Jill Sobule, the singer and songwriter whose 1995 success “I Kiss A Girl” was the rare pop song of this time to take an openly queer theme in the cultural cultural current, died Thursday. She was 66 years old.
Her death was announced by his spokesperson David Elkin, who said she died in a house fire in the suburbs of Woodbury Minneapolis. Sobule was on tour and had to play a hometown concert Friday evening in Denver.
With a lively spirit and a dramatic sense of a playwright, Sobule wrote on the characters who face their internal life with the way the world considers them, and it had a flair for strongly drawn scenes in which people make discoveries on themselves.
“I kissed a girl”, who puts an inflatable folk-pop groove under the slightly raucous vocal of Sobule, opens with two friends who hang out a night while they compare the notes on their disappointing boyfriends. Soon they drink and smoked and the narrator's friend removes her overcoat. Sobule, who identified himself as bisexual, sings:
She called to the house to say that she would be late
He said he was worried but now he would feel safe
I'm glad you are with your girlfriend
Tell him hello for me
And then I looked at you
You had guilt in your eyes
But it only lasted
And then I felt your hand over my knee
“I kissed a girl”, which came out like the main single of the eponymous LP of Sobule in 1995, reached the top 20 of the alternative radio record of Billboard and culminated at n ° 67 on the hot-genre hot-genre; The song clip, featuring the model Fabio as one of the shabby little friends, was nominated for two prizes at the MTV Video Music Awards. The eponymous album of Sobule also generated the “Supermodel” Punky, which was presented on the soundtrack of this year's film “Cluless”.
Sobule was part of a cohort of intelligent composers from the mid -90s which included Juliana Hatfield, Lisa Loeb and Liz Phair, whose success could be considered a reaction to the dark grunge craze and dominated by men a few years earlier. However, Sobule recognized the persistent sexism that followed her and her peers on television and the covers of magazines.
“I love the way they try to put us against each other – as if it were” dynasty “and we are going to enter a fight by Joan Collins / Linda Evans”, she joke at the time In 1995. “Me and Sheryl Crow, let's go!”
Sobule was born in Denver in 1959 and played guitar in his high school jazz group. Study abroad at the university, she was spotted by a nightclub owner while she and a friend performed in the street in Madrid; He invited them to play her club and she abandoned school a month later.
In 1990, Sobule made a first album with Todd Rundgren for McA Records which went nowhere despite many critical praises. (Writing in Times, Chris Willman called He “made a start that you will hear this year”.) McA dropped her before publishing a second LP she had made with Joe Jackson.
“It was a very difficult period in my life,” said Sobule in Times in 1995. “I mean, I had no other skills, in addition to having studied political science.”
Atlantic signed it for “Jill Sobule”, then published his 1997 follow -up, “Happy Town”, which did not give another hit pop.
However, Sobule continued to record and perform, and she established a career on television which included the theme song of “Unbulous” by Nickelodeon. In 2009, she published an article on the Huffington Post in which she explained the ironic remarks she had made in a previous interview about Katy Perry, who had overcome the Hot 100 the previous year with a different song entitled “I Kissa A Girl”.
“I may be a cynical touch about the company, but I have never really been angry or that I have had sick feelings towards Katy herself,” She wrote. “I was actually in a happy little way of being the girl” kissed a girl “.”
For her 2014 album, “Dottie's Charms”, Sobule wrote songs to the words she ordered from writers such as Jonathan Lethem, David Hajdu and Vendela Vida.
“I am an older woman who will never have a brilliant pop song again, so it gives me a license to do what I want”, she said to the New York Times With a laugh.
Sobule's most recent project was an autobiographical musical of the master's entitled “F * CK7THGRADE” whose original distribution recording should be released in June. His survivors include a brother and several nephews.
