This article is taken from the March 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Could everybody please shut up about Sam Smith. This may seem a bit unnecessary if you weren’t talking about Sam Smith, in which case I will now fill you in on the whole Sam Smith situation, and after that you will be fully entitled to tell me to shut up, too.

So here we go. In January, adorable, angel-voiced lummox Sam Smith, 30, released the second single from his album Gloria. Until last year, Smith was primarily a torch song specialist, applying a mournful falsetto to sad-sack warbles about one-night stands and rejection like “Stay With Me” and “Too Good At Goodbyes”: Smokey Robinson after too many bad Grindr dates.

Embracing enbyhood, for Smith, meant embracing the camp he’d denied himself since that assault

The wounded persona in the songs was matched by an almost painfully shy demeanour as a performer. When I saw him introduced as a special guest by Taylor Swift on the Red Tour in 2014, he had the endearingly wide-eyed appearance of someone who’d come on stage by mistake. (Though even with obvious nerves, the voice was there.)

His look back then was a little bit Teddy Boy: smart jacket, plaid shirt, hair long on top with fade sides. It was a style he’d settled on not entirely voluntarily. When he arrived in London in his teens, he’d worn women’s clothes until a homophobic beating scared him off flamboyance.

Smith was always out as gay. Over time, he got outer. In 2017, he announced: “I feel just as much a woman as I am a man.” In 2019, he declared himself nonbinary and began using they/them pronouns. (I, however, do not use they/them pronouns, so let’s respectfully acknowledge Smith’s sense of identity and move on in legible fashion.)

Then in 2021, Smith protested at being excluded, as a nonbinary person, from the best artist award at the Brits, which was divided into male and female categories. The Brits, caught on the wrong side of identity etiquette, did what organisations tend to do: the stupidest thing. They made the award gender neutral. In 2023, no women were nominated.

The video itself was quite different from his old moody offerings: it was an orgy of fetishwear

In an interview, Smith said this was a “shame” and seemed genuinely perplexed by the result. I felt, as I’d done at the Taylor Swift gig, a pang of sympathy: it seems cruel to put pop stars in the position of political arbiters. Bluntly, having a decent voice and some charisma (not that much in Smith’s case) is no guarantee of holding well-reasoned opinions.

The complaint of exclusion was risible, but it’s not Smith’s fault anyone listened. Nonetheless, he had become the figure-head of the Brits’ terrible decision, a Controversial Figure in the gender wars. At the same time, his image was shifting into a more confrontational mode. Embracing enbyhood, for Smith, meant embracing the camp he’d denied himself since that assault. He was bigger, too. He’d never had the sylph-like build of a Harry Styles, and it had made him self-conscious. Now, he was going to live without shame.

The new Smith has a platinum crop. He attended the Brits in a delightfully mad latex suit that made him look like a pervy Michelin Man. In the video for Gloria’s lead single “Unholy”, he wore a basque. The video itself was quite different from his old moody offerings: it was an orgy of fetishwear with Smith prancing delightedly at the front of it all.

The second single, “I’m Not Here to Make Friends”, went further with a troupe of dancers twerking in a baroque urinal and Smith being ecstatically bathed in streams of golden liquid. For those infuriated by Smith’s blundering entry into the gender wars, this was a degeneracy too far. Words like “groomer” got thrown around. This was, of course, just as stupid as the Brits. It’s pop music, and pop music is going to be horny. It wasn’t even the first golden shower in a pop video: Frankie Goes to Hollywood included a brief watersports allusion in 1983’s “Relax”
video and no one minded … No, wait, a lot of people were very upset and the BBC refused to play it.

Smith seems to be having more fun than at any previous point in his career

If you’re going to be provocative, people are going to be provoked. That’s how this game works, and if Smith doesn’t realise it, he’s even sillier than the Brits business suggests. His defenders, though, chose to leave no doubt about their own stupidity: one pompously wrote in the New Statesman that even discussing the video “makes LGBTQ+ people feel that their existence is controversial and debatable”.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think that when a person has grown blasé about piss parties, they have grown blasé about life. I like it when pop artists behave outrageously. Let’s not disparage Smith’s efforts by pretending that luxuriating in urine is no more shocking than a night at the bingo.

If nothing else, Smith seems to be having more fun than at any previous point in his career. Regrettably, there’s still plenty of the old neediness on Gloria — now mixed up with bland affirmations of self-acceptance like “Love Me More”. Lost under the backlash and counter-backlash is the fact that, “Unholy” aside, this is all some very medium pop music. Now, I really will shut up about Sam Smith.