This shit world literally did not deserve unproblematic fave and glorious angelic-voiced bisexual Parsi scion Freddie Mercury who descended to our Earth from the skies to teach us to rock, love, and find some small happiness, and now sits in the lap of the gods, soul painted like the wings of butterflies
There’s been at least 1 iconic bi musician in the spotlight for every decade in the last 100 years. And there’s at least one for many genres too!
1910’s: Bessie Smith, Blues & Jazz
She was one of the most popular singers during the time, and was given the nickname “Empress of the Blues”. She embraced her bisexuality. In fact, one of her hits, “It’s Dirty But Good” includes lyrics alluding to lesbian sex.
1920’s: Josephine Baker, Jazz
Cabaret dancer, singer, and actress. She fled the US because of racism and served France in WW2 as a spy against the Nazi’s. She came back to the US and was a civil rights activist. She was more private about her bisexuality but she is linked to bi artist Frida Kahlo.
1930’s: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Gospel, R&B, Jazz, Rock
She’s called the “Godmother of Rock n’ Roll”, and is a huge pioneer in this genre. The PBS special “Sister Rosetta Tharpe: The Godmother of Rock n’ Roll” tells us she was bisexual, and tried to live as openly as she could during her time.
1940’s: Billie Holiday, Jazz
One of the most legendary jazz singers of all time. Her stormy relationships with men inspired many of her songs, but she was also linked to actress Tallulah Bankhead.
1950’s: Sammy Davis Jr., Jazz, Swing, Traditional Pop
“Rat Pack” singer, dancer, vaudevillian. He was a huge civil rights activist, and after converting to Judaism he found solidarity between the Jewish and black communities’ struggles. He fought for interracial marriage. He was a supporter of gay rights, and spoke openly about his affairs with men and women.
1960’s: Janis Joplin, Pshychedelic Rock, Blues
Bridged the gap between pshychedelic rock/blues and soul. Lived only 27 years but her musical legacy didn’t wait for her death to start influencing the sound of her contemporaries. Openly had relationships with women, hid nothing.
1970’s: Freddie Mercury, Hard Rock, fused with everything else under the sun
The most famous bisexual in history. Voice of an angel. Loved titties. Wouldn’t record a duet with Michael Jackson because he brought his llama to the studio. Musical prodigy. He knew he’d be a legend from the beginning. He was more private about his sexuality, but he dated men and women nonetheless, and he wrote and sang about them.
1980’s: Grace Jones, Funk, Disco
Androgynous icon. No record of her actually using the word “bisexual”, though has declared her attraction to women, and of course married men. She’s a gem. Her early music was rooted in disco, but she brought her own Jamaican reggae influences to the sound. Her striking look made her a favorite muse within the New York art scene of the 70’s and 80’s.
1990’s: Billie Joe Armstrong, Punk Rock
Frontman of Green Day, who are credited with capturing the mainstream’s interest in punk rock. They were still very political, and wrote about not blindly following the government. Their song “Coming Clean” is about him questioning his bisexuality.
2000’s: Amy Winehouse, Jazz, Blues, Soul, R&B
Brought jazz and blues back to the mainstream after 40 years of them essentially being irrelevant to popular music. Her pen game was unmatched. Unapologetically bisexual and sang about women in a few songs.
2010’s: Janelle Monáe, Funk, R&B, Pop
A protégé of Prince, and the funkiest entity in the music industry since his passing. She has spoken about how her gender non-conformity is an homage to her working class roots, and speaks about feminism, race, and sexuality in her music. A legend in the making.
It makes me really happy that bisexuals have played a big part in shaping entertainment and music and have been a huge presence for the past century. Part of why it makes me feel so happy is because bisexuality is often dismissed as performative, attention-seeking, and empty. And it’s like, well…we’re definitely performing…and we just so happen to have gotten attention from it. But it’s not unsubstantial. Bi entertainers are singing about the meaningful relationships that their attraction to multiple genders has enabled them to have.
2. you know, we have fun here, with the word “meme,” but according to meme theory, which is an actual thing pioneered by reptilian human impersonator Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, most of what we call memes are very unsuccessful memes. A meme, in the scientific sense – if one is generously disposed to consider memetics a science on any particular day – is an idea that acts like a gene. That is, it seeks to replicate itself, as many times as possible, and as faithfully as possible.
That second part is important. A gene which is not faithful in its replication mutates, sometimes rapidly, sometimes wildly. The result might be cancer or a virus or (very very very rarely) a viable evolutionary step forward, but whatever the case, it is no longer the original gene. That gene no longer exists. It could not successfully reproduce itself.
The memes we pass around on the internet are, in general, very short lived and rapidly mutating. It’s rare for any meme to survive for more than a year: in almost all cases, they appear, spread rapidly, spawn a thousand short-lived variations, and then are swiftly forgotten. They’re not funny anymore, or interesting anymore. They no longer serve any function, and so they’re left behind, a mental evolutionary dead end.
This rendition of Freddie Mercury’s immortal opera Bohemian Rhapsody is about the most goddamned amazing demonstration of a successful meme I’ve ever seen. This song is 42 years old, as of 2017. FORTY TWO YEARS OLD. And it has spread SO far, and replicated itself across the minds of millions of people SO faithfully, that a gathering of 65,000 more or less random people, with nothing in common except that they all really like it when Billie Joe Armstrong does the thing with the guitar, can reproduce it perfectly. IN PERFECT TIME. THEY KNOW THE EXACT LENGTH OF EVERY BRIDGE. THEY EVEN GET THE NONSENSE WORDS RIGHT. THEY DIVIDE THEMSELVES UP IN ORDER TO SING THE COUNTER-CHORUS.
“Yeah, Pyrrhic, lots of people know this song.”
Listen, you glassy-eyed ninny: our species’ ability to coherently pass along not just genetic information, but memetic information as well, is the reason we’re the dominant species on this planet. Language is a meme. Civilization is a collection of memes. Lots of animals can learn, but we may be the only animal that latches onto ephemera – information that doesn’t reflect any concrete reality, information with little to no immediate practical application – and then joyfully, willfully, unrelentingly repeats it and teaches it to others. Look at how wild this crowd is, because they’re singing the same song! It doesn’t DO anything. It’s not even why they showed up here today! If you sent out a letter to those same 65,000 people that said, “Please show up in this field on this day in order to sing Bohemian Rhapsody,” very few of them would have showed up. But I would be surprised to meet a single person in that crowd who joined in the singing who doesn’t remember this moment as the most amazing part of a concert they paid hundreds of dollars to see.
And they’re just sharing an idea. It’s stunning and ridiculous. Something about how our brains work make us go, “Hey!! Hey everybody!! I found this idea! It’s good! I like it! I’m going to repeat it! Do you know it too?? Repeat it with me! Let’s get EVERYBODY to know it and repeat it and then we can all have it together at the same time! It’s a good idea! I’m so excited to repeat it exactly the way I heard it, as loudly as I can, as often as possible!!”
This is how culture happens! This is how countries happen! Sometimes a persistent, infectious idea – a meme – can be dangerous or dark. But our human delight at clutching up good memes like magpies and flapping back to our flock to yell about them to everyone we know is why we as a species bothered to start doing things like “telling stories” and “writing stuff down.”
“That’s a lot of spilled ink for a Queen song, Pyrrhic.”
Loki is the Philosopher King 