It's Friday night, the gay bar is packed, and you're 85 minutes into a brand new episode of RuPaul's Drag Race. The viewing party is ready to pop off as the lip sync starts — and then a guitar riff rips through the vibe. This isn't Gaga, Ariana, or Dua. It's Lita Ford, or Joan Jett, or the Go-Go's — and everyone in attendance knows that it's hard to do the kind of stunts that make a crowd ignite to a good old rock and roll song. But ... why?
Rock is part of queer culture, and there is no rock (or metal or punk) without queer people. You know I have to include a list: Little Richard, Billy Preston, Jobriath, Freddie Mercury (Queen), David Bowie, Dee Palmer (Jethro Tull), Elton John, the B-52's, Boy George (Culture Club), Joan Jett, Joe Jackson, Rob Halford (Judas Priest), Morrissey (The Smiths), Michael Stipe (R.E.M.), Bob Mould (Hüsker Dü), the Indigo Girls, Melissa Etheridge, Carrie Brownstein (Sleater-Kinney), Le Tigre, Gravy Train!!!!, Kele Okereke (Bloc Party), Rostam Batmanglij (Vampire Weekend), Laura Jane Grace (Against Me!), Ezra Furman, Angel Olsen — I could keep going!
And I didn't even mention RuPaul, whose own history as a genderfuck drag artist and mainstay of the 1980s NYC underground is frequently mentioned on-air (or on the runway; see: Luxx Noir London's tribute to Ru's punk band Wee Wee Pole in episode 15x11). The connection here is undeniable, so why are the rock and roll parts of Drag Race such a drag? Why is the entirety of rock boiled down to tongue out, devil horns, air guitar, repeat ad nauseam? Why are metal and punk used interchangeably? Why are none of those metal/punk songs total slays? And, oh my god, why was Bob the Drag Queen dragged for actually knowing what the B-52's sound like?!
To hash this out, I reached out to Season 18 queen Jane Don't — a queen who won a girl group challenge with a rock song, cited the B-52's Kate Pierson on the runway, and gave it her all in an Amyl and the Sniffers lip sync (which was exactly as off-kilter as it sounds). And if you follow Jane on Instagram, you've seen her dive deep into her own record bins to extol the virtues of artists ranging from Exile in Guyville-era Liz Phair to Deee-Lite. Jane Don't is living proof that rock and roll has a place in queer culture and drag — so why does it feel so weird on Drag Race?
Brett White: Every time there's a rock and roll challenge or a rock and roll lip sync, there almost feels like an inaudible groan from the gay community. We want the pop diva number. What role does rock and roll — or just music with guitars — play in your life?
Jane Don't: It's almost hard to articulate that. On a personal level, I am a huge music listener. I was listening to a lot of different kinds of music. My record collection's back there. And so in terms of the music that I listen to, rock and roll, music with guitars, what have you, constitutes a huge part of the music that I listen to. But also culturally for me, it's been just such a part of the fabric of my life, my professional journey, my artistic journey. Part of it's living in Seattle. This is a rock and roll city.
It's the home of grunge.
It's the home of grunge. It's the home of Riot Grrrl. I went to school for musical theater, basically. and I was writing a lot about music because I took musicology classes. So when I got out of school and I was pretty burned out on performing, I started doing freelance music journalism. I was interning at Sub Pop, and so that was just the music that I was listening to all the time. I would go and see my friends who are all in bands. And then that parlayed into working in entertainment management, so I was managing bands, and I was tour managing, and I was on the road. Culturally, it's so much the fabric of where I live and the kinds of people who really shaped me artistically. It's just so like in the air.
Relating rock music to Drag Race — there's so much discourse around how there isn't one way to be gay. It sounds crazy, but I didn't know I was gay for a long time partly because I liked the Strokes and Talking Heads and stuff. I didn't like pop music then. It is weird how we codify music in that way. So coming up in that rock and roll culture, when you're picking drag numbers, do you go for the rock songs that you really like? What is the most obscure, weird song you've done a number to?
Well, this isn't really a rock song. I did an eight minute Joanna Newsom number, off of Ys, her second album. The very first song that I ever — I mean, this was kind of slay fiercely, but the first song I ever performed was an Amanda Lepore/Cazwell song from her EP that nobody knows. With regards to picking music, I was a full-time drag queen before I was on the show, so I do think part of learning how to do drag professionally is learning how to tailor what you do to different audiences. I started as a bearded queen, and I started at the alternative club with the freaks. And over time, what I've learned is how to, I think, retain that essence of some sort of outsider viewpoint, and channel it and be able to tailor it to different audiences.
I'm obsessed with Bette Midler because she's the epitome of that kind of storyline, of starting so, so, so out there and Trojan-Horse-ing your way into the mainstream. I mean, luckily I'm in Seattle, so I'm in a place where, like, you talked about not knowing that you were gay because you were into rock and those two worlds really existing separately. And thankfully, I don't think that's as true here. So many of the people that I knew as a young queer person when I first moved here, the people that I was meeting and hanging out with, the places I was going, like the bars and stuff that I was hanging out in were both really, really, really queer, and also, like, punk and very like rock and roll.
You were in Seattle. I went to college in Tennessee, so —
Right. Totally.
I find Drag Race's relationship with rock and roll to be very strange, because RuPaul herself came up in New York doing punk, genderfuck drag. When I first saw RuPaul as a kid, it was in the "Love Shack" video with the B-52's. All of that is so intertwined. And then Drag Race's relationship with rock and roll is kind of summed up, to me, by Bob the Drag Queen fighting with Lucian Piane about the B-52's, and Lucian not getting that the B-52's were kind of cheesy. Bob was right but the show presented this as a problem. What do you think Drag Race's relationship is with rock and roll? Because your season has been very rock and roll forward! The girl group challenge, the Amyl and the Sniffers lip sync ...
Part of what you're describing with with the season being a bit more rock and roll forward, I would say, comes from — we've harped on it a lot, but it is a slightly older, more seasoned cast. There were more girls there than I expected who have a wider palette and a wider set of references. Like Discord [Addams], for instance. Discord also comes from that kind of world, and we had a bigger pool of references. I think people were more seasoned and they knew what they were doing.
I think that the thing with rock on Drag Race — everything on Drag Race is sort of hyper stylized. I remember when we did the girl group, and I saw some comments about people being like, "I don't know why Jane won" or "I don't know how the punk group won, because it didn't really feel actually punk." And I see that. I hear that criticism. But at the same time, I would also argue — I don't think the '80s pop group felt like '80s pop. I don't think the disco group felt like disco.
The reality is, at its core, I think the central tenet of Drag Race is about parody. Drag Race started almost as a parody of Top Model and Project Runway. It was very tongue-in-cheek. It was very deliberately poking fun at the medium of reality TV. And I think that's still very much there, and you can see it in those moments, like the girl group challenge. Drag Race is very rarely asking you to give a grounded, sincere, deeply committed performance. I don't think that's what the show is about. Fundamentally, the show is about poking fun at everything, stylizing everything, holding a funhouse mirror up to everything you're being asked to do. I think when rock shows up on Drag Race, it can feel like there's some sort of insincerity. There's sort of a lack of commitment to really doing it.
Exactly. This gets to the theory that I've been working at in my Drag Race recaps. All other genres of music have a level of performance and artifice baked in, like pop, musicals, country music. Rock and roll is one of the only genres where you don't want to be a poser. When I was a kid, being clocked as a poser was the worst thing that could happen. With rock and roll, you have to be sincere and you have to be earnest — or you have to not care, but you have to earnestly not care. And you can't do that on Drag Race. With the Amyl and the Sniffers lip sync, I think you did the right thing by just being straightforward, like, "I'm gonna fucking perform the song." And that is the most punk rock thing you can do. I think you won.
Well, I said this to everybody that talked about this lip sync: I think Athena [Dion] beat me in the lip sync. I don't have any illusions about that. Athena beat me because Athena did a rock and roll lip sync for Drag Race. And I don't say that in a patronizing way. I said it to her. It's no shade. We made different decisions about what we were going to do, and I think her decision just works better for the medium of Drag Race.
Ultimately, that's what Drag Race wants. They don't want a straightforward punk rock lip sync, necessarily. They want almost a parody of one, and that's going to translate better to Ru and the judges. It's going to translate better to the viewers, I think. And it's from a tactical standpoint, the mistake that I made was that, I was like, I don't want to do —
Don't want to throw the devil horns.
— and air guitar. I was just like, I'm gonna perform it as though I'm at Chop Suey, the club by my house, and I've had three Modelos and I'm just kind of vibing, right?
So I don't want to get too personal or whatever, but — I'm also a drag queen, and my aesthetic is very your aesthetic. Watching you in that purple showgirl outfit doing a rock and roll song really spoke to something inside of me. Here's a queen on Drag Race actually doing that, wearing that outfit and doing this rock song. How do you marry those two different aesthetics — Bette Midler and Mae West, figures who are not typically punk or rock and roll? Do you ever feel like you need to put more rips and safety pins in a beautiful gown?
I think I maybe used to feel that way more, yeah. But — this is sort of a macro level analysis — when I moved to Seattle and I was, hanging with a lot of people in bands and a lot of artists and stuff, there was this big, big revival here of new wave, kind of Riot Grrrl. All of my friends were in bands, these female-fronted bands, and they were punk bands, and they were really DIY, but they were also really unafraid to be feminine and pretty and glamour. My girl friends were in bands doing fanzines to Sheryl Crow.
That's my diva. Where is the Night of 1000 Sheryl Crows runway category?
Right? It was so eye opening to me, because when I was going to punk shows in Spokane, there was a particular idea about what a rock and roll ethos, or a punk ethos was, and what it looked like. And it was very straight. It was very stereotypical, like, "I'm a cool guy wearing all black" or whatever, "all my shit's ripped up." When I moved here, the people that I was hanging out with, and the artists that were really influencing me, really opened my eyes to this idea of punk, rock and roll as kind of an ideology rather than a specific aesthetic or a specific set of stereotypes that need to be relied on.
I was going to these punk shows, but everybody's wearing day glow and their hair is different and they're covered in glitter. As time has gone on, I've just become more and more confident in this idea that the people that are going to understand my viewpoint and my ethos are going to get it, even when I'm doing a Mae West look. And fundamentally, I think Mae West was punk. I think Bette Midler is punk. When we allow ourselves to take a step back and contextualize those kinds of people in their work, in the time that they were making it, and what they were actually doing, I think a lot of those people were really, really countercultural.
At this point, I don't really worry about it. The girls that are going to get it are going to get it. And if people are like, "It doesn't make sense that you're doing this like showgirl thing but you're saying you're alt" — at this point, I just think it's a vibe. If I like something, I trust that my taste and my viewpoint will carry it, even if it seems incongruous with some other part of what I'm doing. Boxing myself into this idea of, "Oh, I do this old Hollywood showgirl thing," and saying that somehow that's removed from my past in rock music and punk, I just don't think that that's true. And the choices that I make are always informed by that background, even if they seem on the surface like they live in a different world.
In the future, when a queen gets a rock or a punk song to lip sync on Drag Race, what's your advice?
I think the reality is the medium of Drag Race is always going to reward stylization and parody and blowing things up and silliness, and that's the nature of it. Again, I think Athena won that lip sync against me in terms of the show. I think I won the lip sync for myself in terms of presenting myself how I wanted to present myself. If there's a rock lip sync on Drag Race, and you're a girl who comes from that world, even if you lose the lip sync because you didn't do air guitar, did you? Did you lose the lip sync? You know what I mean? At the end of the day, I think we all just have to have a sense of humor about this. We have to understand the medium that we're presenting all of this in. And stand by your decisions. I stand by the performance that I gave, even though I understand why it wasn't rewarded in the format of the show. And just know that the girls that get it are gonna get it — and I think that's the most rock and roll thing.
Follow Jane Don't on Instagram at @heyjanedont and visit heyjanedont.com for merch, tour dates, and more.
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