Queening out
David Bowie and Annie Lennox's "Under Pressure" tribute to Freddie Mercury is my perfect pop moment
After Freddie Mercury died, the remaining members of Queen returned to Wembley Stadium in 1992 for a legendary memorial concert. They were joined on the mic by a who’s who of pop music, including Elton John on “Bohemian Rhapsody,” George Michael on “Somebody to Love,” and Liza fucking Minnelli on “We Are the Champions.” (Thank god the internet lets you see concerts that happened when you were 3.)
David Bowie also performed, of course. His 1981 collab with Queen, “Under Pressure,” was a major hit. For this tribute, Annie Lennox stepped in to sing Mercury’s part.
You can’t touch Mercury’s voice, but Lennox’s theatricality and titanium-lunged talent make for a real “diva recognize diva” moment. The significance of the memorial night, doubling as an AIDS charity benefit, surges through the lyrics about love, good friends, and the crushing brutality of the world.
I just rewatched their performance for the umpteenth time. Lennox takes to the stage dressed like Gotham City’s premier ballerina. Her close-cropped orange hair is slicked back. The world’s biggest smokey eye slashes across her ghostly white face — a domino mask for a bandit about to steal the show. Bowie crosses in front of her while she’s mid-curtsy. He’s dressed like Gumby.
They share a peck and beam at the rapturous audience. That bass line hits. Everyone in the crowd screams their throats raw.
It’s a moment of pop perfection. Bowie, Lennox, and Mercury have given me a lot of those.
…
I always meant to get into David Bowie, but I never did until he died. In 2016, I worked on the digital desk at the Austin American-Statesman, which meant feeding multiple pieces of content into the metrics machine. A photo gallery of the last time Bowie performed at the Erwin Center, a tribute essay from the features desk, that sort of thing.
I chipped in a story about a then-anonymous fan changing the sign for Bowie Street downtown to read David Bowie Street. It was one of my first “real” news stories. I saved copies of the paper when it ran as the daily Metro section centerpiece.
At that point, my knowledge of Bowie’s oeuvre couldn’t fill a playlist. I knew I liked “Modern Love,” because wedding DJs liked it, too. The “Moulin Rouge” version of “Heroes,” sung by Ewan McGregor as part of a medley, perked my ears up, but I’d been disappointed to learn Bowie’s original lacked the same show tune bombast. “Under Pressure,” though … “Under Pressure,” I knew.
After Bowie died, Alamo Drafthouse quickly threw together a music video singalong. My friend Beth and I snagged tickets before they sold out. That show punched my ticket for the bandwagon, and I happily admit it. Whatever block had stopped me from appreciating Bowie all those years crumbled.
How glam! How fluid! The blown-out soliloquy of “Life on Mars?” was hypnotic. The eerie video for “Lazarus,” released just days before Bowie’s death, felt like piercing the veil. MTV-era clips like “Blue Jean” seemed like the work of an artist who’d been itching for the music video medium to catch up with his visions.
Drafthouse also played a kaleidoscopic recording of “Rebel Rebel” from a Dutch TV performance, a real trippy curio. I’d heard the song before, but never really heard it. Bowie looked like Cynthia Nixon playing Captain Hook. He growled the words “hot tramp” so they sounded like a good thing to be. “You’ve got your mother in a whirl”? Hey, I did, too.
This was my favorite song, I decided.
…
Lennox starts the Wembley performance putting her own spin on Mercury’s nonsensical intro. It’s more of a “muh muh mahp” than a “boo bah bay.” She throws the syllables over her shoulder like they’re salt and she’s looking for good luck.
Bowie launches into the first verse and does his thing. I’ve always loved how stately he sounds for a rock star. When he first sings the line, “It’s the terror of knowing what this world is about,” it’s goosebump stuff.
Lennox joins him for the first cry of “let me out.” Then, she grabs the performance in her mouth like a Scottish Rottweiler and shakes it.
…
Theater kids at Crockett High School were really into Queen. The theater kids at every high school are really into Queen.
During my drama club days, the guys had a tradition of circling up and singing “Bohemian Rhapsody” before every show. I can think of nothing more wholesome than a dressing room full of teen boys slathered in Ben Nye products, earnestly caterwauling “I don’t wanna die” before they perform “Our Town” for their parents. There were synchronized movements to the song, of course. One of them was jerking off a phantom dick, also of course.
Outside of school, Queen also got a workout in the CD player of my friend Alex’s pickup truck, which was essentially public transit for a number of us. One night, we sped down Interstate 35 and listened to “Don’t Stop Me Now.” It’s fun to sing along to a Queen song, pretending that what comes out of your mouth is remotely the same sound that comes out of Freddie’s.
We were gonna have a good time; we were traveling at the speed of light. Mercury sang, “I wanna make a supersonic man out of you.” Someone told me that meant he wanted to give a guy a blowjob. I was scandalized.
This was my favorite song, I decided.
…
Bowie and Lennox play the dynamics of “Under Pressure” so damn well. Lenox shatters glass as she belts, “Pray tomorrow gets me higher.” Then they take it down a notch, for some real emotional shadow work. “Turned away from it all like a blind man,” Bowie sings with an expression of disbelief. “Sat on the fence, but it don’t work,” Lennox croons so hard that her eyebrows shoot up.
The titular pressure builds, as it does. Before the explosion that Mercury does so well on the original, Lennox gets a little gospel-y, her hand on her forehead like she’s sweating in a single-room Hill Country church. She does a little lap around the stage, chanting “love, love, love, love.” Bowie tees her up, growling, “Insanity laughs, under pressure we're breaking.”
Then Lennox really gives it to ’em. She implores with life-or-death urgency: “Can't we give ourselves one more chance?”
…
As a kid, drives with my dad meant listening to Rush Limbaugh or James Dobson. Only. I had more dial control in my mom’s car but didn’t stray far from the oldies or Christian stations. Sometimes, though, I’d be left to my own automotive devices — say, when I joined her on a garage sale run but wanted to stay in the car and eat my powdered sugar doughnuts from the gas station.
With the full FM spectrum at hand, I’d sometimes land on a mainstream hit that, to my sheltered ears, sounded like a new secret to keep. One of these tunes was “Here Comes the Rain Again” by The Eurythmics.
I first heard it on an appropriately rainy weekend when I was 11-ish. Mom had just taken me to the comic book store. She ran inside on the next stop, which I vaguely remember being H-E-B. I stayed behind, thumbing through an issue of “Adventures in the DC Universe” (No. 10, starring the Legion of Super-Heroes, because my brain stored that detail yet not any pertinent family medical history).
I spun the radio dial and found gut-tugging strings mixed with electronic patter. The sound of fantasy and the future — and that voice! I didn’t yet know that Annie Lennox was Annie Lennox. This woman sang deeper and more powerfully than the usual divas on rotation, like Sandi Patty or Amy Grant. She sang about wanting to “kiss like lovers” do. How grown up, I thought, while also avoiding too much thought about what that could mean.
This was my favorite song, I decided.
…
As the “Under Pressure” tribute winds down, Bowie and Lennox come together. They press their faces jarringly close. Lennox wraps her arm around Bowie’s shoulders and collapses onto him. Their eyes are closed. “This is our last dance,” they sing, which really hits, considering the context.
Bowie opens his eyes first, then Lennox does. They part, face each other, and go to opposite sides of the stage. They snap their fingers. It echoes. They whisper “pressure,” and then it’s over.
“The most exquisite Annie Lennox,” Bowie says as the crowd roars. He emphasizes exquisite.
How is this performance so good? It seems like something that should be impossible to see in your lifetime. Bowie, Lennox, and Mercury, a tripartite lightning strike.
This is my favorite song, I’ve decided.
One rad thing
If you’ve watched “Abbott Elementary” and thought, “Gee, I wish this more specifically spoke to my experience as a gay Austinite who uses humor as a coping mechanism,” then “English Teacher” is for you.
Creator, writer, director, and executive producer Brian Jordan Alvarez stars as Evan Marquez, a high school English teacher in a version of Austin only identifiable by the drone footage of the Congress Avenue Bridge in the opening titles. He contends with Gen-Z brain rot, a controversy-avoidant principal, a school gun club, a power-hungry mom who thinks he turned her kid gay, another mom obsessed with outlandish teen sex crazes, and romance.
You might know Alvarez from his internet content, including web series “The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo.” (That’s where one of the best lines ever written — “Sometimes things that are expensive are worse” — comes from.) The classroom segments on “English Teacher” remind me of “Caleb Gallo,” what with their rat-a-tat pace and low-key absurdity.
The sixth episode, “Linda,” contains the most nuanced depiction of right-wing school board moral panic I’ve seen, while also channeling the acidity of “The Righteous Gemstones.” Episode 2 lets Trixie Mattel play a kleptomaniac who vapes.
It would be irresponsible to call “English Teacher” the funniest show on TV after only seven episodes, but “What We Do in the Shadows” doesn’t come back until Oct. 21, and I’m feeling reckless. The season finale airs Monday on FX, and you can catch up on Hulu.
Outbound messages
For Backstage magazine’s latest cover story, I profiled television icon Mariska Hargitay, right as the 26th season of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” kicks off.
As a human being with a TV set, I’d watched a few “SVU” episodes before, but I was no diehard. As I did my pre-interview research — bingeing the crucial episodes and consuming various Mariska literature — it struck me that she’s the dean of the small screen. Hargitay’s Capt. Olivia Benson is the longest-running character in a primetime drama ever. How wild that must be, knowing that you’ve done the most of … anything.
Hargitay was exceedingly professional, kind, and present during our convo, despite on-set distractions. Here’s one of my favorite bits:
“While most TV actors would be blessed to book a show with even a five-season run, Hargitay has been able to develop her character for longer than it takes a baby to grow into a college graduate. These days, Benson fits her like a glove. ‘It’s almost Pavlovian. Now, when I start to put on my outfit, I feel a different posture, a different gait, a different facial expression, a certain walk with purpose and authority,’ she says.”
You can read the story here.
…
To wrap up, let’s talk briefly of The Goo Film, which is what my friend Tyler and I have been calling “The Substance.” In Coralie Fargeat’s sci-fi abomination, an aging celebrity uses a black market drug to create a younger, hotter clone that emerges out of her back like a pistachio. My shit.
As a slimy, snarky body horror film, I had a blast with it, much like Margaret Qualley blasts out of Demi Moore’s spine. It’s a shame that the discourse sets audiences up for revolutionary satirical commentary, though. “The Substance” is a consciously, gleefully broad splatter flick with style to spare — a pop art political cartoon about beauty standards. Its commentary is as nuanced as a block of Velveeta. I consider Velveeta my most important cultural dish, but let’s not convince ourselves it’s charcuterie.
If we’re looking for meaning, let’s go to the fabulous production design. I was taken by Demi Moore’s omnipresent yellow coat. Viv Chen analyzed the significance of it in a cool Vogue piece.
“While visceral body horror is the core vehicle of this message, there’s another subtle storytelling technique at play: using color symbolism in costume design. Vivid hues of red, yellow, and blue punctuate the start of the film’s visual landscape, marking each stage of the fragmentation and erasure we inflict upon ourselves in the process.”
It makes me want to get a tattoo of the color wheel.