A Powerful and Playful, Sexy Male Entertainer – Finally

 By Xena

9 December 2009

 Warning – for the utterly devoted fan only….

Dear Adam………….Open Letter from Xena and her all-volunteer army of female Glambertinae warriors and some men.

Adam, you are so right about the double standard in entertainment and we women have had it!  Thank you for making a statement on behalf of female fans everywhere – we have had to put up with male fantasies including pseudo lesbian under and overt-tones for too long, and it is about time female audiences got equal consideration.

Female performers – great bodies, fit and functional for sexy performances, decked-out in costumes designed to titillate and thrill, provocative choreography for whom?  Are girls and women supposed to identify with the performer?  Not working for us.  Entertaining – yes, make us dance- yes, but inspire passion and panty tossing? – not so much.

What do we get from today’s male entertainers?  Baggy jeans, ill-fitting “band” t-shirts and the latest fashion statement – the plaid shirt – if there are no sleeve tattoos of skulls, flowers, love/hate/kill mixed messages to show off , then the sneakers, running shoes or whatever that casual, sporty footwear is called.  They also have other favourite accoutrements, charming to some – piercings and shaved heads or hair so long, it has its own choreography.

And that big ol’ fan of yours, Mr. M&M Esq. – he’s so ashamed of his now creaky body, no one has seen it in years, covered as surely as a bride of the Taliban.  Isn’t he great? So lyrical too – must have the audience singing along and dancing in the aisles, having left their minds and manners at the door.  At what age does the Angry Young Man have to become the Angry Old Man?

Women want and deserve men with great bodies, in sexy performances, decked out in costumes designed for thrill and swoon – and by costumes, there is much leeway.  Unlike female performers, “less is not always more”.  It helps to have a great voice – that we take for granted, acknowledging your versatility and supernatural abilities with vocalizing.  A sexy attribute, when presented as such.

The Wardrobe and Accoutrements

It’s not just the “just got out of bed look” genre of performers,  we get male entertainers more conservatively dressed – as you were in “Tracks of my Tears” and “Change is Gonna Come”.  More recently re-working the leather jacket from the Queen number or the impeccable tux on the red carpet at the AMAs.   Were those a pair of baroque pearls in the collar?  A “007 Adam Bond” for the 21^st Century, just put down the gun and pick up the martini.  Don’t laugh – Xena’s written it already.

Just looking for some songwriters for the musical extravaganza numbers.  A pretty boy and girl for each arm too.

 

But the other guys are still missing something, that je ne sais quoi – actually I do sais quoi.  They’re missing the chassis, the engine and the horsepower, they’re the Mini, safe and economical to your Jag, fast, dangerous and extravagant.  Leather jackets, boots and belts – tuxes, suits, silk shirts, silk ties, snakeskin and bare skin, delicately hirsute and those provocative gloves leaving the “come hither” fingers loose and free, sparkling with gems and available for all manner of adventure.  Just ask Juneau, Mistress of the Glove Wardrobe for more on gloves.  The textures of soft, rough, pliable, smooth, cool, warm in perfect combination and worn like the Jag’s perfect interior – the enticing envelope, with the carefully placed bits of metal, the studs and spikes to prick, to glint as the body moves.

  Look down if you can – feathered gloves

  

Shake the Booty, Pump the Body and Thrust whtev

Months into our obsession, a stranger, an uninitiated Glambertina, partway through the immersion process and during the replay of your Bowie performance in Syracuse on a 72” TV, declared “that performance is gay.”  Shocked!! Sharply drawn breath!  We were staggered by this news, reaching for another pomegranate martini to steady us, here it was September and no one had told us.  “Really? How could we know? It works on us!”  We like it “Gay” – must be going to the wrong clubs.  Really do need to get out of the suburbs sometimes.  Are there any more from whence you came?

Way more fun watching you at work, to take off a jacket, polish the mic stand, gracefully dodge whips and bras and missiles of undetermined origin.  From the sublime to the ridiculous, you gave it all on tour.  From the moment of your appearance, emerging from the sfumato atmosphere of the stage in Whole Lotta Love, to the final glimpse as you descended to the lingerie warehouse, you held the audiences in thrall.  Eerily contemplative Mad World – alone on stage, body tranquil, eyes worked their magic in the stillness – ah yes, those eyes.  Only intensified by eyeliner and even unadorned, the way you look into the camera and consequently the viewer, conveys “it’s just the two of us, come closer”, with the promise of something more.  That’s the close-up but from the stage, a fleeting connection eye-to-eye and my daughter was ready to leap the barrier and join the band, only Ray stopped her.

What other male performer will spread his showy-eyed peacock tail – at once intimidating and enticing?  Today, the men look more like the drab pea hens, blending into the crowd.  How lazy is that?  Work it people!  The women do, they work hard for the money, aren’t we worth the effort by the men?

Let us pause for a moment to recall the resplendent James Brown, hardest working man in show business, godfather of soul, progenitor of funk and creative force in R&B, each piece of music infused with meaning.  It was James Brown spinning on the turntable the night I met my husband in the tiny black-lit disco.  Frankly sexual, a whisper of danger, air of unpredictability, a lot of pride, and he just had to move to the music!  Expressive to the core and what a show!  He worked for the applause, as did Freddy Mercury, as do you, filling our senses to overflowing in a live performance.

Courage – qui audet adipiscitur

On American Idol, by creating a vignette for each song, we got the full-on three dimensional Adam attention – each week you encouraged us to take in yet another persona “Do you like this?  I made it just for you.”  We did take them and love them all.  Thankfully you brought the same risk-taker attitude to your tour performances, your new performances and FYE video – a tour de force!

There is no retreating from controversy with you, even when it is unintended.  Courage, confidence gained through effort, proud and loud add up to ‘powerful’.  It seems dear Adam, that you might have power and leadership thrust upon you, however reluctant you are to carry those burdens.  You have brought your fierce fandom along and however tested, are loyal and with their eyes wide open, determined to keep you working.  Your conduct in crisis is graceful but firm, the iron fist in the velvet glove.  We are not skerrrrrred.

Courage + leadership + power = sexy

From Bad Boy to Dangerous Dude

And those new characters you have shown us – you’ve grown from the bad boy asking for Satisfaction, even naughtier in Ring of Fire, to emerge as Mephistopheles, taking us on a tour of Dante’s second circle of hell and you wear it all so well.  You’re not putting that genie back in the bottle.  The Tempter in a good suit and silk tie can get in anywhere he wants.

In the FYE video, a character at once so dangerous and compelling, larger than life, masterful, a sorcerer with that mesmerizing gaze “come sit here; next to me…..how do you like my snake?  It’s long and smooth and it has moves you’ve never experienced before…..I know how to handle him, he won’t hurt you……would you like a bite of this tasty, crunchy apple? Don’t worry, no one will know, just you and me.” Adam, you’ve got the devil in your eyes.

Unlike other male performers, you are anything but nonchalant about your audience, you demand our attention with as little as a lift of that animated left eyebrow – needs a name of its own, or as much as you wrung out of us in your final two concert performances – ooofff!!  Syracuse and Manchester – you really put it out and got it all back didn’t you?  Virtually silenced with a bad throat, you more than made up for it with your moves, raunchier, racier, bigger and better, bolder and scream-worthy.  After you worked so hard in Syracuse, with surprising new moves, we understood when Ray gave us the bad news outside – you couldn’t come out to play with the fans.

It’s About Time!

After about two decades of rather asexual, earnest, male music performers – we finally have a guy who can and does work it!  While you may not be able to precisely and consciously articulate how you do it; you can and do stimulate and respond to our unguarded, uninhibited, pheromonic-driven, inner adolescent girl and boys too.

The older guys, the ones our own age or older  – they try to keep it up, but just can’t do unbridled joie de vivre on stage the way you do.  And they don’t have the hair, the youth, the vigour and innate ability to respond to the audience. They don’t do eyeliner and heaven forbid they should ever breath the same air as the fans who paid to see them and keep them in Krug.

It’s one thing for a male celebrity to be considered sexy, but what do we get for it?  Are they filming steamy sexy scenes?  Are they flirting provocatively, inviting us over?  What???  Some still photos?  A perennial favourite Brad Pitt – more on them later.

What do Your Intense, Passionate Female Fans Think?

In a recent interview with the effervescent Jim Cantiello, he asked you about your “middle aged women fan base”.  

You were speculating on the possible attraction you have to the fervent and passionate female fans, Cantiello used “intense”.  The other part of the interview you handled magnificently, with respect to naming body parts, so no need to go there, except to ask if you know what body part “Sneaky” is?

No need to speculate on sources of your attraction Adam, we think, analyze, talk and write about the phenomenon which you tried to explain as the “Spirit of Rock and Roll”, and the “People that I cite are probably the people they listened to when they were younger”.

“Spirit of Rock and Roll” yes!  All that and more.  The old guys though?  Not so much.  Been there, done that, didn’t throw panties onstage.  They kept us out of their lives – they were/are aloof and distant.

Feelings of Intimacy

You are so accessible to your fans by doing those interviews with Cantiello or Slezak or Sirius Q Radio, Ellen, the Early Show or soon – the hosts of The View.  By unzipping yourself, inviting people to know you from the inside out, your genuine smile and contact visuel with the baby blues,  you capture hearts, pierced with the golden tipped arrow of Eros.  Lizzie of the View, distracted and disarmed of her rapier will strike only glancing blows and if she doesn’t back down – we will insist on a blood sample to prove her body is even lukewarm.  Ellen won “the hug every woman in the world wants” when you performed for her.

The Music

The music itself you say? – while we love your reinvigoration of the classics of our generation, from Bowie to Zeppelin; today, the song on our replay is “Fever”!!!  Especially belting out “ménage étoile” – my favourite line – a funny pun, in French, for which I have a well-documented weakness along with Latin.  Did your friend the Lady Gaga write that?  Also heard “raison d’être” in “Music Again” and “déjà vu”. Don’t ever sing an entire song in French or Italian to a live audience – they will need firefighters to extinguish the inflamed audience.

Which song did you think would become lodged in our minds?  “Soaked” perhaps – soaring strings, dramatic ballad, almost operatic, stirring – yes.  At first glimpse, many of us thought so too.  Until that primitive, tribal beat of “Fever” started the chakras vibrating and three minutes is so unsatisfying, need about ten minutes of it.  Hang on, need a dose just now….

I’m back………….

Sexuality – Unboxed, Unfurled

“I black my eyes and I black my hair
So girls and boys will both stop and stare”

You wrote these lyrics in “Nocturnal by the Moon” – revealing yourself and your motives – “sexy is sexy” and “it’s all good.” Our words to live by – who needs Confucius, when we have Lambert?  You made it good to be sexy, to feel sexy, to flirt, to dance!

You wondered if “we ever worry about our husbands being mad about our fantasies” and “we knew you were gay from the very beginning, so a safe object of fantasy?” The corollary being that if you were not gay, we would not be so turned on – hahahaha!  As if we weighed the risks and then made this conscious decision, but we were not conscious and were powerless to make a lucid decision.  “Safe” we get at home and it’s not for dreaming on. (Go back to “Bad Boy to Dangerous Dude”)

“I don’t see how all of this is different than – let’s take a modern sex-symbol like Brad Pitt. How many of the women who fantasize about him actually sleep with him?” you ask. “It’s all fantasy – that’s what entertainment is. I’m here to entertain you, and if my sexuality is apparent and you respond to it, and you’re attracted to it, then great, I’m doing my job. It ain’t happening anyway!” Adam Lambert from Detail magazine.  Now you have it! But you make “doing your job” look like there is nothing you would rather be doing and nowhere you would prefer to that place, at that moment.

Brad Pitt?  What’s he done for us lately? Grew a scruffy beard, looks unkempt, has worked hard at being Dad and seems uninterested in how we feel about him, same with a couple of others on “The List”.

The sexiest man in the room is the one who makes everyone else feel attractive and sexy – one-on-one, through the TV screen, a photo or from the stage, you make it work.  The way you sing and convey the meaning of the lyrics, with your voice, face and body – you would make Cleopatra blush.

You strode out, like a cocky bad boy, looked at the camera with a small flirty smile, and acknowledgment that we were there then sang “I can’t get no……”. An accident? Intended for boys only? I don’t think so.

What you may not know is that our husbands are actually benefiting from our libidinous fantasies and if you ever met, it would be a hearty handshake and one of those male half-hugs, probably a little tighter and a bit longer, depending on the eyeliner that day. Might buy you a martini and ask for some pointers. (See Adam’s Pick-up Advice)

  

Surprise!

Adam you keep everyone guessing and off-kilter.  Each time we leave our chair, you come and shave a little off one of the legs, so the chair tilts one way, then a different one and you have us tilting in the other direction. Though we never actually fall off, it’s quite a ride!  If anyone does fall off, they scramble to get back on – quickly.

You are the most provocative, multi-talented artist today, playing with everything, with all you’ve got, it shows and we all know it.  And you are the wildly sexy male entertainer to rebalance the industry for women, you’ve got everything you need to take the chances and get the job done!

Future

We are looking forward to great big, theatrical, exhausting concerts as you described….

“Things that light up and blow up are essential to the gods of glam — the glam gods that have come before me”

 

Let us all hail the Glam Gods and welcome your glittery new star to the firmament of the Glitzy Galaxy where we are in a parallel universe, somewhere between dusk and dawn, when the North Star rises, Venus and Mars come into view, a distant moon casts its silvery glow, galaxies light the way to constellation Glambertinae, named for the unchained sylphs who precede Sun God Apollo – in his chariot, raising the Sun from its slumber.  And as if we need further evidence that Adam is the corporal manifestation of Apollo:

Apollo’s Strengths: Creative, handsome, supportive of all the arts of civilization.

Weaknesses: Like his father Zeus, Apollo is all too happy to enjoy the charms of youths, as well as the occasional nymph, and his conquests number in the thousands. (A little poetic license taken)

 

Xena is a writer, policy analyst and commentator who has an opinion on everything, and co-author with “Juneau” of On the Meaning of Adam Lambert – order at www.adamlambertbook.com