Music / Transgender
‘Political correctness ebbs and flows. It’s all bollocks’
Who is Jordan Gray? Since her appearance on The Voice in 2016, it is clear something, and nothing has changed.
“The Voice was such a wonderful experience – but the nuclear fallout of being on that show is the reason I don’t make my own music anymore,” Jordan explains ahead of her gig at The Square Club on Thursday, November 15.
But despite that fallout, Jordan is still performing her music and last year, for the first time, grabbed the microphone to display her abilities on the comedy circuit. Whilst now focusing on her career in comedy, Jordan still sings live and her style, she says, has not changed a bit. “I still inhabit that sweet little bubble of time when music was still fun for me”.
is needed now More than ever
“Now that I’ve no drive to push my own music,” she continues, “I can have a lot more fun stringing together medleys and mashups. I try to blend ‘whacky’ and ‘wistful’ together. Like a cartoon David Gray.”
Favourably compared to Joni Mitchell, Tracy Chapman, Lady Gaga and Jessie J, a less-than-kind punter “once shouted that I was a cross between Lee Evans and Sid Vicious,” Jordan recalls. But the insults don’t appear to have dented her ability to try, in her mind, “to inhabit a space between Michael Jackson and Jeff Buckley”.
“I was obsessed,” Jordan says, “with big musical characters like Johnny Cash, Marilyn Manson and Meatloaf. Somebody with a mythology behind them.”
“To me, they were like musical superheroes and all I’ve ever wanted to be is a superhero,” she adds.
Performers acquire labels through their career, but most don’t start out with a politically-charged one. Jordan says being a trans artists means being seen as “the minority of the month” and is judged by people “in spite” of her identity.
“People used to say, ‘you were only on The Voice because you’re trans’. It might well be true,” she shrugs.
It is a slur many LGBT+ artists encounter – a view underpinned by a belief that straight, white, cis-gender male artists have accommodated performers from diverse backgrounds out of begrudging politeness. It is a toxic attitude that presents itself in politics, the media and entertainment.
“My job now,” Jordan says defiantly, “is to outperform everybody around me so that people can believe that I deserve to be in the spotlight.”
Political correctness – the bugbear of those who feel ‘equality’ has gone too far – is little more than modern day censorship in the eyes of its opponents. To its proponents, it is vital to strengthening the rights of LGBT+ people.
But Jordan says: “It’s all bollocks”.
“Political correctness ebbs and flows,” she continues, “and whatever public consensus best serves the current political agenda will be manufactured and we’ll all believe it’s our genuine opinion. It ain’t. So, I pay no attention to it – I just try to be funny, clever and sexy enough that groupies want to get involved.”
Read more: The Bard beyond binaries
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