But in 1998, Wainwright seemed like something, someone, new under the sun: a pop-rock performer on a major label, named Best New Artist of the Year by Rolling Stone, who didn’t have to come out because he had never been in the closet. ![]() There have been gay performers for as long as there have been performers, of course, and they have lived and worked in various degrees of outness. The performer also seemed like a gay messiah. In 2023, if the young male singer is openly gay, that’s another legacy of Rufus Wainwright. If Wainwright hadn’t done so, at a time when doing so wasn’t fashionable, when lovers of this genre viewed him as a messiah, this new song and others like it might not exist or might have taken very different courses. That’s one legacy of Wainwright’s eponymous debut recording, released in 1998: keeping alive this particular kind of pop-rock. ![]() Rufus Wainwright, yes? No, it’s not him, but whoever it is owes some debt to Wainwright. It’s a young man whose expressive voice ranges from a rumble to a whine, with stops along the way for controlled vibrato. The singer isn’t Nilsson, who died in 1994 and doesn’t really sound like him. The music is piano-based pop-rock, sweetly melodic but melancholy, the kind Harry Nilsson made in the latter half of the 20th century. It’s the 21st century, and a new song is playing.
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