Post-Ironic Stanning

Coming through like a western wiiiind

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MOTHER

A truth: I looooove Carly Rae Jepsen.

Another truth: I don’t know if I’m joking.

This is not meant to downplay the fact that I listen to Carly Rae Jepsen all the time and deeply enjoy her music. But the extent to which I truly love her as a figure? It’s an open question for myself.

You see, I think I love, maybe, every single pop girl? I made a TikTok recently about how most gay boys seemingly have an infinite well of love to give the pop girls, and the enthusiastic response I received on that video proved that this notion feels resonant. Beyond the obvious ones — Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Rihanna, Cher — queers, but particularly gay boys, have a cultural tendency towards diva worship all the way down. There’s always enough room for another pop girl. Ava Max, get in here!

Of course the idea of diva worship has a long history. The most obvious example from days far passed is Judy Garland who made her living after the peak of her glory days as what The Advocate called “the Elvis of homosexuals.” Garland used to sell out shows in the late ‘60s with audiences filled with gay men who identified with the long arc of her career — from her status as Dorothy, the prototypical ordinary girl plucked by the wind and thrust into fabulous, sparkly greatness, to her latter days as a washed-up icon who performed in a hazy stupor while flashing her wit, elegance and one-and-only singing voice.

Garland was, in many ways, the first diva who gained the worship of a large gay audience, but she would not be the last. There is something inherently appealing about the diva to the queer ethos. The diva combines the grandeur of the star with the inherent vulnerability of the maligned. It is both a strength and a sensitivity that the queer consciousness can both identify with and aspire to. In that sense, the infinite well of love that queer audiences have for “pop girls” makes sense, because those two qualities always coexist within divas, no matter who.

And of course with pop girls, there is a natural element of camp that beckons the attention of queer consumers. “Camp,” which Susan Sontag iconically codified in her 1964 masterpiece, “Notes on Camp,” is an aesthetic ethos and potential political project. “Camp” is the extreme attempt at grand aesthetics, the failure of which to achieve gives such an attempt its deliciously campy quality. It’s “so bad it’s good,” but gauche and unaware. And it is one’s ability to take pleasure in that failure where the politics comes in; if we can say bad is good, then us too, the bad ones, the heathens and scum, can be good. So Judy Garland’s booze-filled fabulousness, which speaks to both a virtuosity and personal catastrophe, is camp. It’s messy, it’s great, it’s tragic: it’s a failure.

“Iconic” then, that perennially usable adjective, is thus camp in descriptive praxis. Lady Gaga wearing a meat dress is “iconic.” So is, Britney striking a stalking paparazzi with an umbrella. So too is Mariah Carey pretending to “not know” Jenifer Lopez, someone she clearly does indeed, know. All of these examples, that are so effortlessly celebrated by the queer community as iconic cultural moments, are camp because in their description as “iconic” they are typified as succeeding beyond legible moral standards. They strike the viewer, the witness, as excessive or odd or sad or marvelous, but with that passing word, “iconic,” we elude the need to define the pleasure of their impact. They simply are the moment.

Its that moral and aesthetic lack of clarity that I believe allows for the infinite stanning of pop girls. While gay icons may seem classically required to exude the vibes of Judy or Cher — that is the over-the-top, the messy, the glamorous — the overwhelming queer adoration for every pop girl shows that something more than a love for excess is at work here. We don’t know if we’re joking because we don’t know what we like and that’s, sort of, the point. We don’t know what’s good and we never want to define it, because once the idea of “good” is solidified, we surely fall outside its bounds.

Which brings me back to Carly Rae Jepsen. To your average human being CRJ is no more than the singer of the most popular song of 2012, “Call Me Maybe,” which is, in many ways, the perfect pop song. I will not go into it; you know it, you probably once liked it marginally, the story is over. What the initiated know though, is that since 2012, CRJ has made some of the most perfect bubble-gum pop music of the 2010s. Her post-“Call Me Maybe” album, “Emotion,” is widely considered by pop-connoisseurs as a masterpiece. Songs like “Run Away With Me” and “Emotion” are simply put, perfect. They are expertly crafted and strike the right balance between bubbly fun and the earnest melancholy of having a crush. They are delectable. But there is nothing truly campy, or over the top, about them. They just, kind of, rock. And yet, even in their solid un-remarkability, the gays are livingggg.

All of this makes me think of a really amazing TikTok that my friend Niko sent me. It’s of a young queer person who, when speaking to the camera says, “The way that literally no one these days is talking about how Meghan Trainor is mother right now,” referring to of course Meghan Trainor, a pop girl who had the biggest song of 2014 and has since, um, like been a reality TV judge? After the direct-to-camera moment, the TikTok cuts to the perspective of watching them from the side as they say “she’s literally mother, I’m gagged.” Ominous, moving classical music comes in and drowns out their speaking. The video literally then fades to black. There is an uncanny sadness to it all. Why is she “mother?” Why do they stan her?

The answer doesn’t really matter. In our infinite adoration of pop girls we have lost any semblance of why we stan. And in that gaping space of aesthetic iconography we can allow ourselves to worship anything, even failure. Failure, it seems, is peak iconic. Gays love Dua Lipa for example, partially because she is iconically horrible at dancing. There is even a whole meme that stems from the adoration of her unenthused dance moves; under her disastrous performance at the 2018 BRIT awards, the top comment was this (and yes, this was a different Tobias who commented this):

“Go girl give us nothing” pretty much sums it up. We celebrate the failed and broken and the boring and unenthused and name it as iconic or “go girl” because, whether we know it or not, we want the space to also fail. I hesitate to too closely link Dua Lipa’s dancing fopaux with CRJ and her amazing, if not a bit boring, pop music. But I think there is surely an element of “go girl give us nothing” for her legions of gay fans. We love her, and we love her music, and yet we know that these are not the world’s most inventive songs. They are great and enjoyable and she, as a figure, seems nice and fun! But that’s sort of it. But there is space for the unamazing. Hell, there’s space for the bad. And the wild. And once in a while, the truly great. It’s all iconic.

So when CRJ put out her first single in over 3 years, I had one only one register to receive it: outright adoration.

But I guess it’s pretty good.