Robbie Williams é um cantor e tanto. Tem voz, estilo e repertório. Sua música "Feel" está dividindo com "American Life", da Madonna, o primeiro lugar no meu hit parade particular. A seguir, a entrevista que Robbie Williams deu a revista The Advocate.
THE SECOND COMING OF ROBBIE WILLIAMS
At a time when the public wants—in fact, demands—its pop stars in tidy, clearly defined boxes, Robbie Williams is a wild card who aggressively rejects categorization. Rather, he revels in confounding his audience and the media, cultivating a persona rife with contradictions. In his music he frequently darts between playing an embittered, chronically depressed young man and a cocksure celebrity who bluntly admits in songs like the new “Monsoon” that he makes music simply “to make money and get laid.”
It is when the England-bred Williams, 29, steps out from behind his songs that he becomes particularly fascinating—and, as his queer fans know, perfectly happy to play the gay card. Rising from the ranks of the 1990s boy-band army as a member of Take That (long considered the prototype for Backstreet Boys), Williams has built a solo career that has rendered him one of the biggest stars in the world—the United States excluded, with the exception of some video play and the minor hit “Millennium” from his aptly titled U.S. solo debut album, The Ego Has Landed, in 1999. In Europe, meanwhile, Williams has rarely left the pages of the tabloids, which glory in casting him as an alcoholic, womanizing party boy whose alleged amours include former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell and supermodel Pamela Hanson.
But that’s not where the dirt-slinging stops. Reports of trysts with women often give way to rumors of closeted gay affairs with men such as his childhood friend Jonathan Wilkes. Instead of squashing such gossip, Williams has delighted in watching reporters race to report stories of his queer canoodling, often baiting them with comments that intentionally provoke the question “Is he really gay?”
On the eve of the U.S. debut of his new album, Escapology, the rapid-tongued Williams spoke to The Advocate in his spacious new Los Angeles home.
How do you feel about the fact that your following in the States so far is primarily gay?
Is it? Well, cool. That’s fine with me.
Why do you think gay men are so attracted to you?
I hadn’t really thought about it, quite honestly. I suppose I’ll choose to think that it’s more than me bum that they’re after. I’d like to believe that they’re connecting to whatever emotions or ideas come across in my songs. But then again, it’s probably me bum.
You’ve been occasionally painted by the media as a womanizer. There have been some who have speculated that it’s a smoke screen for being gay.
[Laughs] I think that’s funny. I mean, really, who cares? I know what’s going on in my life. That’s what matters. [The speculation] is absurd, actually. If I shagged as many women, men, and farm animals as people claim in the media, I’d be in the hospital. But it’s fine—speculate as much as you want, I say.
Do you think you’d be as compelling to people without the speculation?
Everyone has the things that they find interesting about someone else. The subject of sexuality doesn’t scare me. I find it funny. I find it entertaining. I think every straight man has the capability to have sex with another man. Don’t you agree?
I think every gay man views straight men as “get-able.”
It’s true. It happens a lot, doesn’t it?
