Transport Systems
Ari Gold
On Transport Systems, Ari combines all the best of contemporary pop conventions with his own blue-eyed soul, and sets to music his life experiences of love, lust, sex, heartbreak, infidelity, and frayed relations. This all sounds like coloring within the lines until you realize Ari’s not singing about bitches, boobs, and juicy booties - his sentiments stem instead from his experiences with other men. And he’s not coding it in any way.
Ari is in-your-face gay without the camp and the crassness. He doesn’t take the “Queer As Folk” approach to gay social equality via music, shoving butt-sex and blowjobs down everyone’s reluctant throats. Instead he creates music that sounds like everything you’ve heard before, but inserts the otherwise deleted gay male perspective on the same ups and downs of life that inspire the lyrics of mainstream straight pop. He inspires acceptance via normalcy - instead of something like Britney’s “Stronger”, a song about her moving on from a cheating boyfriend, Ari offers the alternative “Mr. Mistress”, a song about his moving on from a man who refuses to live honestly about his same-sex feelings. One of the album’s highlights is a cover of Human League’s “Human”, which adds a new dimension to the already laden lyrics (I’m only human/ Of flesh and blood I’m made/ I am just a man). Transport Systems, along with Gold’s two previous albums, is a tasty slice of radio-friendly R&B/pop that allows man-loving men the opportunity to fully relate to the fun and frivolity of pop music without having to switch gender pronouns or emasculate themselves by obligatorily identifying with the female role in the song. Ari just might be our Justin Timberlake, and frankly it’s about time.
