I’ve been listening to Eurovision winner Måneskin’s new album for a week straight now, blowing out my ear drums as the album soundtracks my work days.
I’m obsessed, and aside from the quality of the music, the band’s obvious appeal comes from their laissez-faire approach to sexuality and gender presentation, a Zoomer glam rock that pulls off queerness with more nonchalance than I’ve ever been able to muster.
Theirs is a funk-inflected sound that puts me in mind of another band I once listened to on loop: Franz Ferdinand, whose self-titled debut album came out when I was not yet fifteen.
I’ve always felt a kinship with the male rocker point of view. That was, after all, the bulk of the music I listened to growing up, due to both my own adolescent internalized misogyny, and the industry’s insistence on conflating “serious” music with male music.
But an unanticipated side-effect of my dude-heavy former playlists is that some of the first queer desire I ever expressed came in the form of these songs, sung about women I was still a few years from consciously desiring myself.
And in Franz Ferdinand’s first album there was something more: A less-precisely-defined sort of desire I had only ever heard in the Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack and in “Lola” by The Kinks. A queer desire.Most of that is thanks to the song “Michael,” which tells the story of a homoerotic dance floor experience between friends. Transgressive and rough around the edges, the song seems like a forebear of Måneskin’s music, including the Eurovision-winning “Zitti e buoni.”
Compare “this is where I’ll be / So heavenly” to (translated from the Italian) “Take me to where I’m floating / I’m short of air here.” And the lyrics “Sticky hair, sticky hips, stubble on my sticky lips” to “You’re dirty, bros, full of mud / cig stains between your fingers.”
In 2004 “Michael” would open up a psychological space that transcended the sexual roles I thought I would occupy, allowing me to conceptualize myself as less passive, less feminine, less concerned with what was expected of me. It’s very much a similar vibe to “Zitti e buoni,” with its wailed refusals to sit down and shut up and repeated proclamations that “we’re out of our minds but different from them.”
That I originally managed to find this boundary-less eroticism in such an utterly straight band is a testament to the endless resourcefulness of queer desire, which has always been able to find itself in even the most barren of cultural landscapes.
Almost two decades later, it’s thrilling that I have found that desire in rock again, and to find it as a revival of the glam traditions of long hair, tight outfits, and makeup. To find, in such a very masculine form of musical expression, a band unafraid of a passionate kiss in the heat of victory. A rock band that found its international footing at, of all places, the perennially gay Eurovision Song Contest.
I’m so glad that a newer generation gets this same sort of sexual freedom, played out more explicitly than ever before. I’m glad this music, as sexily fluid as it is hard-hitting, is back. Ciao, I’ve been waiting for you.
_____________________________________
First published as a Twitter thread in 2021.
Alyssa Favreau 