Matt Maltese's queer undertones

From a psychoanalytic perspective

update 4/28:

Dear readers, I wrote this essay a little over 6 months ago, originally titled, “Why Matt Maltese is a repressed homosexual.” Since then, it has overwhelmingly become my most viewed post, with most of the traffic coming from Google searches of ‘is matt maltese gay’. (None of the traffic on my other posts comes from google search). I never expected it to receive as much traffic as it has, including someone on Reddit describing my essay as “a very eerie, yet passionate essay.”

Now, I feel ethical ambivalence after having written this, at first a joke, now a potential violation of a person’s privacy… Admittedly, if I had genuinely humanized this person as something beyond a parasocial lens, I would have never written this essay in the manner that I had. No one’s sexuality should be imposed, ridiculed, or appropriated upon them without their consent, especially by someone they don’t know.

For this reason, I have edited the language to reflect not Matt Maltese as an individual, but rather as a queer reading of his work and its undertones. I have removed the instagram posts/activity screenshots and other personal information that were both regrettably inappropriate and insensitive to have included. This essay thus finds relevant only interpreting lyrics, album covers, and music video stills.

Matt wears a tuxedo (masculine signifier) backwards, facing away from the camera, hands in pockets. We can interpret this image in two ways—he is shrinking in the male signifiers that he ought to partake in or... he is playing both a male lover and himself, facing each other. Do you see it?

Intro

Dear friends,

Today I will be explaining to you why twenty-nine-year-old British-Canadian singer-songwriter Matthew Maltese’s music, when read psychoanalytically, reveals repressed queer undertones. I have been proclaiming for a while that, although he sings exclusively about desiring women, Matt Maltese’s work is, in actuality, deeply queer. What makes it even queerer is that this queerness appears to be unconscious—this repression is peak queer activity.

Firstly, reading repression in his work does not mean that heterosexual desire is fake or performative. That’s not how sexuality works. I am simply stating that unconscious homosexual desire emerges through the manipulation of heterosexual signifiers and "jokes," which serve to expel excess homoerotic energy in the work (like all desire).

Also, let me say one more thing: repression of desire is unconscious. Unconscious means that it is categorically outside of one’s consciousness. Why do I emphasize this? Because in pop culture, the terms repression and unconscious are often used inaccurately—they’re largely used to describe an ugly truth that one secretly knows but refuses to admit. On the other hand, my use of the word unconscious is faithful to its original psychoanalytic meaning—it is entirely outside of one’s awareness. It’s supposed to seem absurd and impossible. Non-Freudians may have a difficult time following me, but hopefully some of you will.

Desubjectification of female love interests

Before I analyze individual lyrics, I want to posit a general trend among Matt’s songs: the desubjectification of his female love interests. In other words, the work often mutilates the female subject into parts—her lips, her eyes, her voice, her hair, clothing items, etc. I recommend actually listening to the songs, but here are a few examples:

• Leather wearing alcoholic angel

• Tuesday with your wet hair and curls
  Wearing pajamas and the outside world

• K's eyes are like first prize

• I see you line up
  With a turtle neck and
  Leather gloves
  Oh my god

• The cotton that you wear
  They cover up your neck this way
  You're calm and naked, crying
  Washing off Chanel
  From the edges of your neck this way

• And now the morning sweeps you up
  You take your evening outfit off
  You run your shower and lean back your head
  I love when you wash your hair

Now, what does this accomplish? I don’t want to move too fast for all of you non-Freudians because I don’t want to lose you—I will talk more slowly about this under the section Castration Anxiety. However, let me briefly say that these lyrics mutilate women into parts (which is seemingly contradictory for a neurotic) because they are not a man. It is a disavowal of castration. The castration anxiety being repressed by a homo-neurotic-subjectivity is unable to track onto that of heterosexual desire. Perhaps another way of putting it, a neurotic libidinal economy only activates homosexually—it can only be castrated by a man.

4/28 update: check out his new album cover, Hers…same thing applies…

Desubjectification of the self

Here are some lyrics depicting self-mutilation:

• I wanna be the screen you always touch
  And I'd even be an ulcer in your mouth
  Just to be close to you, I'm just so far

• The apple that you buy, that's what I wanna be

• I'm a toothache
  I'm the saddest case
  I'm often looking round for my next mistake
  I'm your garden waste
  I've left no trace

• I'm a dead end, a budget hotel
  I'm a deck chair
  Your cheap underwear
  A bad Christian who never goes to prayer

• I put myself inside of you

  And use my hands when you tell me to

  Like there's no fucking tomorrow

I’ll write more about this in "The eye and the mouth."

Castration anxiety

Please note that when I say castration, I am referring to symbolic castration in the psychoanalytic sense, not literal castration.

Assuming a neurotic-esque libidinal landscape, why does Matt Maltese so beautifully sing about a female love interest’s parts, one small piece at a time, his gaze taking precedence? After all, performing the function of the gaze is the pervert’s job. Let’s put aside that perverted fantasies still play an essential role in the neurotic’s libidinal economy.

There are two potential reasons for this—the first of which is that he is able to do this because the woman is not the end of his desire, but rather the object cause, objet a. The objet a transcends gender and sexuality, though not entirely disentangled from it, but let me make the claim that objet a and sexuality are necessarily independent.

Second, as Slavoj Žižek in his essay The Masochist and The Social Link, that the mutilation of the subject into localized parts for jouissance, effectively disavows castration—this is the second potential reason. This is not entirely unrelated to the first reason: a disavowal of castration anxiety is linked to a kind of detachment from one’s libidinal reserve, which is why Zizek said it leads to its own failure—it is not a sustainable kind of pleasure. However, it can be sustainable if it rides on an underlying wave of unconscious desire, in which the face of this libidinal image is but a symbol or a buffer for something else.

I’ll develop this further in "Jokes & Sarcasm as Buffers for Homosexuality." In short: the lack of castration anxiety in his hetero-interactions versus the overabundance of it in homo-readings supports this structure.

Also: in the Strange Time music video, Matt sings as a straight couple makes out in the background.

In another music video, he rides on the back of a motorcycle while a woman drives it. He clings to her back, looking away.

The eye and the mouth

This is Matt Maltese’s album cover, Songs That Aren’t Mine. Similarly to the women he sings about in his songs, he has desubjectified himself, mutilating him into two parts that are visible to us: his eye and mouth, which furthermore are misaligned from if it was simply his face behind a miniature house. He proceeds to sing with his face composed this misaligned, disjointed way in his music video, the eye and the mouth moving and swaying separately on their own accord. Furthermore, the album title is Songs That Aren’t Mine. This echoes the desubjectification he performs on his female figures.

The inevitable circuit of the drive takes route as follows: through mutilating and desubjectifying himself into two locuses of jouissance: the eye and the mouth (oral and scopoic drives), and, through defining himself by what he is not.

As we know, desire is traumatic and depends on its own oblivion. Let me just mention the scopic drive (to see and be seen) and the oral drive (to suck), and perhaps you can connect it to how he has individualized these two body parts onto his album cover, Songs That Aren’t Mine.

Lastly for this part, I will ask you, why has he taken an interest in songs that aren’t “his” so much as to create an entire album for it? As we know that neurotics have a strong distaste for the Other gaining pleasure from imposing the law on them as a subject—they want things to be fair, equal, noninvolved. So how do neurotics cope with the impossibility of this preference playing out in reality? Well, one option is to mutilate yourself temporarily, as Matt has done in his album cover, into individualized locuses of jouissance. An effective route of non-traumatic pleasure for repressed individuals, indeed.

Another option is illustrated by the title of the album cover itself—another form of mutilation in a way, by refusing direct association or responsibility for what they are partaking in (as he didn’t create the song, he is simply covering it). This distanciation or vicarious-pleasure is an effective method of protected pleasure, though if this can be considered masochism. Furthermore, some of the songs in these covers are originally female singers singing to male lovers, but we may disregard it as perhaps that’s too much of a stretch for you (though it’s not for me).

So, then, if this is to be interpreted as a source of masochism, guilty of desubjectification/playing the role of the gaze in which female love interests are supposedly subjected to, then how is this not a perverse form? Because it takes the form of repressed homosexuality. Thank you. This perverse activity is directed toward the first layer of desire among many—the female love interest. I will continue this line of thought in the double-neurotic section.

Foucault//rejection of repressive hypothesis

Now, I want to briefly mention how Matt Maltese’s sexuality is a great corroboration of Foucault’s debunking of the Repressive Hypothesis. In Foucault’s debunking of the Repressive Hypothesis, he rejects the idea that social norms repress an “innate” element of human sexuality, but rather, posits that social norms actually provide an initial friction in which sexuality forms itself around. Because, without friction and distance, there is no desire.

This ties into Matt’s circumstance, because I wish to make no claims as to what his “true” sexuality is. Rather, in this essay I have pointed out various instances of repression that point to a kind of homosexuality.

In other words, the order goes as follows: repression first, homosexuality second. Social norms don’t repress a “true” sexuality; rather, repression produces sexuality itself.

Like a Fish

You said you use chocolate
When you and him take off all your clothes
Why the fuck you tell me that?
Can't drink that image out of my head

Like a fish
That's how I drink these days
It numbs the envy I have
Against your tall, kind man
He's so much taller than I ever will be

I dream about you four nights a week
Call me romantic
I wish that I could fill his shoes
But I'm only a seven

Like a fish
Pour me a Guinness, man
She's probably screwing him now
Can make all the wisecracks in the world
But I will never be what she wants

In Like a Fish, Matt laments that the woman he loves is with a man. But he spends a suspicious amount of time focusing on that man—his height, his kindness, his shoes.

"I wish that I could fill his shoes, but I'm only a seven."

Comparing himself so intently to the other man—this is not neutral. This is repressed homoerotic desire hiding behind envy. It gets a little too close to exposure, so he has to quickly re-center on the woman.

Also: "like a fish" = oral drive = Freud.
We’re not done yet.

In Jupiter, too:

In every dream I have, you're in the car
You're not with him no more, yes, it's just us
In every dream I have, you're at the bar
Drinking White Russians with me, it's just us

He briefly mentions the man, then urgently reasserts the woman. Another little slip.

Irony Would Have It

Got a life ahead
Gotta chime on through
Got a life ahead
And I hope it's with you

I know it ain't so simple
But I’d do anything that I could
To make you happy again
Don’t know much but I do
Know this, I need to make it easy again

When the TV laughs
I look at you
That's our thing
You're a passionate man
And I'll always look up to you

Seems like only last year
You were teaching me
Life can fill you with fear
But it ain’t just suffering
And now irony would have it
There’s a diffеrent dynamic
Looks like irony would have it
That I tеach it back to you
I'll teach it r-right back to you
I’m gonna teach it back to you

This song was the original trigger for my suspicions…it’s full of tender mentorship, admiration, and reversal of roles. Too tired to explain it all, but this song is quite gay if you listen to it.

Mother

I don't wanna make a big scene
I just need a moment, lying on this street
If your lungs stop, you die
If you lose love, that's life
What a blue sky

All my friends, they miss you a lot
I know your father probably hates my guts
When the lover cuts ties
And the people get caught in the cross-fire

Tuesday with your wet hair and curls
Wearing pajamas and the outside world
Couldn't look in your eyes
Then you got in your car, and started to drive

And yesterday I told my mother
You learn to love again
And oh, she was the daughter you never had
And I know sometimes you might miss her
But I know the years can heal
And if there is another
Maybe you'll love them in the same way you loved her

As I was saying in my intro note section, everyone loves women, and a man desiring a woman does not necessarily rule out him being a homosexual Here’s the big idea for this song: Why does he focus on his mother’s desire upon the issue of breaking up with his girlfriend? Now, I’m about to get a little Freudian.

In breaking up with his girlfriend, this song is more concerned with reassuring his mother that she’ll “fall in love again” with the “daughter she never had.” Is it then, that his relation to this ex-girlfriend, was, again, but a medium in which unconscious desire can be passed through? His concern for the relationship between his mother and ex-girlfriend—the mother getting heartbroken when he is the one getting broken up with—well Freud might say let’s simplify this equation and say that this song is about Matt Maltese breaking up with his mother.

After all, the medium for expressing libidinal desire between mOther and son had been disintegrated when the girlfriend—whom both the mOther and the son loved—left the picture. Direct exposure of this….love…is of course not a choice, and castration anxiety is at an all-time-high. Hahahaha, we’ve come back full circle—repressed male homosexuality can desire women as a libidinal image which mimics and disguises the desire of their mOther. Cue the next section.

The real relationship being mourned here isn't romantic…through a Freudian lens, it's the libidinal triangle collapsing—the girlfriend was the buffer between the son and the mOther. With her gone, repression cracks open.

Why double-neurotic heterosexuality is gay

To put it plainly: being subject to the desire of the mOther is universal and genderless, similar to how I necessitated the distinguishing of objet a and sexuality as independent of one another. When two neurotics get entangled, you often get an object-object or subject-subject libidinal structure. Alarm bells should be going off, signaling that repression is actively taking place.

In Matt Maltese’s songs, I argue how he takes up the position of faux-pervert desiring a neurotic woman. The libidinal dynamic that arises in his work often contradict themselves and/or are inconsistent. The nature of a subject’s libidinal economy cannot shift so easily. In other words, it lays claim to an object-subject dynamic, yet raging subjecthood slips through.

So, then, you might ask me couldn’t this whole dynamic be resolved by arching toward a perverted woman as the main love interest? Well, no. It’s because of that necessary repression—going near that pole would trigger a number of traumatic images of desire that castration anxiety actively keeps dormant. Cue the song about a mother—lots of mommy-issue repression going on here, which might be why the pervert in this interpretation of a libidinal economy must be a man—to protect oneself from that raw, unmediated traumatic terror of the mOther’s unmediated jouissance. Or it could be, as I mentioned earlier in this essay, that this dynamic, in its queer interpretation, can only effectively become castrated by a man.

Bye-bye

There you have it, I will stop here. This kind of queering on an abstract level can be analyzed out of any and everyone if you look in the right places, and I hope you enjoyed reading this specific instance of it. To my subscribers, thank you, and, to my non-subscribers, please subscribe. Bye-bye~

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