For all its supposed cutting-edge credentials, pop music has been slow to embrace lesbians. Film, TV and literature have been swarming with gay female icons - or flirtatious girl-to-girl kisses - for years, but the music industry has remained pretty straight when it comes to women.
But now what the British music pundit and writer Rick Sky calls the "last great pop taboo" has been broken by two teenage Russian girls, Julie Volkova, 17, and Lena Katina, 18, together better known as Tatu (and not to be confused with the Australian girl group of the same name).
Sky, the author of books on Michael Jackson and Freddie Mercury, believes Tatu is to lesbian pop what the Spice Girls were to girl bands, the start of a revolution. "The pop world has exploited all other types of sexuality, but not that one," he said.
"I think the industry thought that little girls were not that keen on buying records by other little girls, so why would they be willing to buy records by little girls who kiss each other."
Now it will be recasting its thoughts. Having claimed the number one spot in Spain, Switzerland and Italy and gained top 10 success across Europe and the United States, the group's debut single, All the Things She Said, has this week entered the British charts at number one.
A catchy, powerful song about teen sexual angst, it contains the lines: "When they stop and stare - don't worry me/'Cause I'm feeling for her what she's feeling for me." It has been produced by Trevor Horn, who has worked with Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the Pet Shop Boys, both bands with considerable gay followings.
But Tatu, whose name translates as 'this girl loves that girl', have not become the hottest act from Moscow since gymnast Olga Korbut solely on the strength of being young, gay and talented. They are the product of some very clever hype and the year's most controversial video clip.
Lesbian or not (there's some doubt), Katina and Volkova, former members of a Moscow pop group Neposedi, might have finished up as wannabe stars if not been for Ivan Shapovalov, a former psychologist turned pop svengali.
Shapovalov had admitted creating Tatu as "under-age entertainment" for men. "It was five years ago that I decided to do this under-age sex project in Russia. Why under-age? Because I wanted it and found it funny."
Such frankness about selling sex may be less shocking in Russia and the former eastern bloc, where most thing have a price, but in a Britain still reeling from a wave of high-profile pedophile cases, Shapovalov's comments have unleashed a moral backlash.
The TV presenter Richard Madeley has called the group "sick", accusing their record company, Polydor, of promoting "pedophilic pop". Kidscape, a child protection charity, told the Daily Mail newspaper that "child pornography is not funny and should never be laughed at".
Raising the most ire - and publicity - is the group's debut video, which features the girls dressed in pseudo school uniforms and kissing and fondling each other behind razor wire. While Tatu is hardly the first pop act to simulate sex on film or stage, the combination of lesbianism and juvenilia has kept the controversy boiling.
While the video has been showing widely and uncut on MTV, the BBC's Top of the Pops program has this week banned it and will instead screen footage of the girls in concert. "We think its too raunchy for our viewers," the BBC said.
The girls themselves are unrepentant and unfazed about the heat they've generated, despite reportedly receiving death threats from boys whose girlfriends have become lesbians on the strength of their songs. "We do what we want," said Lena. "We are free."
As for their own sexuality, the word lesbian appears to have become lost in the translation. Claims have been aired on the internet that they in fact have boyfriends in Moscow.
"Every song is about our life," Katina has said. "Everybody thinks we are lesbians. But we just love each other."
Tatu's record labels, Universal in Australia and Europe, Polydor in Britain, are happy to let Tatu gain the sort of publicity that most PR flacks can only dream of. "The record has been embraced in the UK, it's been embraced across Europe and that really speaks for itself," a spokeswoman for Universal said.
Asked if the girls were actually lesbians, she said: "I haven't asked them their sexuality."
As for the music, the critics are genuinely divided. Although he praises it as a "superb piece of marketing", Sky described the hit single as " not that great". " If it had been two blokes from Yorkshire who are ugly it wouldn't have got anywhere."
But others beg to differ. Writing in the often-staid London Daily Telegraph, a pop critic, Neil McCormick, called the song a "propulsive, near-hysterical statement of teenage desire" which carried a message of "affirmation" about teenage love.
"What it is saying is: you are not alone," he wrote recently. "And that, in a sense, is what a lot of great pop music is really about. It is at once personal and universal, drawing people together in a shared experience."
Having been described by the music and style bible The Face as "the hottest pop stars in the world right now", it is quite possible that universal acclaim for Tatu's music, rather than music business hoopla, is only a video clip away. |
