"Lucky Strike," by Troye Sivan, Thursday, March 10, 2022 [Reworked Repost]

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 "Lucky Strike" Sivan says that the boy the singer likes tastes like the classic British/American cigarette brand. In my lifetime, it seems like smoking in the media went from a wistful nostalgia to complete disgust to a devious behavior. When I was young, I watched old movies in which everyone smoked on screen. I even remember seeing cigarette ads in magazines at home, whether it was the smoking Camel or the Marlboro cowboy. But in the late '90s to early '00s smoking couldn't be shown on TV unless it was a villain or a special episode. I still remember the shock and betrayal I felt when the episode of How I Met Your Mother revealed that actually, the characters had been smoking all along. But that was kind of like the beginning of the neo-rebel cigarette depiction in the media. It's almost as if culture collectively realized, yes smoking is bad and it might kill me or make me impotent, but some badasses can pull it off--occasionally. And nobody is ever addicted to smoking, right? In the song "Lucky Strike," Sivan lays out a contradiction--a boy who is "safe like springtime" but who "taste[s] like Lucky Strikes." He's a good boy with a bad edge. It's that romantic James Dean image. But isn't it funny how, unlike coffee, cigarettes can go from smelling interesting to wearing out their welcome. Sure, some people may not like the smell of coffee, but most people--even those who don't drink it--like it. And coffee's scent fades over time. There are some hunks I think a fresh cigarette on the breath is kind of sexy. What's not sexy or pleasant, though, is sitting in the house I just started renting, waiting for the stale smell of the previous tenant's habit to clear.

Read “Lucky Strike” by Troye Sivan on Genius