Shawn Adeli | Be Your Girl / 2024 [music video]

everything she has, i have more

by Douglas Messerli

 

Shawn Adeli (director), John Duff (music and lyrics) Be Your Girl / 2024 [3 minutes] [music video]

 

In the music video Be Your Girl, gay performer John Duff imagines how he might be some straight guy’s girl, backed up by a chorus of women dancers who in Vegas/Hollywood style in what Ben Nelson in Get Out! describes as a “celebratory anthem from another time”…harkening back, he exclaims,  to “Tom Jones, Cher, and Frank Sinatra”—an extremely odd trio gathering whose vocal stylings I can’t quite assimilate into my aural memory.

     Nonetheless, Duff, singing his own composition with the help of Eren Cannata and Koil PreAmple, does manage to create a kind of disco showstopper about unrequited love (as Nelson correctly describes it).

     Standing near 4 red-painted light posts—reminding one a little of the labyrinth of silver light posts of Chris Burden’s “Urban Light” outside the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—Duff, a good singer, but even a better dancer, belts out how he could be the elusive other’s girl instead of the background dancers to whom it is clear the imaginary straight boy of the song is really attracted.

It is a song of gay boys forever and after, wandering through small towns and even big cities who encounter their would-be lovers to be someone not at all receptive to the joyous gay sex they have to offer, but knowing that it would surely be more for fulfilling that any woman might be able to provide.

    The song’s lyrics quite literally lay out thousands of school-boy desires in youth when they cannot quite realize that they will grow up to be men who might better offer their services than the hometown prom queen:

 

“Been dodging your cologne

And thinking I should just stay home

Can’t control my mind

She’s running back to you

 

You’ve seen it all

Do I look small

I entertain,

though I can’t play

The role you wrote

But I would stay

With you

 

I could be your girl

Fall back

Right in love

And we could be so classy

Buttoned up

Be your girl !

I could be your girl

Then all the stars would shine on my delusion

Buckle up

And be my girl

It’s like a paradox you see

The ones he’s chosen over me

Cause everything she has

I have more”

 

    In this music video, Duff does indeed have more, and the pleasure of his imaginative dances and campy struts is what his success is all about.

 

Los Angeles, January 19, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).