Positions, Part 2

How a queer cover of Ariana Grande made me feel surprisingly better

Last week I wrote about Ariana Grande’s love letter to marriage on her 2020 album Positions. For the longest time, I wasn’t able to finish listening to it. My queasiness was, admittedly, a personal reaction to the emotional arc of Positions — that of a straight woman finding self-love through the devotion of a prize mate. Romance figured as the peak of human existence made me feel like a purgatorial wraith, caught forever in the tide pools of lesser loves.

This week, though, I want to write about a very different version of the song “Positions” — and an entirely different take on gender, love and the performance of devotion.

Whose position is it? It’s this handsome chap’s:

For non-initiates, Dorian Electra is a genderfluid hyperpop musician who made their first break in 2010 with a song about Austrian economics. Since then, they’ve made a name for themselves writing campy pop anthems about gender and capitalism, anthems that blur the line between critique and enjoyment, irreverence and revel.

A quick sampler of the jewels in their catalogue: “Career Boy” compares corporate ladder-climbing to sado-masochism; “Man to Man” is a plea for male vulnerability dressed up as a conversation between bros; “Flamboyant” is a playful paean to queer decadence. Each is a veritable orgy of bright costumes, colorful sets and dancing. As Electra says themself,

No taste for subtlety
And no time for restraint
No, I go all the way!

Queer folks have been critiquing the ways of the mainstream for a long time now, but there’s something special to me about the way that Electra does it. Maybe it’s just that when I watch them literally cosplaying a “basic Starbucks girl” in “F the World” as they twirl and sing:

F the world 'cause I love it
F the world, wanna hug it
Tell the world I won't miss it
F the world, wanna kiss it

I can tell they are having a blast. Does Electra mean “F the world” in the sense of “let’s destroy the world” or “F the world” as in “let’s make love to the world”? For them it seems it’s always both: let’s critique the dominant narrative, but have a blast while we’re doing it.¹

So, with all of this in mind, and in particular with a sense of how Dorian Electra usually self-presents — i.e. as a dapper but deranged gentleman — let’s take a look at their utterly unhinged cover of “Positions”:

One of my pet peeves in cultural writing is when a writer goes on and on about a piece of art that they love, trying to explain — using academic jargon — why it’s objectively Great. Instead of doing that, I’m going to accept that you probably either loved or hated the video you just watched. Whatever you felt, I want to highlight just a few things about this video that make it interesting, even if it isn’t necessarily pleasing to everyone.

The first is that, unlike in a classic pop music video wherein we expect the artist to express some authentic essence of themselves or their brand, Dorian Electra is not being themself. We know this because in recent works like “Edgelord” and “Give Great Thanks,” Electra has shown us that their natural element is… fashionably demented.

Electra’s fans know this, which is why, when Electra plays any sort of traditional woman, you get comments like these:

To be clear, the above comments are from the video for “F the World,” but I think they apply well to the cover of “Positions.”

In “Positions,” Electra is wearing a costume. Some fans have called it “tradwife drag,” where “tradwife” denotes the movement of women embracing the view that a woman’s proper place is in the home. “Drag,” of course, is the art form in which gender becomes a self-conscious performance. And in this case, Electra’s performance is exaggerating the qualities of a particular kind of woman, the kind of woman who would actually sing this song, and mean it.

This is the uneasy ghost at the heart of “Positions.”

Dorian, in drag.

Who is this woman, in a floral print dress, white ankle socks and a rose gold necklace of a cross? She is both delicate and disturbed, crossing her eyes in an expression uncomfortably close to that of the Japanese ahegao, a hentai trope that Electra references in other videos. She’s simultaneously extraordinarily pure — on a bright white background, dressed relatively modestly — and hypersexual, humping a homemade bible and side-eyeing the camera seductively. She sings in a chipmunk falsetto and then a dragging baritone and then a suave tenor. She performs her devotion for the camera, but as soon as the music ends, she freezes — like an automaton being shut off.

This, Electra is saying, is the kind of woman who would sing “Positions,” and mean it.

I don’t think this is meant to be a diss of Ariana Grande. Nor is it a takedown of anyone who genuinely resonated with her version. What it is, I think, is a brilliant close-reading of the lyrics themselves, divorced from Grande’s project as a whole. This is Electra asking, “What if we took “Positions” more seriously than it takes itself? Whose song is it really?”

And it turns out, if we really were to imagine a woman who is “in the Olympics, way [she’s] jumping through hoops,” whose “love [is] infinite, nothing [she] wouldn’t do, switching for you,” we get a woman whose devotion is so extreme, it warps her very personality. There’s nothing she wouldn’t do? Why not sing in a baritone then, why not take another vocal run, why not be both lily-white pure and a sacrilegious pervert? If tradwife Dorian seems unreal, it’s because she is: she’s a Frankenstein of several tropes of womanhood that by definition, cannot coexist. And Dorian captures this perfectly by playing this character who is simultaneously so plain, so familiar and so, so extreme. She’s basicness become a weapon.

When I first experienced this version of “Positions,” something unblocked itself inside me and started flowing again. It was a few months after Grande’s single release, and I had been in a kind of mire about it, both unable to bring myself to finish listening to the album, aware of the feelings of guilt and alienation it brought up in me, but then also simultaneously aware of the silliness of feeling bad about a stupid pop album. I wanted to forget it, but I was worried forgetting it would be giving in to some weakness in my personality, some flaw or inconsistency I needed to address. A healthy person, I told myself, would be able to just let go and enjoy Positions. What was wrong with me?

But when I saw Electra’s cover for the first time, it was as though Grande’s song had been stripped bare before my eyes. Oh! The relief was instant. Maybe I felt seasick not because I had a particularly weak constitution, but because the boat had been swaying all along. Maybe the story of the song was a little messed up. I don’t think I could have gotten there on my own, suspicious as I was of my own motives. Electra gave me the courage to consider that my feelings were actually valid.

I’ve written before about the experience of being “in the dark,” as it were, invisible in the world as a queer person.² In that essay, I questioned the rite of passage of “coming out of the closet,” arguing that it wasn’t always accessible, realistic and/or smart. What I neglected to mention at the time, though, is my enormous debt to queer folks like Dorian Electra who have not just “come out of the closet,” as it were, but exploded the building the closet was in.³

It’s thanks to Electra that I can feel, as I still do, that particular mix of vicarious gender euphoria and attraction that I note in myself as especially queer. Do I want to be Dorian Electra or do I want to be with Dorian Electra? Honestly, a bit of both. With Electra’s work the feelings all mix into a bacchanal of desire — and I feel transformed by the wanting, and comforted in my distance from traditional womanhood.

As I tried to express it to a close friend recently.

In my last relationship, I tried to share my love of Dorian Electra by playing this cover of “Positions.” We were on a roadtrip, and the tinny vehicle speakers brought out all of the most acidic parts of the song — buzz on buzz on top-heavy buzz. My partner at the time didn’t get it; I think he found the song kind of ratty, like a pile of rain-wet clothes, cigarettes and takeout containers you find in the corner of an alley. I love it though not despite its trashiness, but because of its trashiness, its bold ambition to be stinky and abrasive, absurd in its maximalism. There’s a trashy part of me that he, so often focused and conscientious, never fully knew how to enjoy.

Unlike with Classical music or Jazz or something, I don’t think listening to Dorian Electra more lends itself to appreciation. Maybe living can change how you hear Electra’s work, but only because living can change who you are, and what is enjoyable about Electra’s work for me is the feeling that you are no longer alone in the room, and that the room is lit, a party is going, and you’re invited. If you don’t already feel alone in the room, it’s hard to put into the words the relief — and ecstasy! — this kind of music can give you. It’s probably not possible to convey. But maybe that’s a good thing.

In this profane world, where everything is continually flattened by commodification and queerness is quickly becoming just another Etsy pin, it makes me happy to know there are still forms of experience that are essentially ours.

So yeah, I guess the saying still goes: If you know, you know. ✨

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Thank you for reading. This essay is part of an ongoing writing project in which I take a magnifying glass to small things in culture and try to learn about us in the process. If you liked this piece, please consider either subscribing for free or sharing.

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Finally, if you enjoyed this essay, but haven’t read Part One, you can read it here: Positions, Part 1

And if you liked this, you might also like these essays: Knots and Bubbles, My Problem with Taylor Swift.

See you next time and do take care,
M.

1. There are vulnerabilities to this approach, of course; the worry is always that emphasizing fun leaves our movements open to forms of fun that are not political: forget about organizing, let’s just party.

That being said, I think there is wisdom to making good work enjoyable, as is exemplified by Toni Cade Bambara’s legendary idea: “As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible.”

2. For those curious, that essay is here: Music for a Szechuan Restaurant.

3. A great example of this in Electra’s work: Electra’s 2019 album was called Flamboyant, and it was by all measures an easier listen than their 2020 work, My Agenda. A visual representation of this: the first image in this essay is from Flamboyant, the “edgelord joker” screenshot is from My Agenda.

Flamboyant actually did very well when it came out, though. The influential music critic Anthony Fantano of The Needle Drop gave it his much-sought endorsement upon its release. Electra could have easily built upon this very promising ramp to commercial success and put out a similar album; instead, My Agenda advances into ultra-distorted, almost crazed, even more countercultural territory — both sonically and visually. It literally ends on a BDSM anthem in which Electra sings, “Put me in a cage / I shall not complain / I will give great thanks to you / As you fuck my face for a hundred days / I will give great thanks to you.”

Fantano did review this new album and did not like it as much; true to freaky form, Dorian Electra did not seem to care.