“Lucky Strike” by Troye Sivan, Friday, May 7, 2021

Austra-South African YouTuber-turned pop star and actor Troye Sivan creates a kind of infectious electro-pop that brilliantly celebrates love, acceptance, and sexuality. From my vantage point in South Korea, I saw the rise of Sivan's career. With his debut album, Blue Neighbourhoods, Sivan could be heard everywhere in 2016 and not only was his music making an impact, him and fellow LGBT+ singer Sam Smith were starting conversations around sexual orientation that would have been considered taboo even five years before. My middle school students, in their free time at school, would often play Sivan's music videos. "Wild," "Fools," and "Youth" depict a teenage secret relationship between two boys. Being a teacher at a Christian school and working in a conservative country where it was illegal for teachers to talk about LGBT+ issues at the time,   undoubtedly these middle school students were trying to press some buttons. Still, with some of Korea's own K-pop groups coming out in support of LGBT+ youth, it is certainly a different experience from my middle school days. Thank God for that.

MY BOY, LIKE A QUEEN. In Sivan’s sophomore album, he continues to write about love, but this time making his music less ambiguously gay and singing about specific experiences. Songs like “Seventeen” and “Bloom” and this song, Sivan proudly uses masculine pronouns and says “boy.” This was rarely seen in pop music in past eras. In the past, musicians who had come out either wrote ambiguously or changed pronouns in hopes of greater market reception. But on Bloom, Sivan bent the pop charts to him rather than editing for mainstream approval. And while some of the songs on Bloom tell explicit tales of gay love just as many straight artists get explicit with tales of straight or bi-curious sex, “Lucky Strike” is a subtle love song that talks about a pretty innocent crush. You could play it in a coffee shop.

A HIT OF DOPAMINE. In Kindergarten I had my first girlfriend. Somehow I had this idea that when you are school age you are supposed to find your future life partner. Of course it was just cutesy stuff, and by first grade I started to feel embarrassed by the whole ordeal. Then by second grade I had my first kiss with the neighbor girl. But with all of these early experiences, I was actually not  on the way to a promiscuous adolescence. Other than a “telephone” middle school relationship—when you call your girlfriend after school for a few minutes at night before mom kicks you off the phone, my dating life was obsolete. I had crushes but was always too scared to take the jump. By 2014, 27 years old, I started looking over my close encounters with dating and tried to put together the pieces why I was still alone. I started looking honestly this time.

Read “Lucky Strike” by Troye Sivan on Genius