In similar spirit, "Lola" by the Kinks!
6
Don’t forget “Emily” by Laura Nyro, a truly great musician and song writer. RIP.
9
I appreciate the gesture to de-stigmatize homosexuality. In my book, Dylan is the greatest songwriter of all time. However, merely changing a pronoun in a song doesn't automatically transform it into a song about "gay love." Any song about gay love needs to be embodied with that spirit and intention. Dylan is contributing to an EP that honors and supports same sex marriage. That is not the equivalent of recording a song specifically about gay love. And honestly, as much as I love Dylan, the song itself is not celebratory in its expressivity and is hard to image as a wedding anthem.
2
There are some great ideas here. But, with respect, is Dylan greater than Cole Porter? Stephen Sondheim? The Gershwins? Schubert? Or even Bruce Springsteen???
6
Disappointed that this article didn’t mention Linda Ronstadt’s 1977 hit “Carmelita”, in which she DIDN’T change Warren Zevon’s lyrics and openly sang a love song to another woman. Game changer.
10
In the age of gender fluidity aren't the lyrics to Dylan's "Just Like a Woman" open to interpretation? "Queen Mary she's my friend"?
4
You forgot to mention Britain's Calum Scott whose remake of Robyn's "Dancing On My Own" flipped genders and was a #2 UK hit in 2016. And America's Halsey took "Bad At Love" to #5 on the Billboard Hot 100 earlier this year; the song reminisced about her ex-boyfriends AND ex-girlfriends.
2
All of us old gay music majors get a twofer:
Songs re-imagined for us.
And the young'uns get an introduction to the Great American Songbook.
5
The essence of what they’re doing—chipping away at the stigma of homosexuality—is great, but I wasn’t aware that a particular song not being immediately relatable by someone meant that song wasn’t open to them.
Perhaps a little more thoughtfulness is warranted?
8
Why is there no mention of the Annie Clark aka St. Vincent contribution to this album? Very odd considering she is gay.
5
Back in the late '70s, I was in a small music store and on the sound system was a guy singing "My Boyfriend's Back." I thought it was pretty funny, and a couple of days later I decided to get the album, or tape, or whatever, for a gay friend's birthday. But when I asked about it, the clerk had no idea what I was talking about (though he thought it sounded like something he'd like). I've never heard it again--but I know I didn't imagine it. Maybe it was a club thing.
5
Joan Jett had a minor hit with her cover of "Crimson and Clover" in 1981.
She kept the female pronouns too: "I don't hardly know her/ but I think I could love her..."
5
Bob Dylan is not any NEW friend to cultural diversity or nonconformist sexual identity nor a NEW friend to gays. He's always been against bigotry. Both he and his friend Joan Baez performed at the Lincoln Memorial on 28 August, 1963 just before Martin Luther King gave his 'I Have a Dream' Speech. Dylan was also a friend to beat poet Allen Ginsberg. He came to Denver in his late teens, just before fame, tracing the footsteps of Kerouac who had lived in Denver. And let us not fail to notice the words of his early song 'Ballad of a Thin Man' that excoriates homophobia and shreds it to pieces.
31
In 1973, Roxy Music's Bryan Ferry recorded a version of "It's My Party" - on his solo album These Foolish Things - in which he did not change the lyrics from those sung a decade earlier by Lesley Gore to a man (as it happens, she later revealed that she should have sung them to a woman).
Be all this as it may, I recommend Ferry's album as a great one for parties.
7
Wait...did you all miss "women's music" in the 70s and 80s? Linda Tillery, Cris Williamson, Teresa Trull, Meg Christian, and many, many others recording with Olivia Records and some other labels.
13
"If you look at the history of pop music, love songs have predominantly come from one heterosexual perspective." Forget about religion. From evolutionary point it's the one that makes sense. The one with actual purpose.
3
You talk about "purpose." The purpose of love is not evolution of the species; it is the expression of connection between two people. Whether or not that leads to the continuation of the species is not relevant. Love has no obligation to reproduce the ones who love or push the species into the future; it has no other purpose than to express itself. You may want to force a connection between love and evolution, but that is just as "fundamentally" mistaken a projection of your own need to limit love to a linear, rational "intention" in the species, as those whose religion dictates that people get married to continue the species according to their god's plan, desire and demand. Too sort sighted, self-important, and self-righteous, Mohammed: Love is to love; anything that comes out of that, whether it is collateral damage or collateral benefit, is not part of its purpose. It is simply a secondary loss or gain without primary intention. Check yr version of fundamentlism at the door, please.
3
I've long noticed that traditional Irish songs - whether sung from the female or the male perspective - can be and is freely sung by both men and women singers. Even though the Irish were long repressed by Catholic mores and constraints, there weren't any restrictions in song. If it was a good song, anyone could sing it whether male or female.
Look up Tommy Makem's beautiful rendition of the traditional song "The Butcher Boy." He performed it on the Pete Seeger Show in the mid 1960's. It is on Youtube and is just beautiful.
Bob Dylan has expressed that Irish traditional music influenced his own music. I have no doubt that he was familiar with Makem's "Butcher Boy" as well as others.
11
Madame George was a song I grew up listening to as a child and loved. It was produced and released before I was born. I came about understanding it in my adolescence and I appreciate now, what the message of that song gave me when I was being molded in my youth. Something I was not getting from those around me.
I hope these songs might be able to do the same. Open eyes and hearts of those who are still young, to mold, shape and build a more inclusive experience.
Just because it has been done before does not mean that it should not be done again to share with those who may not even been born yet.
4
Did anyone ask?
Kind of lame, no? Not very creative. Everyone writes their own
1
GO BOB!
3
Sex and love are "completely" different. There is no thing such as either gay love, or straight love. Gay or straight sex, yes. Love however, originates, is felt or seen, the poet might say, between the eyes. Sex, always between the thighs.
5
Marvin Gaye's classics "What's Goin' On" and "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" seem promising [has nothing to do with his name!]...and they are bound to be back strong when his 80th birthday rolls around next year. Hard not to want to sing and dance to such music in ways that seem to invite inclusivity.
4
I always thought Dylan had the "Chimes of Freedom" tolling for gay lovers.
3
So who is going to rework AS TIMES GOES BY which I play often at small weddings? "Woman needs woman"? - Man must have his ..............man? John Poole
2
How can an article about queer pop music fail to mention Tegan and Sara? 'Boyfriend' was on top of my summer playlist in 2016.
5
Straight Kitsch for Gay Weddings!
1
Bob- a prolific lover and hater
1
“Odds and Ends”, from the Basement Tapes, could well be about a same-sex relationship gone bad: “You promised to love me, but what do I see / Just you comin’ and spillin’ juice over me”.
1
If such eminent moral and political philosophers sing about homosexual rights, they must be a good thing, and we should all support them.
Bob Dylan Sings About Gay Love? So that's that then. Society has reached EQUALITY! All because of Bob Dylan! Can't wait to hear what Wayne Newton has to offer...
(Yes, show biz really is the national religion)
https://emcphd.wordpress.com
2
You know, I'm a guy, and when Brittany Spears sings "I'm addicted to you ..." in her song Toxic, about a boy she likes, it isn't hard to listen and appreciate the song even though I find guys disgusting. Turning 'straight' songs into "gay" songs is stupid, as if gay people can't appreciate songs that aren't 'for them' just as straight men and women have always enjoyed songs that aren't 'for them'.
4
"Ballade of the Thin Man" records a straight persons reaction to witnessing gay sexuality.
3
I do love gay subtext but this song was written about a specific journalist who annoyed Dylan by asking too many questions. The journalist acknowleged that the song was about him in a Rolling Stone article.
4
How about John Lennon's You've Got to Hide Your Love Away? An honest first person testimony from 1965.
9
I really think that Lennon composition is about a man losing a woman to another man, dealing with the pain ("Hearing them/Seeing them/In the shape I'm in"), his anger with her platitudes when he reveals his feelings ("How can she/Say to me/Love will find a way"), and the final realization that he must show a falsely indifferent face to the world ("Hey!/You've got to hide your love away ...").
3
K.D. Lang, Michael Stipe, Luther Vandross, Ricky Martin, Ani DiFranco, Melissa Etheridge, Indigo Girls...
14
I have no issue with homosexual love songs, although no, there is no commercial future for gay exclusive songs. Arena's will never be packed throughout the country for gay rock and roll. But a song or two? well, sure, it may be recorded... but live performances are doubtful.
Good for some artists to record & thus measure demand.
30 years ago, political correctness was all the rage on the university campus I attended. No problem. Rather than just factually state the historical record that dead white European males founded the mass immigration to North America, it was lamented. Male sexuality was also just beginning to be dismantled, or disapproved of.
Skip ahead to today, and political correctness now includes an agenda to question gender. There are calls to ask students how they identify sexually and eliminate gender specific language or identity. All quite remarkable in and of itself. The movement almost comes across as a tacit invitation to explore if you might be interested in homosexuality.
But let's set sexual plumbing & social gender identity debates among fragile students away from home & on campus aside... Good music will find its audience. An exclusive focus on a gay audience has never been done because it doesn't make money. A few songs by major artists for the gay community makes sense.
Not everyone thinks this is something to celebrate.
1
Then don't buy it.
18
Actually, Sam Smith does not refrain from using same-sex pronouns. Listen to his latest album. Very superficial article, and idea.
5
He loves you, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya. Works too. Think about it Ringo and Paul.
Check out Joan Baez's cover of "Boots of Spanish Leather" from way back. And Van Morrison's gorgeous "Madame George" .
4
In most of her early Folk albums, with classic folk songs, Joan Baez NEVER changed the sex from the original gender when she sang them..Back in the '60's no one even had a second thought about that. Miss Baez has always been ahead of the curve.
23
What, no clips? I though the Internet had been invented so that we could hear the songs associated with articles like this.
3
Scalia sang a song whose meaning he radically misinterpreted if he felt it supported his retrograde stance on many issues. Note some of the last lines:
Come senators, Congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
17
Cher's The Way Of Love warn't no secret. Neither was Doris Day's Secret Love.
1
Mary Wells's early 60's hit, "My Guy," needs not lyric changes at all, just a change in the register and timbre of the voice singing it.
I have to admit that when Bob Dylan started recording standards, I could not help but think this was hypocritical by the man who proclaimed that he put an end to Tin Pan Alley. This thoughtful gesture re-evaluated my opinion. My hat is off to you Mr Dylan for your expansive creativity,
3
'Jet Pilot' by Dylan was a very sensitive treatment of the subject, years ahead of even himself.
4
They missed out on getting Ray Davies to reprise Lola - WAH!
6
Lest we forget... "Lola," by The Kinks is about a surprise transgender conversion experience. It's both brave and funny, given the time it was a hit, and that's a very hard trick to pull off. I hope the new songs are as good.
19
Lets not forget Empty Glass, which had Pete Townshend struggling with his sexuality in every song. Rough Boys is a great song about sexual identity and it slimly cracked the top ten when that subject matter was still quit taboo. But Rock and Roll was always about bisexuality is a way. I think that was why some acts went so hyper- masculine. Hair metal (post Alice) and Hip Hop, at least in their infancy, made no bones about who should or shouldn't be in bed with who.
5
I don't get the point of Justice Scalia singing "The Times they are A-Changin'". Mea culpa, I guess. Still, I'd like to hear him sing it. (Not live obviously).
MGM catering to its clientele? A breath of fresh air compared to the Pappa John’s and those bakeries that prefer discrimination to accommodation.
Only six tracks? What’s up with that?
2
The "Missing Side" of Bob Dylan -- Kidos to Bob and the other singers for taking such a loving stand for love. In a world polarized by hatred, they are showing the way forward.
One of the greatly under appreciated aspects of Bob's career is his encyclopedic knowledge of American songwriters. We know from interviews that he is constantly searching out long-forgotten gems from our nation's musical history -- not just pop or folk music, but the entire universe of song, including obscure accordion bands and Eastern European immigrant tunes. Anything and everything with heart and sincerity.
Bob is a great anthropologist in addition to his many other skills. It's not surprising that he could think of a good "switcheroo" song for this new album at a moment's notice. He is the Alex Trebek of the ever-expanding Great American Songbook. Not bad for a boy from Duluth! You betcha!
8
Just piling on to the "this is nothing new" theme:
-Joan Jett's cover of "Crimson and Clover" (1982)
-Stevie Nicks's interpretation of "Annabelle Lee" (2011)
9
A reminder that this album was commissioned with songs re-recorded to be appropriate for same-sex wedding celebrations. No need to waste time listing random songs, y'all!
2
A friend gave me "Jade and Sarsaparilla" -- 1976? Still love that album. My son and I rocked to Magnetic Fields quite a while ago. This one sounds fun, too, but my old ears have not excluded hetero- or homosexuals when I hear beautiful love songs :)
4
Another reason to love Bob Dylan and these talented artists.
Also, check out David Bowie's "John, I'm Only Dancing" and "Boys Keep Swinging."
And Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side" is now bouncing through my head...
42
And don't forget "Young Americans."
1
That’s great. Where’s the gay musicians/singers?
7
In the closet where the record companies put them.
Kele Okereke and St. Vincent, for two. Ben Gibbard has been an outspoken activist for gay rights for a while as well.
2
Kele Okerere is gay, and St. Vincent has been in same-sex relationships.
1
Rock on! I'm going to buy it just to support the concept.
20
When and where can we buy it? I NEED it for my Bob Dylan collection
16
Not only didn't Dylan speak out "in favor of gay rights in the past"; during his born-again phase, he made unkind remarks about gay people (and Muslims) from the stage. This was years after he'd co-written a song, "Jimmy Berman (Gay Lib Rag)" with Allen Ginsberg for Ginsberg's 1971 album, "First Blues." His choice for this project is a gender-reversed version of "She's Funny that Way"? Antiquated indeed.
6
All applause to Bob. He does it his way. As for his born-again phase, he made unkind remarks about himself, too. It was a strange cycle, but the music he made stands the test of time. Good for you, friend, and good for Bob.
18
I welcome it when people come around.
11
I just happened to be reading Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews today and here's a quote from an interview with Robert Shelton from March 1966:
"Sex and love have nothing to do with female and male. It is just whatever two souls happen to be. It could be male and female, and it might not be male and female. It might be female and female or it might be male and male. You can try to pretend that it doesn't happen, and you can make fun of it and be snide, but that's not really the rightful thing. I know, I know."
10
This definitely sounds like a cool project, though Pete Townshend might have beaten everyone to the party in 1980 with the release of "And I Moved" on his LP Empty Glass. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6vvTaJVuiY
11
Ricky don't lose that number?
1
My first thought went to that entire record. It was brave and deceptive. Rough Boys was a hit!
Bob Dylan knows what we all know...
Love is Love !!
40
I'm surprised that it has taken this long for openly gay artists to use same-sex pronouns in their songs. I suspect record companies were/are leery of alienating the masses and discouraged it. But really, I think it would be more authentic and sincere to hear the songs as the artists intended.
11
Carole King sang "Hey, Girl" (written by Goffin and King) on her album "Pearls" back in 1980. I always thought it the best version I had heard of the song. I guess she was before her time.
20
To have one of my all-time favorite artists taking part in this is amazing and mind blowing. Reading this article made me tear up. It's a challenging thing to be LGBT in a culture which so rarely reflects that experience, especially when it comes to music. Deep thanks to the artists who participated. Here's hoping that the concept and voices expressing love can grow further. Representation matters.
63
In 'As Time Goes By' (words and music by Herman Hupfeld) My brilliant beautiful musically-talented gay brother (still inspiring his patients, family and friends although in our memories) used to point out that 'Woman NEEDS man and man must have his mate' (......often another male..)...'that no-one can deny...it's still the same old story..a fight for love and glory...the world will always welcome lovers ...as time goes by....'
1