Blue Fay

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the student experience of every undergraduate at the university, but some challenges facing LGBTQ+ students remain unique.

After the 49-track debacle of “Convocations” rolled out in April and May, it’s tempting to accept anything from Stevens with lyrics and a hummable melody.

This is a flowery way of saying that my resistance is defensive. Personal. A role model can be a hard thing to find in the gay community.

‘Bashback!’ is a versatile summer single: It’s equally meant for the dance floor and for watching the system burn.

Some may dismiss it as an attempt at musical time travel, but it is not so much the present returning to the past as the 1970s being dragged into the 2020s with runs in its stockings and curlers in its hair.

Like all great narrators, Nightjars’ vocal performance is soft and sophisticated when it needs to be, but it is the sheer rhetorical craft behind their songwriting that makes the EP truly sing. 

One thing was evident from the evening’s discussion. Regimes can be abandoned, nationalities jettisoned, but stories are impossible to leave behind.

“Solemn Anthems” lacks cohesion and connective tissue, but it holds a great deal of thought, and a great deal burns. 

The songs that inspired “Daddy’s Home” represent more than just a musical epoch; they are the sound of a generation, a culture cut loose from the 1960s but not yet thrown into the conformity of the 1980s. 

His “Call Me By Your Name” is more than just a coming-out story — it is an audacious step into the public eye as an unapologetically queer Black man.