Sam Smith isn’t satanic. He’s just a boring attention-seeker
Ian Haworth
An ever-vanishingly small audience enjoyed, or at least witnessed, our culture’s latest Hunger Games-esque award show on Sunday evening: the 2023 Grammy Awards.
According to the internet, Sam Smith, alongside Kim Petras, stole the show with a performance of the aptly named “Unholy,” a confusing compilation of lyrics clumsily sewn together with lazy sexualization and more unnecessary branding than a NASCAR event. Fendi, Balenciaga, Prada, and Miu Miu are all included, as well as a bizarre reference to Rihanna, alongside Shakespearean lines such as “Mummy don’t know daddy’s getting hot at the body shop, doin’ somethin’ unholy.”
WATCH: SAM SMITH’S ‘DEMONIC’ PERFORMANCE LEAVES MANY GRAMMY VIEWERS HORRIFIED
Bravo.
But it wasn’t this demonstration of modern linguistic genius that had everyone talking: It was the performance itself, with Smith channeling his inner tomato as a chubby red leather Satan, sending conservatives into a somewhat understandable frenzy.
But Smith isn’t exactly the first “artist” to mimic Satan for attention.
In 2021, Lil Nas X went through a Satanic phase, grinding on Satan during “Motero (Call Me by Your Name)” and even releasing a line of footwear infused with actual blood.
Madonna has repeatedly clung to relevance with a combination of Botox and satanic staging.
And what about Marilyn Manson?
So, why is Smith bringing up the rear by cannon-balling into this already crowded pool? Well, it’s simple. It’s not because Smith is satanic. Sam Smith doesn’t even know who Sam Smith is, after all.
No, the reality here is that Smith is an unoriginal performer desperate for attention, and our divided media apparatus is all too happy to oblige. On the Left, he is cheered. On the Right, he is condemned. The Left responds to the Right, while the Right responds to the Left. More reactions, more clicks, more outrage, and the cycle goes on.
All while Smith gorges on notoriety, feeding his insatiable hunger for attention. Don’t forget: Everything he does is a calculated pursuit of attention. This is the same man who came out as gay following the release of his first album in 2014. No one really cared.
When his second album was released in 2017, Smith then came out, again, as “genderqueer,” saying, “I feel just as much a woman as I am a man.” And again, no one really cared.
A few months before the release of his third album, Smith came out for the third time, with the latest label being “nonbinary.”
But Smith is now discovering a problem: When your entire brand hinges on identity-based edginess, you’ve got to continue with a neverending stream of new identities. Otherwise, your true identity, a boring and irrelevant performer, might shine through.
We can, of course, help expose Sam Smith as a narcissistic fraud by pumping the brakes before giving him everything he wants in our vocal condemnation. There’s a time and a place to make a stand. When a woke singer is counting on that stand, perhaps we should just leave him high and dry?
After all, he can’t keep coming out forever. Or can he?
Ian Haworth (@ighaworth) is the host of Off Limits with Ian Haworth.