: a heightened ordinariness that is the heartache in Roxy Music’s dream home; Springsteen’s darkness on the edge of town; Arcade Fire grabbing the keys to your mom’s car and screeching out the driveway. It’s everywhere on Troye Sivan’s Blue Neighbourhood, and its anthem is “SUBURBIA”.

Melodramatic and self-serious in the way only a teenager can authentically be, “SUBURBIA” is the soundtrack to a thousand coming-of-age movies. It sits on a bed of strings that acts as a cinematic sound effect: a kind of ready-made glamour that elevates the “history in these streets,” like the filter applied to an Instagram photograph. It pairs its sonic lushness with tangible lyrical subject matter – cars and blown-out stereos and a particular record that reminds you of home. It also hints at the specifically teenage certainty of knowing you’re too good for this place that so many people return to and settle for: the cocky questioning of “did you hear me on the radio, did you turn it up?”

There’s so many of these songs, and they come from houses and bedrooms and front lawns and shopping streets just outside of so many different places. There’s Troye near Perth, and My Chemical Romance near New Jersey, and The Go-Betweens near Brisbane. All satellites, all feeling the promise and pull of the nearby city. The songs all feel universal because of the inherent normality of suburban areas, but also because they all evoke another duality, an almost-adulthood – an in-between age spent in these in-between places.

I listen to songs of suburbia when I want to romanticise my own past. I grew up outside Wakefield in Yorkshire; technically a city, but without any of the glamour or mystery or clubs or record shops that I needed to facilitate becoming the adult I wanted to be: adults who drank and danced and fucked. The distance between my bedroom on my suburban street and the possibilities of the city always felt slightly too far; its sophistication and inherent adultness just out of reach. I wanted to get out because I didn’t want to be a child anymore. I wanted to be an adult with an identity, and an adult couldn’t sustain herself in such a non-place. But then again suburbia is adult, but a different kind: A secure kind filled with people returning, trying to be grown-ups, bringing up their own children.

Now I am an adult, and I do live in a big city. I get the same rush of nostalgia listening to “SUBURBIA” as I do when I pull into Northern English train stations, even though the streets Troye is singing about are in Australia, and he grew up in them ten years after I did. They evoke that universal, time-standing-still quality – kids on concrete, and boys fixing cars – that could be suburban scenes anywhere, at any time. It’s a memory of life, but it’s a hyperreal past life with the waiting and the dull Tuesday afternoons edited out. The songs tart up the place, smooth out the differences, turning memories into a film.

Songs of suburbia are eternal because suburbia is eternal. There’s countless miles and years between Troye Sivan’s version of suburbia and mine, but it’s essentially the same place. Cities change and develop, but the whole purpose of the suburbs is stability – the rows and rows of identical houses and identical gardens that you’ll grow up in, escape from and maybe one day return to, to start the cycle again.

[oneweekoneband]

TRYXE EP; or, glazed eyes empty hearts

Is there anything more teen-in-2014 than that ‘X’ in the title? Although he’d released singles and EPs before – a remix of one of them, charity single “The Fault In Our Stars”, appears as the final track here – TRXYE was Troye’s first proper popstar statement. Maybe because I only listened to it retrospectively, it didn’t grab me as much as the WILD EP did, but it’s an interesting prototype for the Troye of Blue Neighbourhood. “Touch” features a dry run of the wordless sampled chorus of “Youth”; “Fun” shares the carefree flirtatiousness of “for him.”, but with none of the specifics that make that song sparkle. Most intriguing is lead single “Happy Little Pill” – a Tove Lo-esque melancholy anthem to neon-lit hedonism: much darker and more adult than Blue Neighbourhood, or even Bloom. Sivan sings of nights spent with, “Nothing but time to kill/Sipping life from bottles,” his blank delivery dripping with exhausted nihilism. It’s an anomaly in Sivan’s discography: even later songs like “Seventeen” or “Animal” pair their night-time wandering with Sivan’s trademark romantic hopefulness. Usually, when Sivan sings about sex, he’s really singing about love: “Happy Little Pill” takes carnal pleasures at face value.

[oneweekoneband]

Juvenilia; or, yes Troye Sivan used to be a YouTuber

I like to think I’m good at keeping up with contemporary pop culture, but I have absolutely no clue about YouTubers. I found out that Troye Sivan used to be a YouTuber after I had listened to “WILD” a few times and wandered idly onto his Twitter profile: how could such a new artist already have over a million followers?

It turned out that Troye was already famous when he started making YouTube vlogs in 2012. I found out that he released his first EP aged 12, and starred in films, TV and stage productions throughout his childhood. YouTube made him famous outside of his native Australia: he started posting cover videos to the site in 2007, but it was his switch to vlog-style videos five years later that led to him amassing over 4 million followers in four years. I watched a few of his videos in preparation for this week, and although I can spot Troye’s star quality, I’m definitely not the target audience – I’m a 31-year-old woman, and I can’t really grasp the appeal of listening to a non-celebrity talk about their day. Not in a snobbish way; it’s just really not for me. I don’t want to pointedly ignore Troye’s past, I just… passively never think about it.

Sometimes I’ll be listening to Troye’s Spotify on shuffle and it’ll throw up a song from a film he was in when he was 13 as a surprise. Troye was in the public eye when he made these recordings of course, but I think it’s interesting how now, in the age of streaming, it’s harder to sweep these juvenile recordings under the rug. Older artists’ early demos and first tries are either hoarded by superfans or included as bonus tracks on re-released albums. Troye’s are all immediately available, if you’re inclined to scroll back far enough on his Spotify artist page.

Like fellow queer pop prince Olly Alexander’s past as an actor (which I wrote about for my One Week One Band on Years & Years here), Troye’s childhood endeavours are sometimes used as a stick to beat him with: a punchline to an unfavourable review. This mean-spirited dismissal can be seen as symptomatic of a certain critical mistrust of pop music: the view that pop is all a facade, or a marketing ploy, and the critic is there to uncover it on behalf of the poor girls/teenagers/queer people who have been strung along by it. There’s probably an essay to be written about authenticity and YouTube and pop, but as a complete YouTuber novice I’m not the one to write it – I do always note, though, how Troye taps into his past on social media: posting to-camera Instagram stories or hyping up his Twitter followers with a follow-spree. He is also, crucially, a pop fan above all else. This dual experience from both sides of the fandom/subject divide means he has an understanding of the beats of fandom, and an empathy for his audience that has undeniably benefited him. As he said on a recent Instagram story, you can take the boy away from YouTube, but you can’t take YouTube out of the boy.

[msbiddles]

I watched YouTuber videos for this OWOB: true commitment 

[oneweekoneband]

Troye Sivan - WILD (Lyric Video)

Buy, Download or Stream Wild by Troye Sivan taken from the album Blue Neighbourhood: https://UMA.lnk.to/TroyeSivanYM Subscribe to the official Troye Sivan Yo...

WILD; or, there’s still too long ‘till the weekend

“WILD” was the first Troye Sivan song I heard. The lead single from 2015’s WILD EP and the first track on his debut album Blue Neighbourhood, it’s a distillation of Sivan’s early pop stardom aesthetic: wide-eyed, hopeful and swathed in suburban imagery. Sivan is cushioned by the elation of a reciprocated crush – “Kissing up on fences and up on walls on the way home/I guess it’s all working out” – uncertain of where his daydreams end and his reality begins. The relationship seems new, maybe they’ve just met, but Sivan is already casting his crush as his ride-or-die in a breakout from the streets of their hometown, imploring him to “leave this blue neighbourhood”. It’s a Young Adult novel come to life. 

Hopefulness and romanticism are at the heart of all of Sivan’s work. Every spark of attraction, every glance, every new person contains the potential of a happy ever after. Pain and angst are welcomed as all part of the fairytale: “You make my heart shake, bend and break/But I can’t turn away.” Pining, heartache, the particular pain of a crush; Sivan romanticises it all. So do I, which is why I fell overwhelmingly in love with Troye and “WILD” on first listen – maybe I’ll get to discussing this a little later on. I know that I’m going to be returning to this (characteristically teenage) theme of melancholy, almost fictionalised romanticism over and over again this week. Even Sivan’s most recent work, flushed with real life love, is filled to the brim with it.

[oneweekoneband]

Hello OWOB readers! My name is Claire Biddles, and I’m thrilled to be writing about my favourite pop star Troye Sivan this week.

Troye Sivan is an Australian singer/songwriter who has been making music since he was a child, but whose current incarnation started with 2014’s TRXYE EP. This was followed by the WILD EP in September 2015, and debut album Blue Neighbourhood in December 2015. He is fresh from the release of his second album Bloom, which completed his canonisation as a bonafide pop prince. His songs are characterised by their soft synths and romantic melancholy, and latterly by a specifically queer joy. This week I’ll be covering Troye’s back catalogue (almost) chronologically, but mostly thematically: writing about romance narratives, suburbia, adolescence, audaciousness and queer female fandom. I’ve also asked a few of my friends who are fans of Troye to contribute guest posts, which I’m very excited to share.

The first post is coming right up, but in the meantime you can find me posting about songs and people I fancy on Twitter and Tumblr, and writing on the regular at The Singles Jukebox, The Wire, and The Line of Best Fit.

[msbiddles]

Hello Tumblr friends! I’m been away for too long, but I’m BACK today with news of something big I’ve been working on: a One Week One Band on my favourite pop star, Troye Sivan. I’ll be writing all week and I’d love for you to read.