Words by Jason Lee. Portraits by Jenny Alice Watts. Content warning: explicit language, strong sexuality, reclaimed slurs, spiritual yearning, unbound love, unrestrained lust.
Let’s just say that if you’ve been looking for a song that puts the “hole” back in “holy” and the “Jeez!” back in “Jesus!” well you’ve come to the right place cuz today we’re here to introduce you to the new single by Klovis Gaynor and the Urinal Cakes entitled “Peace Be With Every Little Faggot,” the first single off their upcoming debut album SAVE ME FOR THE SPANK BANK, and yes you just read all of that right, and no we don’t mean “faggot” as in a “bungle of sticks used for kindling” or wait maybe we do…
…cuz between the song’s incendiary mix of sexual and spiritual supplication, inflammatory avowals of desire for a deity’s progeny laid out in the most carnally descriptive terms imaginable, set to a musical backing that swells like a tumescent, um, organ, building from a solo keyboard étude to a bombastic stadium rock finalé, well, let’s just say if your fire’s not fully stoked by Klovis & Co’s heady mix of religion and eroticism and pleas to give Jesus head well you’re made of stronger stuff than us…
…which boy howdy let’s start with the music cuz sonically the song’s a sumptuous feast for the ears so unbridled in its passion that it’s on the verge of being obscene even before you take in the lyrics with florid pianistic flourishes supplied by none other than bandleader Klovis Gaynor themselves as supported by his merry band of urinal cakes—a worthy epithet for a collective whose playing can be hard and heavy as a deodorizing hockey puck one moment, soft and squishy as a pink spongy sea anemone that’s been peed on repeatedly at another–a band made up of Brayden Baird (guitar), Dane Bundschuh (bass), and Josh Hausman (drums and fFench horn) in a historic first for the Deli crediting someone who plays both drums and French horn…
…as further supplemented by a chamber orchestra made up of Yoshi Weinberg on harp, Anthime Miller on cello, Larah Helayne on violin, and Alice Marks on saxophone (“Peace Be…” is produced, mixed, and mastered by Brayden Baird) with the first couple minutes of the song sounding like a heavenly house band fronted by Liberace only if Liberace had decided to come out of the closet in the most flamboyantly fashion possible by singing lines like “Lord rail me hard” over twinkling harp and throbbing piano chords in a voice chocked with desire that he surely woulda been dragged before a HUAC committee during the years of the Lavender Scare…
…at which point the song transitions into a sweeping, fever-pitched glam anthem and perhaps it’s worth noting here how its couple big musical climaxes correlate with about the only lyrics that could be reprinted in a family newspaper (“You are loved” and “Peace be with you”) both of which see K. Gaynor’s voice soaring off into the stratosphere like a supersonic jet, his pipes as supple and flexible as an inguinal ligament, fueled by a combustible mixture of the sacred and the profane and it’s all enough to make us wonder how many queer “little faggots” (in the parlance of the song) out there first got turned on at an impressionable age by God or Jesus seeing as the former is basically the archetypal “daddy figure” and the latter was clearly a hottie based on all the art and iconography depicted Him as a dreamboat deity with washboard abs…
…who according to some accounts was more of a sybaritic libertine than anything (“because the Lord loved love / and He loved wine / and He was always naked/ thorned and tied”) and whose love was unconditional which was just as taboo back then as it is now and whose origin story is all about virgins and whores, multiple penetration, and the strong sadomasochistic tendencies of a religion based around the tortured suffering of its primary deity (Christianity is named after Christ after all with God da Faddah being just this mercurial guy floating around up in the clouds)…
…and while “Peace Be With Every Little Faggot” will no doubt be labeled sacrilege by some what with it’s mashup of erotic and spiritual, violent and tender, despairing and ecstatic, degrading and re-humanizing at once, it’s actually part of a long tradition spanning from Hildegard of Bingen to Janelle Monáe of these different things or as Oxford Research Encyclopedias Online puts it: “Erotic representations of the divine occupy a pivotal place in religious myths, poetry, liturgy, and theology. Reading eros as a category of religious love highlights its ubiquitous presence in sacred literary sources; moreover, it renders the nexus of erotic love and the divine critical to comprehending religiosity as an immanent and embodied phenomenon, rather than as an abstract idea”…
Images lifted from here
…and while it’s become somewhat of a cliché for people to say how love can mean about a hundred different things—depending on the context, and to whom and by whom the love in question is being expressed—Klovis Gaynor goes against the grain in essentially declaring that “love is love” whether spiritual love, physical love, or platonic love (or straight love or gay love or nonbinary love or whatever) cuz maybe all these forms of love aren’t really so different as people like to pretend and maybe if everyone could just chill the f— out for a minute and make it a goal to collectively inhabit a state of grace that’s radically authorized for everyone then maybe we could live in a state of peace and solidarity or as Martin from The Simpsons once memorably put it: “Individually we are weak like a single twig, but as a bundle we form a mighty faggot!”
Artists’ statement: “Peace Be With Every Little Faggot” will be available on all streaming platforms on May 30th, 2024 and will be celebrated with a release show at The Stone Circle Theatre in Ridgewood, NYC that evening at 7pm (TIX HERE). This venue was originally a church, and still is, though functions as a modern-day multi-purpose space. The cover art for the single was shot on the same stage the performance will take place.
While still in their first year of performing, the band has been creating buzz in the queer underground scene, establishing themselves as forceful, loud, and confident, yet also fragile, gentle, inspiring of hope. The foursome self-describes their music as “the sound of crying, the sound of fucking, the sound of banging pianos, distorted guitars, fear, lust, hate, love, cum, cum & more cum.”
