WHO IS MIKA?
Michael Holbrook Penniman Jr.—Mika—is a British-Lebanese artist.
MIKA AND ME
I owe a lot to my fourth and fifth grade teacher. I would not be where I am right now if it weren't for her. I was a French immersion kid, and a core experience I had was when this teacher would make us listen to songs in French class and give us sheets where we would fill in the blanks in the lyrics. One of the songs she made us listen to was Elle me dit by Mika, which, fun fact, I thought back then was a band. Though the song was fun, as were all of the songs our teacher would play, I didn't think much of it at the time; little did I know that this would be the thing that truly cemented French in my life.
Fast forward to grade 9, and my Tumblr dashboard was uhhh mostly Les Misérables but in May everyone was excited about the Eurovision Song Contest. There was the vegan pussy eating song, banana wolf, it was a whole ass event. One notable thing was that one of the hosts was none other than some guy named Mika. Italy was hosting and he was Not Italian, but apparently the Italians liked him so much they had him on anyways. And everyone thought he was so fun and awesome. And just by these secondhand accounts I also thought he was pretty fun and awesome. And then a few months later I realized wait a fucking second. That's the same ass guy from when I was nine years old.
Funnily enough that wasn't even the moment I fully got into him; I started listening to a few songs (shoutout Good Gone Girl, which was my first English Mika song!!!) but things actually picked up a year later, in the summer before grade 11. The ship that consumed my mind was Elliot/Kyprian from Tattered World, and I desperately wanted to make a ship playlist for them but feared that my music taste was far too limited to make a good one. (Every other Fall Out Boy song applies to them, I swear.) I therefore set out to diversify, and settled on Mika as the artist I would try to get into. And oh boy, this time I was RIGHT on the money. I dove deep into an obsession so profound that Mika was my second top artist that year and I'd only begun listening to him in late June. He and Chappell Roan are a pair of queer pop artists—my queer pop artists—who embody everything I could want out of not just queer pop but pop in general. Mika's world is colourful and whimsical and sincere, and he tells so many stories with his music.
You don't get it. It was just meant to be. Two months after the obsession began, he announced his first album in four years. This keeps happening to me dude. The year I get into Fall Out Boy, they announced their own new album four years after the last. A whole three weeks after I first listened to Chappell Roan, she released Good Luck Babe. Mika's case was particularly special though, for the reason that this album would be his first one fully in French. By this point, I was thriving in my French high school classes, and I was already listening to the rest of Mika's limited French music, but this was a sort of turning point.
I kind of fell so hard in love with French.
MY FAV SONGS
- Origin of Love
- Good Wife
- Jane Birkin
- L'amour fait ce qu'il veut
- We Are Golden
MIKA AND QUEERNESS
In Mika's breakout single Grace Kelly, he famously exclaims "I could be brown, I could be blue, I could be violet sky", desperately asking "Why won't you like me? Why won't you like me?". This song was written out of a deep frustration about being rejected by record labels—they didn't know what to do with him and his theatrics, his colourful sound, they said it was too much, too "gay". He built onto this frustration, and turned it into an expression of his identity, unwavering in his conviction that Throughout the early years of his fame, there was lots of speculation due to the flamboyant and theatrical nature of his music and his style. For years when prompted, he would call himself label-less, open, bisexual if you needed a term. In 2012 he came out as gay, and dedicated his single Origin of Love, after which he named his third album, to his partner.
oh my goddddd i listened to a podcast episode with him and he said it blatantly that his queerness is so evident in life in cartoon motion, that from the start his music was his own honest expression of all parts of himself bc he was never embarrassed abt it and yet scrutiny from like the media twisted the discussion into something different and AUGH. i explode into a million pieces
being bullied growing up, about his relationship with his family and their support of him every step of the way.
Since the beginning, Mika's music, as an expression of his own personal experiences and his identity, has always contained aspects of his sexuality. In an episode of the podcast Great Company with Jamie Laing he talked about how it was so evident in that very first album, and he was not embarrassed about it, but scrutiny from the media twisted it into something else, and he really did not appreciate all that kind of talk surrounding him. and thats really the thesis of his music, isnt it? Being able to find comfort and freedom in who you are and who you want to be.
MIKA AND CULTURAL IDENTITY
Mika makes music primarily in English, but he speaks a multitude of other languages : French, Spanish, Italian, Lebanese Arabic, and I believe he's also learned a bit of Mandarin Chinese. French is my life; I go to French university so everything I do is in it. One day I want to relearn to speak Tagalog, my native language. Whenever I trip on my words, forget some vocabulary and stutter and feel like a bit of an idiot, I can just think about how Mika makes grammar mistakes live on national television in multiple countries and everyone still loves him, and is nice and encouraging to him, even. How could I beat myself up about my own mistakes after that? Sometimes Mika openly asks his live audiences for grammatical help. He truly is an inspiration to all.
“i speak almost four languages and all of them badly”