City exhibit gives Big Love to k.d. lang
National Music Centre exhibition Big, Big Love an ode to k.d. lang’s career
Twenty-five years on, it’s hard to imagine anyone having anything negative to say about k.d. lang’s Ingenue.
It long ago secured its position as a genuine Canadian classic, a breathtakingly daring and stylistically varied work that found her straying from her country roots. But during those jittery days before it was released, both lang and then collaborator Ben Mink were convinced it would “probably fail.”
Some of the early reviews were, in fact, less-than-kind, lang says.
“We’d get slammed with all the reviews coming through the fax machine back then,” lang says. “There were some pretty ugly ones.”
But then the song Constant Craving, Ingenue’s gorgeous and yearning debut single, began to make waves. Lang came out publicly as a lesbian in the Advocate around the same time. There was also that now-famous Vanity Fair cover in 1993 that featured a photo by Herb Ritts of Cindy Crawford as a scantily clad barber with a straight razor shaving the face of lang, who is dressed in drag.
Ingenue was eventually viewed as lang’s breakthrough album, one that would place her in a new stratosphere as an uncompromising but commercially successful artist, gay icon and celebrity. On Friday, the 25th anniversary reissue of the album was released and lang will embark on a tour this summer that arrives at Calgary’s Jubilee Auditorium Aug. 23 and 24. So, it’s hardly surprising that it plays a major role in Big, Big Love: k.d. lang On Stage, an exhibition at the National Music Centre dedicated to the Alberta native.
But, interestingly, most of the artifacts on display from that period are not musical but items of clothing that lang wore. There’s the red and gold brocade jacket she wore on the Ingenue tour; the yellow ball gown that was featured in the video for Miss Chatelaine; a striped shirt seen in the video for Constant Craving; a red, white and black striped jacket she wore at the Junos that year; and the black jacket she wore at the Grammy Awards.
The exhibit also features artifacts like the handmade diorama that was used to create the cover art for the 1987 album Angel with a Lariat and a few of lang’s musical instruments. But Big, Big Love is dominated by clothing, everything from her cowpunk stage outfit from 1985, which featured a fringed-satin shirt and floral skirt, to the bedazzled blue nudie suit she wore in 1990. It’s a reminder that, no matter how impressive lang’s singing voice and talent for genre-hopping may be, she was also an artist who was conscious and in control of her image, allowing her to play with ideas of gender and androgyny and to simply “have a lot of fun with clothes.”
“It was inseparable from the music, it was a whole piece,” lang says. “I came from a performance-art background, so it was definitely as much of the concept as the music. It was to present it as I did with music, which was a hybrid between classic sounds or classic instrumentation but mixed with an alternative mindset. So you’d have a classic country shirt but you’d have sawed-off men’s cowboy boots and a skirt.”
Lang, who spends most of her time in Calgary these days, was aware and had been impressed with the work being done at Studio Bell, which is home to the National Music Centre. She offered to donate or loan some of her belongings to the centre.
“I definitely have a fondness and enjoy looking at those things,” lang says. “But I feel, in some ways, owning that stuff and having to carry it around with me in a way weighs me down, both physically and spiritually. I really feel like I want to share it but not own it.”
Born in Edmonton, lang was raised in the small town of Consort. Her relationship with her home province hasn’t always been without controversy. In 1990, lang participated in a Meat Stinks campaign for the animalrights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which didn’t go over particularly well with those involved in Alberta’s cattle industry.
But in the past few years, there has been an effort in Alberta to celebrate her artistic legacy. In 2013, she collaborated with Alberta Ballet for Balletlujah, which mixed lang’s music with a loosely autobiographical narrative. It was turned into a CBC documentary in 2015 by Calgary director Grant Harvey, who combined Albertashot dance pieces with interviews and behind-the-scenes footage of creating the ballet.
After living in Los Angeles for 21 years, lang has homes in Portland and Calgary but spends most of her time here.
“It’s funny because I never thought I’d end up back in Alberta, or even Canada for that matter,” she says. “I’m very, very happy about it. It seems like a blessing to me now. I mean, I’m sure there’s still people pissed about me being a vegetarian or whatever. But what are you going to do?”