[SONG OF THE DAY] Aish Divine - "Common Questions"
image courtesy of Aish Divine
To witness all that is Aish Divine in the flesh is remarkable. It was sheer luck that I stuck around to check out his set at Piano’s last year during Mondo.NYC. It only took a few seconds after he first opened his mouth for me to be hooked and hopelessly devoted. For the next 20something minutes I was glued to his every move. It’s difficult to explain the sensation that washes over you when you share a room with someone that is there to be heard. To clarify, there is a difference between someone hoping to be heard and folks like him who somehow give you no other option but to hear them. As an immigrant, queer, person of color, Aish Divine is here to be heard. It is not a suggestion, it’s essentially command. He will be the first to tell you as he shared recently on Instagram, “I want to undo the injustice, the unfairness, the non-equality, and lack of visibility that I experienced. I will undo it with the rest of us.”
His latest track, “Common Questions”, is exemplary of his ethos. Taken from his forthcoming sophomore album, The Sex Issue, the track examines the world of online dating through a queer lens. From first blush, it’s easy to say that “Common Questions” is another song bemoaning hookup culture, but it’s more than just moving on from one warm body to the next as you may have heard previously from tracks from other queer artists like SAKIMA’s “Apps”. From his experience on dating apps, seeing things like, “no femmes", “no asians”, “muscle only”, etc. on dating profiles are the alarmingly normalized things that possible matches are just causally leaving on their profile. This is of course before being inundated with common questions about dick size, STI testing status (*which to be clear is not a bad thing to ask but not within the first 10 minutes of talking to someone*), and essentially just questions related to solely hooking up.
Meanwhile, as he notes in the song, “Ain’t got time for common questions / I just wanna man with intuition / who knows how to keep my attention / he’s a good fuck and tender affection”.
Oh honey, same same same same sameeeeee.
Not only is the song a fuckin bop that won’t stop, but the video is full of fabulous non-binary folks and was directed by a woman, as are all of the upcoming videos for The Sex Issues singles. It's a dance filled, intersectional view of queer, non-binary, South Asian, American street culture….and I can’t fucking get enough of it.
More details on The Sex Issue forthcoming. For now, get caught up on his debut album Mother, which was released earlier this year.
