Articles on Music

Twenty-five years ago, Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir — do you want to sleep with me tonight — became one of the most repeated French phrases in popular culture without most people fully processing what they were saying. A generation hummed it and sang it at karaoke and heard it in the 2001 Moulin Rouge remake and filed it somewhere between exotic and catchy.

Broadly gendered audience response to a female pop star is unusual. Men and women both fawn over Raye, in comparable volume and similar language, in a way that most female pop-star appeal does not generate. The reason is structural. Her appeal operates on a different contract with the audience than most contemporary pop does — transport rather than identification — and the return of that older contract, in a decade of parasocial pop dominance, is the reason her success is registering as broadly as it is. Her appeal is not identification but transport: the pleasure of leaving your own head for the length of the song, of being inside her voice and her arrangement rather than seeing yourself reflected in her life.