troye sivan "my my my!" -- 'one of the first great songs of this young year' or overpraised twink mediocrity??

the main thing i get from this video is a visit from the ghost of hangovers past

or an abercrombie ad lol. it's the song to play after 'padam padam' basically.

lol the most annoying expensive-drink homo bar in town just posted a screenshot from the video advertising their friday night

random but I like the level 42 'starchild' part

― xheugy eddy (D-40),

otm

it's funny how many of my gay guy friends whose relationship to pop music stays w/in the gay bubble are asking me about troye sivan now... once you start marketing your music strictly to gay guys it's prob not a good sign for your career as a pop musician

anyway i actually like this song ... the falsetto-y parts in the chorus are nice & are far more present than the chant-y parts

the 'in a dream' EP is really good so i'm looking forward to this album. i think he actually has good taste he's just not that dynamic of a singles artist

"STUD" from that EP is a much better version of "rush" imo ... the perspective is slightly different, but also deeper and more nuanced to me. and of course we don't have to say anything about how the years & years debut album threw the first brick at stonewall as far as "rush" is concerned. fun little song tho

it's funny how many of my gay guy friends whose relationship to pop music stays w/in the gay bubble are asking me about troye sivan now... once you start marketing your music strictly to gay guys it's prob not a good sign for your career as a pop musician

anyway i actually like this song ... the falsetto-y parts in the chorus are nice & are far more present than the chant-y parts

the 'in a dream' EP is really good so i'm looking forward to this album. i think he actually has good taste he's just not that dynamic of a singles artist

It’s interesting, I stand by everything that I typed about Troye upthread, but with “Rush” and hopefully with his subsequent songs/album I feel kind of owned? almost as if everything I previously expressed here was arrived at also by Troye and his team themselves and remedied with this song/video. Both are elevating and undeniably titillating, it feels like less of a commodification of the artist’s body/backstory and more of a celebration of a broader lifestyle/identity.

My enjoyment of Troye’s music has previously been coloured by a kind of camp appreciation but now I just feel bossed around and I love that.

and of course we don't have to say anything about how the years & years debut album threw the first brick at stonewall as far as "rush" is concerned.

Yeah the song feels very post-Y&Y to me, especially "Worship" (albeit that the shift in vocals for the chorus is inverted).

I was discussing with a friend who is into troye what we both thought about the song/video/reception-to-same.

I find the complaints about the video being a missed opportunity to highlight the diversity of "real" gay bodies a bit of a boring take, though not because they're wrong necessarily.

My friend made the point, which I think I agree with, that as titillating as the video is, it does feel pretty stage-managed, a calculated portrayal of the experience of going into a hyper-sexualised queer clubbing (and afters) environment, with little of the residual capacity for surprise and messiness that make those environments tempting to want to portray in the first place (though of course even the "real thing" suffers from this issue, just as each successive hit from a bottle of poppers is marginally less intoxicating).

But of course a carefully curated portrayal of "diverse" bodies would suffer from this problem even more, would feel even less connected to some semblance of real lived experience (by way of counter-example, I quite like the video for Calvin Harris's "Promises", and think it's great that it's centered around a black model with vitiligo, but the clip feels even less "real" to me than the clip for "Rush") - and perhaps made worse by the fact that troye is obviously a twink himself (and is always going to sit at the center of the video).

I wouldn't be surprised if the team behind the video clip discussed this a lot and decided that a video that leaned into blanket-twink-glorification was the lesser of two evils - it does feel like a reasonable stab at capturing the spirit of that scene (which, sure, is pretty body-totalitarian) - albeit that it doesn't really give me Sircuit vibes!

"Rush" is serviceable, I guess, and I'd dance to it, but when he slips into a euphoric mood I don't believe him. He's better at approximating the melancholy of Sufjan Stevens' non-diegetic Call Me By Your Name music.

i would rather never have sex again than listen to Sufjan Stevens’ sappy pablum from CMBYN. Awful music.

The obvious jokes about the video are somewhat boring, imo, but that’s also because I like twinks lol. Also disputable as to whether Troye is still a twink, as he’s nearly 28 years old. His look is twinky but that might just be the Marfan syndrome on display.

All I meant was that Sivan's "Seventeen" struck me as a better CMBYN-inspired song and performance than Stevens' contributions.

i would rather never have sex again than listen to Sufjan Stevens’ sappy pablum from CMBYN. Awful music.

I mentioned this video earlier ("Fast Slow Disco" is the name; I'd forgotten it before). I think it's better than the Troye, but I'm happy living in a world where both can exist.

My friend made the point, which I think I agree with, that as titillating as the video is, it does feel pretty stage-managed, a calculated portrayal of the experience of going into a hyper-sexualised queer clubbing (and afters) environment, with little of the residual capacity for surprise and messiness that make those environments tempting to want to portray in the first place (though of course even the "real thing" suffers from this issue, just as each successive hit from a bottle of poppers is marginally less intoxicating).

i was re-reading this thread from when "my my my" came out & i posted about how the video had this odd zoological quality where troye and all the shirtless muscle guys were gazing at each other but never touching. so "rush" is a progression insofar as there is skin on skin contact. but the video as a piece of art unto itself is pretty muddled -- it's gesturing at gay clubs, but also summer camps, and frat hazing, and some, like, ballet studio dance practice? there's a part about halfway thru where he's drinking a beer and grinding on another shirtless twink but then they separate into a choreographed dance that includes troye kicking his legs out to the side in his jaunty fashion like he's a leprechaun?

the body diversity debate feels like someone pressed one of 4 buttons on the gay twitter machine so i just don't find it interesting but the styling is curious to me insofar as we see troye in a jock but while wearing some sort of like crotchless chaps that let us know he's wearing a jock but he's framed in a way that doesn't show any bulge. we see some hint of his ass but not his full ass, tho we do see full extra ass. i have to assume it wasn't troye's choice to not show his own ass, tho perhaps i'm wrong. in the era of lil nas x, olly from years & years doing photoshoots in a versace jock etc the notion that the world can't handle troye sivan's bulge or bare ass feels a bit ridiculous

we see some hint of his ass but not his full ass, tho we do see full extra ass

i just had to highlight this because it's amusing.

like, when he unlocks his privates for you but he wants to make sure you know he's a "top."

i mean i ain’t gonna lie, i find a bit of crack or crown gets me much more excited than FULL ASS, at least in a cultural context, but maybe that’s just me.

Sivan's career consists of a bit of crack or crown.

i would rather never have sex again than listen to Sufjan Stevens’ sappy pablum from CMBYN. Awful music.

recut the last scene with 'visions of Gideon/is it a video'? replaced by 'oh, my genitals/i'm a janitor' imo

my intergluteal cleft is bleeding

Sivan's career consists of a bit of crack or crown.

there's an official extended mix streamable now but i feel like at 3:36 it's still like half as long as it should be?

“Got Me Started” is the new single. I think it’s okay on first listen tho the melodic line that comes in during the chorus is wild familiar, can’t place it though.

you mean the "shooting stars" sample? it's very funny here, just a completely different vibe to the rest of the song

song is pretty nice though

Yeah the sample feels a bit on the nose in an Australian context, though I guess deliberately and unashamedly so, and as such it sort of fits with the general 'twink in a Balenciaga t-shirt' vibe Troye is generally going for right now

it's quite strange because it's a very four-to-the-floor filter house sample but the song is breezy 2-step

lol see this is how little i know about this sort of thing— i know that shooting stars song and have heard it many many times but had no idea what it was or what it was called cuz it has generic bar song all over it

it was a minor hit here before really blowing up years later as a meme internationally

it got a lot of play in whatever hipstro clubs I was going to when it came out stateside like alongside classixx and treasure fingers and these sorts of things

yeah i mean i worked for XLR8R at the time it came out so i definitely heard it but probably lumped it in with a lot of other stuff that i didn’t like— that filter house sound got really tedious real quick.

Ew. This song is excruciating.

Say more?

The title of this song reminds me of that Molly Shannon bit, “don’t get me started, don’t even get me started”

i like "got me started" a lot... my interactions w/ this sample have been very minimal. the production is a cool melding of like 2 step and organ house. also dig the way the chorus vocals are treated.

i feel like one of the few gay guys alive who finds him non compelling to the point of boredom as a visual artist but musically speaking is quietly one of the more compelling pop stars going from a taste & execution standpoint. curious if he can string it together for a whole full length

"i feel like one of the few gay guys alive who finds him non compelling to the point of boredom as a visual artist"

this is a lot of words to say that you're not into twinks

to each their own in that regard— fwiw he does have mild Marfan syndrome, which does tend to yield…twinkier results whether or not one wants them. in his case, he’s embraced it.

as far as aesthetics beyond just the bodies in the videos, i think that one of the elements that feels interesting to me is that there is a mainstreaming of certain queer signifiers via his videos and etc. while i can ramble about assimilation til my face turns blue, the unapologetic queerness of the videos is refreshing, particularly because we know it’s not just some pandering shit.

i like the new song too, cautiously anticipating the album

great album

also, this video!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhGl8McrOHo

that video is amazing but also… cue the discourse lol

have had the album on repeat for the past couple of days, so good

I've warmed up to "Got Me Started" and this thing has a handful of strong tuneful mumbly jams.

lol only just noticed the Star of David he wears in the video which is always but esp in the context of this past week... a choice

my my my

Lol @ the Rush - "Power Windows" tee.

I like this song the least of the singles so far, but the video the best

was a bit iffy on it at first, but now am obsessed with the song, I guess the video helps

My fav on this was actually the closer, "How To Stay With You." Pretty solid record. Much better than the last one.

Is there something missing about this video? Makes me feel more comfortable to show off my own chicken legs but aside from that I'm... not gonna watch it a second time

Really digging this thing after walking, exercising, and driving to it for a week.

I am taking a break from grading papers -- one of my students wrote about the rejection of hedonism in "Got Me Started" (he was describing hedonism and I was like...there's a word for that :)