“Why don’t you like me? / Why don’t you like me? / Why don’t you like yourself? / Should I bend over? / Should I look older? / Just to be put on the shelf.”
The lines above are lifted from a song penned by 23-year-old Mika a few years ago. They were written in response to a British music industry executive who told the campy singer-songwriter he’d have to change his image to be successful.
Mika says he mailed a copy of the full lyrics to the exec. If the man still has them they’re an eBay goldmine because the completed song, “Grace Kelly,” is now a global hit.
“Record companies were coming to me saying, ‘You can be successful, we’ll support you but you have to be [more R&B],’” Mika explained in Australia’s Daily Sun newspaper. “I wasn’t going to change. I told them to fuck off and wrote a song about it and moved on.”
And now the world — for the most part anyway — has caught up with him.
While the majority of Americans are still wondering “who’s this?” when they hear Mika’s electro-disco track “Love Today” in a current Verizon commercial, music lovers overseas are already swooning for the new star.
In fact, the hoopla started early. BBC News placed him atop its “Sound of 2007” list in January, weeks before his debut album, “Life In Cartoon Motion,” was even released.
The din grew louder when “Life” proved to be a massive commercial success, shifting nearly 108,000 units in the U.K. its first week out. The poptastic 12-track album drew instant comparisons to the works of Elton John, Scissor Sisters, David Bowie and in particular the late Freddie Mercury.
There’s no denying that Mika’s five-octave, operatic voice sounds strikingly similar to the former Queen frontman’s, so Mika doesn’t try. In fact, he addresses the matter head-on in the chorus of “Grace Kelly.” “I tried to be like Grace Kelly / But all her looks were too sad / So I tried a little Freddie / I’ve gone identity mad!”
In addition to his emulations of the princess and the queen, Mika was shaped by his unique childhood. He was born Michael Penniman in Beirut, Lebanon, in August 1983. The middle child of five born to a Lebanese mother and an American father, his family fled the war-torn country for Paris a year later. When Mika was nine they relocated to London.
“It was the combination of moving as well as a horrible time I had at school in the first few years of living in London that lead me to forget how to read and write, and stop talking for a little while,” Mika recalls. “I was pulled out of school for over six months; in order to sort myself out and find a new school. This is when music really became important. It got me back on my feet.”
He studied music as a teen under a Russian singer, and earned money recording jingles for Orbit chewing gum and British Airways. (“I’ll never forget calling up British Airways to get a ticket, only to be placed in a line listening to my own voice. That was a painful 8 minutes,” he says.) He performed in the Royal Opera House and was accepted into the Royal College of Music. He left the prestigious academy to record his album in Los Angeles with producer Greg Wells.
Apart from his music, Mika is mirroring Mercury in another way. The British dandy declines to give a definitive answer to the “is he gay?” speculation that once hounded his forebear. He told the Sun he just wants “room to grow and not to be devoured all in one go. … I have no intention of being a cheap Chinese all-you-can-eat buffet.”
And he bristles at the claim that he’s trying to further his career by remaining ambiguous.
“People say, ‘You don’t want to talk about sexuality because you’re worried about having success in the U.S. and you’re worried about sexual taboos,’” Mika is quoted in the Sun. “I say, ‘Have you heard the fucking album?’ There’s a song called ‘Billy Brown’ about a married man who has a homosexual affair and one of my lyrics goes ‘I tried to be like Grace Kelly.’
“If I was worried about sexual taboos I certainly wouldn’t have made the record I made. It has nothing to do with that.”
Mika says he has been led to walk his own artistic path by observing the iconoclastic artists he admires.
“My musical tastes have become more eclectic as I’ve gotten older, but I’m always going back to great songwriters. People who make great records to their own vision — Prince, Harry Nillson, Elton John, even Michael Jackson. These people make amazing pop records that couldn’t be performed by anybody else and that’s what I always wanted to do.”
“Life In Cartoon Motion” is in stores now on Casablanca Records and available online at music download sites.
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