You may recall that the pop music realm of the early 80s was dominated by some interesting sexual personnae. Now close your eyes and think back...there's Madonna rolling around in her slutty wedding dress!...there's Boy George, bringing drag into the living rooms of middle America!...there's sexy manboy Prince in sausage-casing velvet pants...and there's...Michael Jackson....
And there's Annie Lennox. I've begun thinking of her as Madonna's darker cohort. While Madonna stared into the camera with her trademark mixture of contempt, come-hither and brute power, Annie was crossing her own power lines by cross dressing, dancing robotically, then getting nasty with her own anima.
She matches Madonna in her ability to transform herself, and her exquisitely androgynous beauty took her places that Madonna did not or could not go. She was a beautiful boy singing about sexcrimes. She was a a mechanized chanteuse singing her own corrupt gospel. She was, perhaps most amazingly, the famous court model statue of Nefertiti made flesh (a theme she would adopt later, and even more startlingly, in her video masterpice "Money Can't Buy It.)
After some less effective artistic turns, she closed the circle and went full on drag again in her first solo effort, Diva. Watching the opening video of her video collection, "Why," I just couldn't get past her melting beauty...but there was something else. Ah yes. After years spent playing a man, she's became the woman who played a man and returned to her feminity through drag. This is one of the most miraculous artist statements I've ever witnessed.
Over all these years Annie Lennox has constructed a sexual house of mirrors, ripe with transsexuality, a sumptuous, understated sadism and the most delicate kind of narcissism. No other pop culture figure taught me so much about sex. Not that she didn't make some mistakes along the way.
Anyone else a fan?
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