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Halloween with Mika

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It’s Halloween, so I present you with Mika‘s “Lollipop’:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6md5RSnVUuo

I don’t want to get to technical about the meaning of this song, except to say that it may not be about sucking too hard on lollipops (in the same way that Serge Gainsbourg’s “Les Sucettes” was not about sucking too hard on anise popsicles). He seems to be warning young girls about the dangers of being slutty and sucking too hard on other people’s ‘lollipops’ (wink, wink, say no more) rather than looking for true love.

If I was really cynical, I would say that he is not talking about girls at all (he does start the song with a shout out to himself with a “Hey, Mika!”), but about himself as a man who is recalling a walk with his mother one day and has heard her motherly advice. “Love’s going to get you down,” says mother, if you engage in deeper emotional attachments with women. This might mean that he should not “suck too hard on [life's] lollipop” but should instead cause him to drift freely from woman to woman with meaningless emotional attachments, ensuring that love won’t get him down, while keeping her darling boy attached to his mother and no other as his chief emotional attachment.

But then we get to Mika’s homosexuality. The Queer Beacon insists that he is in fact gay, but he himself will not say (Wikipedia), perhaps because it would hurt his album sales (which it probably would) but more likely because defining himself would limit his quality as an artist of being everything to everyone without limits.

If this is the case (and I’m not saying that it is), then maybe he is retreating to an infantile fantasy in which his life has not been defined by his growth into his sexuality, which he might think is misplaced. If nature was just, he should have been a woman. Since nature is what it is, he must travel in the shadows of nature, being what nature made him: a woman trapped in a man’s body, struggling to break out but fearful of consequences (which can be horrible) at the same time.

Now that he’s grown older, and into his sexuality, he’s realized that he is by nature a homosexual and he must suck penises of risk the very fate his mother had warned him about as the fate of normal heterosexual men. They will be brought down by sucking too hard on penises, but it is exactly that that will save him, the unnatural man. Unless he does this, his creative spirit will be stifled and he will not have “stood on his own two feet” and expressed himself.

And so Mika betrays his mother by “sucking too hard” on penises, but he is modest, not for his own sake, but for the sake of his mother, who has warned him of “what people say.” So he reverts to a childhood fantasy of metaphor in which men are transformed into boys, boys into girls, and penises into lollipops. Those in the know, know; those who don’t can take comfort in a sweet song of childhood innocence, much like “Les Sucettes” that so disturbed France Gall when she was old enough to know what Serge was doing to her, pulling her strings and making her into a “Puppet on a String” without her knowledge or consent.

Grace Kelly

Then there are Mika’s role models, which he cites in his song ‘Grace Kelly.’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaEPCsQ4608

Once again, he’s talking to a young girl, but she speaks in voice of a woman much older that she is and in the stilted accent of a noir femme fatale in a B-movie (although I have watched every available film noir in Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, I cannot identify the film).

After being rebuffed, he tries to hook up with her by becoming “Grace Kelly.” But if not Grace Kelly, he’s not all that picky, and he tries on other personas, including gay icon Freddie Mercury. But in the end, it really doesn’t matter what persona he takes. All that matters is that the “other” “likes him without making [him] try.” His natural inclination is to be loved for himself alone, but that means giving up the standard existential identity appropriate for “natural” man.

He could be any number of things:

I could be brown
I could be blue
I could be violet sky
I could be hurtful
I could be purple
I could be anything you like
Gotta be green
Gotta be mean
Gotta be everything more

This behavior translates him out of his lonely world and back to being “the artist as everyman for everyman” in much the same way as Woody Allen is everyone and no one at the same time in Zelig.

This is the origin of costume and masks which we wear, not just once a year but everyday of our lives, whether we are heterosexuals of homosexuals. We may want to tear off the masks, or we may want to hide behind them for a little while longer. But in any case, neither extreme position is reachable. Mika (if he is in fact gay) can never abandon himself to become a true Zelig (such people tend to end up believing that they are gods) anymore than he can become an isolated person all to himself (such people are sociopaths). All passes through an imaginative and by nature distorting metaphor before reaching our minds as “truth.”

On the other hand, maybe that’s just me.

Happy Halloween!


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