k.d. lang’s career started with a round of open-heart surgery. In 1983, the woman born Kathryn Dawn was involved in a 12-hour performance art piece in which she and her peers in Edmonton, Canada, re-enacted the first artificial heart transplant, using pickled carrots and beets for the organ. There are no surviving reports of the audience’s response, but lang recalled that the players came away dazed.
A year later, she took her career in a more conventional direction, albeit marginally. lang was an androgyne from rural Canada who considered herself to be the reincarnation of Patsy Cline, convinced she was born to be a country star. Even in outlaw terms, she was a long shot in conservative Nashville, a city nonetheless seduced by her punky verve and saucy rambunctiousness, a hay-bale alternative to the genre’s burgeoning cosmopolitanism. She was accepted, to a degree—her vegetarianism and PETA allegiance notwithstanding—but lang knew that acceptance was creative death. By the early ’90s, she felt that she had exploited country’s full creative potential. Now was time to develop her own romantic language.
That’s a challenge for any artist—how to create an original expression of love or heartbreak when those emotions have been so comprehensively codified by decades of pop music? lang’s circumstances were very particular. She was irrevocably in love with a married woman, and there was nothing she could do, no cooling-off period she could wait out, to get what she desired. The crush was a lost cause, and despite heavy rumors about her sexuality and a much-remarked upon lesbian contingent in her fanbase, lang was also not yet officially out. It was the early 1990s: Ellen DeGeneres wouldn’t come out for five years, AIDS-related deaths wouldn’t peak for another four, and President George H. W. Bush was renouncing his earlier support for gay marriage in a shameless attempt to maintain power. And yet, lang wanted to convey the specificity of her pain to as broad an audience as possible.
She was also perturbed by how pop was starting to crowd out the singing parts with the rhythm parts. Seeking a vehicle worthy of her voice, lang decided to hark back to the age of Peggy Lee, Julie London, and Rosemary Clooney, the adult contemporary sound of her parents’ generation. The gulf between her artistic whims and mainstream potential could hardly have seemed wider. But lang, who had sewn plastic farm animals to her gingham skirt in her earliest, kitschiest phase as a country star, was skilled at subverting what seemed anachronistic, even if the growing queercore scenes in Olympia and London wrote her off as a mopey blight on their cause. That is the beauty of 1992’s Ingénue, which looks however you want it to look depending on the light—radical queer ur-text or MOR reverie—and lets lang shapeshift accordingly. It was her first all-original album for a reason, allowing her to create modes of tragedy, defeat, and roleplay as she tried to distill the truest essence of her own heartbreak, a state that makes subjugated clichés of us all.
Ingénue is irresistibly seductive, so much so that it drives home just how unavailable lang’s crush was: How could she resist this? lang described the sound of Ingénue as “post-nuclear cabaret” and “nouveau easy listening”: Opener “Save Me” soothes the room like a bath filling up, making the light swim and the temperature rise. From there, lang and stalwart collaborator Ben Mink conjure a sense of intimacy so acute it feels like a confrontation. Their obsessive “sonic cleanliness” heightens the atmosphere to a peak of sensitivity: The tapering bass of “Wash Me Clean,” a song that is otherwise pure, sustained glow, might as well be a finger running down the inside of your wrist. Long before the term ASMR was coined, lang knew how to simulate the sensations of heartbreak: the obsessively lovelorn can trigger the memory (or fantasy) of connection until it’s wrung dry, the spark drained. From: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kd-lang-ingenue/
