Mika

We've dealt with a lot with acts from the 20th century. Starting today and continuing for the next couple of weeks we'll showcase names that achieved career recognition in the 21st century. Then we'll go back again and then soon after we'll deal with contemporary material again. Anything to get you from getting bored...  :)

Mika was born Michael Holbrook Penniman, Jr. (1983) in Beirut, Lebanon. His mother was born in New York, to Lebanese parents. His father (a banker) was born in Jerusalem to a US diplomat father. The family moved to Paris in 1983 and then to London 8 years later.

Mika hit it big with his first album, Life in Cartoon Motion, in 2007. The first single, released a few months before the album dropped, was called Relax, Take It Easy. It wasn't a hit, but it's a good song. The melody is borrowed from (I Just) Died In Your Arms Tonight. The reviews were good: Beth Johnson from Entertainment Weekly wrote that the song is "a Bee Gees-ish shout-out to Frankie Goes to Hollywood". It was also featured prominently in the gay-themed movie Were The World Mine. The lyrics seem to justify the inclusion:

Scared

It's as if I'm terrified

Are you scared?

Are we playing with fire?

Relax

There is an answer to the darkest times

It's clear we don't understand but the last thing on my mind

Is to leave you

I believe that were in this together

Don't scream, there are so many roads left

Relax, take it easy

For there is nothing that we can do

Relax, take it easy

Blame it on me or blame it on you

It was his next single, named after the legendary Grace Kelly, that caught fire: it spent 5 weeks at #1 in the UK, thus propelling its parent album to sales of over 8 million worldwide. It name-checks Freddie Mercury (a big influence for Mika) and contains a bit of dialogue from Grace Kelly's Oscar-winning performance in The Country Girl. The song, which appeared in lots of TV ads and films (Ugly Betty and Doctor Who among others), is about an artist's need to constantly re-invent himself in order to be liked by the public. Gay people, however, are the social group that primarily use re-invention, either for social advance, attracting a sexual partner or simply for self-protection. If the lyrics fit...:

Do I attract you?

Do I repulse you with my queasy smile?

Am I too dirty?

Am I too flirty?

Do I like what you like?

I could be wholesome

I could be loathsome

I guess I'm a little bit shy

Why don't you like me?

Why don't you like me without making me try?

I try to be like Grace Kelly

But all her looks were too sad

So I try a little Freddie

I've gone identity mad!

It was in another song from the album, however, called Billy Brown, that the gay (actually bisexual) content is obvious:

Oh Billy Brown had lived an ordinary life.

Two kids, a dog, and a precautionary wife.

While it was all going accordingly to plan

Then Billy Brown fell in love with another man.

He met his lover almost every single day

Making excuses for his dodgy holiday

(Unto religion that he said and duty found

They didn't know his faith was earthly bound)

As instantly as Grace Kelly became a hit around the world in 2007, so, too, began public questions about Mika’s sexuality. He never lied or denied anything when the media asked pointed questions. And he certainly, as he emphatically points out, never wore a beard. He simply would redirect interviews back to the subject at hand, the reason he thought there was public interest in him in the first place: his music. That was until the publication of one particular article in 2009.

In an interview with Dutch magazine Gay & Night, Mika was once again asked how he defines his sexuality. And he responded, as he had many times before, that he doesn’t like the idea of labeling and defining people by the strict social terms we use to classify whom people sleep with. Except this time he took it a bit further in dealing with the near-obsessive need to label him as something and added: “Call me whatever you want. Call me bisexual if you need a term for me.” Finally, in an August 2012 interview with the magazine Instinct, the singer described himself as gay.

Mika has released 3 more albums since his debut, relatively successful and critically well received, but he was unable to catch lightning in a bottle again. Like it or not, it's Life in Cartoon Motion that defines his Pop career.