Hey 'sup. You may have noticed I've switched from Tinyletter to Buttondown! To celebrate please enjoy something I've spent about three months picking at, before I finally decided to try and teach myself an object lesson in "done is better than perfect". You might notice I've also finally managed to find a way to avoid having an actual address getting published on every email I send!! What a time to be alive.

We're Not The Only Ones: an argument for a queer interpretation of Employment by Kaiser Chiefs

In the summer of 2004, I was 13, and two songs came along which talked about male homosexuality with a frankness which felt electric. In June, The Killers released Hot Fuss, featuring Andy, You’re A Star as an album track. Two months later, Michael by Franz Ferdinand was all over the radio, and while the refrain of ‘come all over me Michael’ still wasn’t quite something I understood the meaning of, the rest of it was clear enough.

Even though both of these songs by bands who have never openly identified themselves as queer, the representation of same-gender desire was still important to me – it still opened a world of possibilities I hadn’t been quite as clear on up until that point. I knew that lesbian, gay and bisexual people existed, and I’d almost certainly dipped a toe into the waters of Harry Potter slash by that point. But as an autistic person, songs had always been how I understood what it meant to feel particular ways – discovering indie music with gay content was a huge step in my ability to contextualise what it might mean to be queer. I hadn’t worked out that I was a transgender man yet – but my fixation on songs about men being attracted to men was an early indication of where I would end up later on in my life.

Employment by Kaiser Chiefs was released the following March; although I loved Franz Ferdinand and The Killers, this album became my first NME-endorsed hyper-fixation. It was formative for me. At the same time, I was realising I wasn’t straight; I came out as bisexual on my 15th birthday, and that understanding of myself has broadly remained constant since then. Despite not having any textually queer content, Employment was just as important to me and my increasing sense of identity as a queer person as the more indisputably queer songs I’ve mentioned above.

As far as I’m aware, I’m the only one who sees this record this way – it’s by no means an intentionally queer work in the way that Michael or Andy... are. A queer reading of Employment, however, exists most vividly on the level of the album as a whole – the songs on the album mirror each other and reinforce each others’ themes. While it might not contain any songs framed explicitly around same-gender desire – in fact, it’s an album almost entirely without love songs - the songs on the album repeatedly return to many tensions inherent to queer life.

An inevitable starting point for interpreting a work as queer is examining how gendered pronouns are used. It doesn’t tell the full story, but it’s useful as a way in. The way that the songs on Employment almost entirely avoid using gendered pronouns about romantic subjects might seem like just a cheap way of making a pop song relatable to the maximum audience possible – an obvious ploy for a band who never hid their ambitions for mainstream chart success. However, in the one case where gender is explicitly stated, it doesn’t make it necessarily a clearly heterosexual song.

Caroline, Yes is unambiguously about a woman – but it’s so preoccupied with the man who has ‘taken’ her that it barely counts as a love song towards her, as it’s almost entirely about the narrator’s feelings of envy and wish to emulate his rival. The clip-clop rhythm which leads into the vocals is heavily reminiscent of Westerns – a genre which also reduces heterosexual supposed love interests to props and prizes in homocentric rivalries.

The obvious comparison point (as my friend Olivia pointed out to me) is Jolene by Dolly Parton. But where Jolene is famously fixated upon the rival in a way that has been argued to be homoerotic, the man who Parton doesn’t want to be stolen is also referred to in the chorus. By contrast, the Caroline of Caroline, Yes is even further removed from being the central focus of the song love – she literally doesn’t even appear beyond the first minute of the four-minute run time of the song.

Furthermore, although Jolene’s merits are notoriously itemized in the eponymous song, at no point does Parton express any desire to be her. In Caroline, Yes, the entire point of the song is how much the narrator wishes to be like his rival, and how successful he has been in doing so. As a queer trans man, I’ve often found it to be a point of confusion whether I’m attracted to a man, or I want to be them; a tension which often amplifies eroticism. Because of this, it’s my favourite song on the album – it’s the clearest articulation I’ve come across of a constantly present feature of my feelings towards men. There’s no way it was ever intended as such, but that’s an important part of why I love it; it's reassuring to remember that no matter how niche your positionality might be, there is always something about how you feel which is more universal than you realise.

Ambiguous genders aside, most prominent way in which Employment relates to queer experience is how many of the songs can be seen as articulating how it feels to be closeted. The opening song on the album, Everyday I Love You Less and Less, is a neurotic, nervy, yelping track about ending an affair. The chorus finds reassurance and comfort in the narrator’s ability to return to his family and girlfriend – the gender of the person who is being left is never made clear, which exposes a dichotomy between a sense of discomfort and risk at rejecting social norms, and comfort and security at conforming to what society expects.

In contrast, Born to Be a Dancer is about discovering your partner hasn’t been faithful. But the chorus uses euphemism to reveal that the narrator is also involved in some kind of deception:

To lay back and think of England is to have sex which doesn’t meet your desires for the purpose of fulfilling the greater social good; it’s normally associated with being something women are instructed to do when they’re not attracted to their partners for whatever reason. Being born to be a dancer isn’t an idiom in the same way, but as a phrase it carries connotations of performance and artifice. It'd be one thing if the cheating party was being spoken about in these terms, but that’s the narrator referring to himself.

If Born To Be A Dancer only hints at the concealment of a true self, the closet appears more tangibly and directly on You Can Have It All (‘No, I can never hold your hand in public’), and to a lesser degree What Did I Ever Give You? (‘I wish that you could see me in the day’). These songs mirror each other; the former track reflects on the impossibility of conducting a relationship in public, but the latter calls into question the impossibility of true intimacy when a relationship is conducted in the shadows, and the push and pull against a partner wanting to love in the light – ‘all I ever gave you was pain, and a look of disdain’. The former swoons, imagining a future of possibilities (‘I’ll buy you some more in five years’) where the latter slouches with shame. They demonstrate the fantasy of escaping the confines of what your relationship has to be, versus the reality of what those confines have turned it into.

Although being in the closet can seem like simply a matter of just hiding one facet of your existence, i.e. one’s love life, in reality the constant need to hide a ‘true’ self has an inevitable impact on everything else, too. Being closeted means a need to blunt and withhold much of what you feel; the effort this takes breeds apathy and disillusionment in all spheres of life. Modern Way expresses a sense of disillusionment with one’s daily life which stems from a sensation of being inauthentic; meanwhile, Oh My God is about the euphoria of having successfully managed to escape that humdrum existence. In the chorus, the line ‘I’ve never been this far away from home’ frames this escape in terms of distance – a common thread in queer life is relocating to a more accepting urban milieu.

One approach to living while being closeted is to only mention any romantic entanglements as ambiguously as possible. The closing song on the album, Team Mate, is as ambiguous as it gets. Not even just in terms of gender – it’s hard to completely work out whether Team Mate is about the ending of a platonic relationship or a romance: on the one hand, the partnership that it’s mourning the end of is described as one of team mates, which, with its connotation of sports, infers a close platonic relationship between men. However, the vocals are wistful and yearning, and the line ‘it’s just me and you / on a bicycle for two’ clearly references the traditional song Daisy Bell.

Blurred boundaries between platonic and romantic relationships are a common thread of queer life. Unrequited crushes on straight friends are a frequently cited rite of passage – close same-gender friendships are a fertile breeding ground for the exact feelings of intimacy which lead to realisations of same-gender attraction.

Team Mate is also the most sincere song on the album, and it closes the album. Albums aren’t meant to function as essays, but due to their sequencing, closing tracks can alter the tone of the songs which come before. I’ve always found it strange that an album which revels in a sense of playfulness ends in this way; it leaves you with an impression of a tender ambiguity which makes it easier to retroactively read sensitivity in everything that’s come before.

As is very obvious from having written this essay, I love this album. I don’t have any sense of affinity with anything they’ve made since, but Employment was one of the first albums I loved enough that it became a part of me. The reason I learned how to tie a tie wasn’t because I needed to wear one for school – I didn’t manage it when it was compulsory - but because I desperately wanted to be Ricky Wilson as a teenager. I sometimes joke that seeing this Top Of The Pops performance made me trans, and that I just didn’t realise it at the time. When I first saw Wilson performing, I was a shy and awkward teenage girl, and it didn’t occur to me that there was any chance I could be anything else.

A few years after this, when I was at sixth-form, I wanted to become a serious-minded academic; occasionally, I’d read left-wing criticism, and I noticed that bands I’d felt emotionally invested in at some point were often mentioned as throw-away jokes. It felt embarrassing, and made me feel ashamed of myself. After having been out as bisexual for a few years already, I knew not being straight wasn’t anything to be ashamed of – but liking the ‘wrong’ music felt like my fault.

The reason I’m bringing this up is because I really believe that the case I’ve made for a queer interpretation of Employment is solid. However, I keep worrying that the reason I’ve developed this argument is to retroactively give my sincere enjoyment an objective political justification. There’s no way I could tell you what came first: did I begin to love this album because I felt a sense of recognition of queerness, or have I sensed that the only way I can render my appreciation into an acceptable form is to intellectually rationalise it?

I couldn’t tell you the real answer to that - I don't know for certain either way. But it still matters to me that I’ve seen my life and feelings specific to my sense of self as a queer person in a piece of work which wasn’t intended to express those facets of life. It matters that creative works don’t have to be accepted as part of a canon of ‘worthwhile’ art to have meaning and value.

Kaiser Chiefs have released six studio albums in the years following Employment; their first single of the rest of their career, Ruby, was straightforwardly heterosexual in a way that nothing they’d done before was. Much of why it might be hard to conceive of Kaiser Chiefs having released an album which could be interpreted as queer is because their music is now entangled with stereotypical heterosexual masculinity – Ruby was almost immediately adopted by football terrace culture. But we’ll always find facets of our experiences where we need to find them; that’s something intrinsic to queer resilience.