k.d. lang

Dirty Linen

This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen #137 (August/September 2008).
The full article is in the magazine, available on newsstands, by subscription, and at the Dirty Linen webstore.

k.d. lang

Sitting Right in the Middle

by Don Wilcock

k.d. lang is one of those artists the media defines in traits that have little or nothing to do with her music.She's the spitting image of Tom Mix in chaps, bandana, and white hat on the black-and-white photo inside her 1989 Absolute Torch and Twang album. Even the steely look in her eye and the sundown-on-the-range backdrop by the campfire screams "man's man." But in 1996, Rolling Stone proclaimed her the "freak de jour." She had come out as a lesbian in 1992 at a time when she was best known for sending up country music. "Certainly in the country days I was a caricature. I was definitely playing with the image of country music. Yeah." And she proudly proclaimed her vegetarian ways in campaigns like "Meat stinks!"

lang sees herself quite differently. "I definitely took the music seriously. There was a more kitsch and humor in that part of my life -- in the music, or more overtly -- but I took the music seriously."

About the time she came out, she released Ingénue, on which she dodged the bullet from conservative hard-core country folk and found an even bigger audience with her languid and erotic hit, "Constant Craving." "It just seemed to be the right thing at the right time," she said, looking back. "But I think it also had to do with (the idea that) Ingénue was a pop record, and 'Constant Craving' was a hit, and I think they weren't codependent upon each other, but I don't think I'd have had much success if Ingénue was an actual country record."

In a 1996 interview, she called her 1993 release Even Cowgirls Get the Blues a stepping stone. "Cowgirls was kind of a culmination of all the past and present style. k.d. lang had kind of covered the country stuff and kind of lush stuff and was moving into the more dance-funk oriented stuff, which I think in turn influenced All You Can Eat (1996). And I think I wanted to make a seductive, slow, funky record, which All You Can Eat kind of is."

By the time lang released All You Can Eat, she had incorporated the freedom of knowing she didn't have to be cryptic about her sexual preferences in love songs. Everyone now knew.

"It really liberated me," she said. "I think as a gay artist I have to speak for myself here because I can't generalize again, but I think you get in the habit of getting cryptic or speaking in metaphors and coming out really removed that instinct and really allowed me to kind of speak my mind, because I wasn't protecting anything at that point."

Several albums and 12 years later, she's released Watershed, her first self-produced album, a Top-10 CD the week of its release in February that also has the distinction of being her first #1 charting album ever. That was only in Australia, but it happened. The media has finally thrown up its hands on what to label Watershed. She's been labeled pop, country, adult contemporary, and just plain genre-less.

[cover #137]