Dorian Electra tends to push the boundaries of what’s possible. A pop star for the modern era, they don’t mix and match genres so much as transcend them, building fresh forms out of what they find. Shot in Milan during the tour following their latest album, Fanfare, the editorial is an opportunity to celebrate their constant transgression of musical and gender expectations.

Hello Dorian and welcome to Coeval. How would you describe your latest album “Fanfare” in three words?

Hopefully Very Good.

A good portion of the album is devoted to exploring the cult of celebrity: is this the mythology of our time? If so, has this mythology changed the way we look at images?

Fandom and the cult of celebrity are the new religion under capitalism. It's human nature to seek out community, a connection to a higher meaning, and something to help anchor one's own identity. Traditional forms of worship that have historically fulfilled these needs are not as central to daily life as they once were, and now these needs are being met by fandom in an unprecedented and pretty weird way that we're just beginning to unpack.

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Investigating modern culture, Fanfare mixes Les Miserables and Krautrock, glossy pop, dubstep and nu-metal, with eclectic lyrical influences. Biblical stories sit side-by-side with Stanley Kubrick, Nikola Tesla meme quotes bump up against Mao Zedong, Minions and The Muppets.

Is this idiosyncratic collage an attempt to escape the grasp of identity as personal branding? Becoming opaque, almost unreadable, we can maybe deconstruct the capitalist performance we’ve become, we can perhaps obstruct the trajectories of value extraction that plague every single gesture in our daily lives.

Hahahah. Sadly, capitalism is really really good at subsuming everything, including critiques of itself…so I don't think it's very easy. But it's not impossible.

In this particular historical/economic moment our personal identities are very much tied to our consumer identities (take for example the hipster: defined by what brands they wore, what music they listened to, what coffee shops they frequented, etc). Even politics or having a particular set of political beliefs itself has become so aestheticized and commodified that it could be argued that it has become more about which t-shirt, pins, or flags you purchase to display rather than the effect of your actual vote or other collective action. (See: "eat the rich" t-shirt made in China for sale on Amazon Prime https://a.co/d/0a109e5o ).

In his book, Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher has a quote about Kurt Cobain:

«In his dreadful lassitude and objectless rage, Cobain seemed to have given wearied voice to the despondency of the generation that had come after history, whose every move was anticipated, tracked, bought and sold before it had even happened. Cobain knew he was just another piece of spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV; knew that his every move was a cliché scripted in advance, knew that even realizing it is a cliché. The impasse that paralyzed Cobain in precisely the one that Fredric Jameson described: like postmodern culture in general, Cobain found himself in ‘a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, where all that is left is to imitate dead styles in the imaginary museum’».

I do think it's possible to create a counter-narrative to 'capitalist realism', but we're still figuring out what that would look like lol.

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This album took you almost two years whereas your previous ones were usually six months. Besides touring and the pandemic, is there any other reason for this? Were the themes explored in the album somehow difficult for you to engage with?

It was really hard for me to work remotely with producers to make songs. I.e. kind of impossible. I did try it though. Also, it definitely took me a while to figure out what the themes of this album were. In the past (for Flamboyant and My Agenda) I had the themes in mind first before I even started making the music. For Fanfare, I had to wait for the themes to emerge as I was making the music. We had over 100 demos for this album that didn't make the cut. It was also hard for me because as much as this album is political, it's also deeply personal (and that kind of vulnerability can make me kind of uncomfortable sometimes haha).

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Now the dumb question: do you have a favorite track?

(Other than Freak Mode) - Yes Man. The longest song I've ever made haha. It's like a mini rock opera about this sort of Napoleon-esque sad Ronald McDonald figure on the battlefield who pushes away everyone in his life who ever said no or challenged him until he's left with nobody. It's the story of the dictator and his sycophants, the CEO, the lonely celebrity; It's very tragic. I wouldn't say it's purely autobiographical (haha) but I also wouldn't say it's completely unrelatable to my life lol. It can come with the territory of being an artist, unfortunately, even when you're operating at a small scale. Everyone close to you is on your payroll kind of thing. The power dynamic of it all and how that poisons things.

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Casey MQ and I worked on this song (with contributions from Umru and Weston Allen) for 2 years basically until it was right. When we first started it, Casey had this beautiful instrumental and he encouraged me to just get up on the mic and riff freestyle, but I was apprehensive. At the time I never really did that; it felt too vulnerable and I was worried I would sound like an idiot. I had the title Yes Man in my mind but that was it. When I got on the mic I closed my eyes and all of this stuff started coming out of me and these melodies, the verses and choruses, everything. It was crazy. I haven't had a songwriting experience as powerful as that since. I cried after.