The Guide #72: How Sam Smith became one of pop’s most boundary-pushing stars

Hello and welcome to another issue of the Guide. If you’ve been on the internet this week, it’s highly likely that you’ve come across Sam Smith’s new video, for their latest single I’m Not Here To Make Friends. In it, Smith wears a corset and some rather fetching nipple tassles, simulates drinking urine, and generally gets up to all kinds of things that someone not looking to get invited back to that gorgeous castle any time soon might do.

It’s a brash, camp affair which – perhaps unsurprisingly – has sparked the interest of many a keyboard warrior, as though Madonna wasn’t doing the same sort of thing long before “the culture wars” were even a twinkle in the Daily Mail’s eye. Indeed, while you could be forgiven for thinking that Smith (who uses they/them pronouns) was the first artist to ever make a raunchy music video, they’re not doing anything that pop stars haven’t done for decades, from George Michael to Cardi B and Meghan Thee Stallion.

More interesting, perhaps, than whether your great-aunt Phyllis is offended by Smith’s (surely apple juice-flavoured) “golden shower” climbing the YouTube charts, is the fact that the singer is now one of the most out-there pop stars in the UK. You probably didn’t see all of this coming back when their bread and butter was squarely mournful Radio 2 ballads (I’m Not the Only One; Too Good at Goodbyes) or dance music collaborations that were a little slow to actually dance to (Latch with Disclosure).

These days Smith is quite the anomaly among the upper echelons of UK pop. Sure, their music isn’t as boundary-pushing as their image, but there’s a reassuring mix of body positivity, unapologetic queerness and general unbotheredness to Smith that only a handful of mainstream British artists seem to have nailed in recent years.

That isn’t to cast aspersions on the many brilliant queer artists out there, but rather to say that Smith occupies a unique place in the culture, and one which they have seemingly Trojan-horsed into. Elevated to the status of four-time Grammy winner and Bond theme purveyor through those aforementioned ballads, they have slowly but surely begun to cast off sensible and sombre songs in favour of music that’s, well, more fun, and working with increasingly eclectic names, among them Nigerian superstar Burna Boy, Koffee – the Jamaican reggae singer – and Charli XCX collaborator Kim Petras, a trans woman.

Indeed, back when Smith was dolefully singing lines like “I don’t want you to leave, will you hold my hand?” on Stay With Me, in 2014, the thought of them writhing around with Petras, telling the story of a man getting sexual favours behind his wife’s back at a strip club (Unholy) would have probably seemed unthinkable. Once described in the Guardian as “the gay Adele”, much like the actual Adele they have slowly but surely been allowed to show a bit of personality and – ironically – more of a youthfulness in their 30s than they had in their 20s. While it still isn’t enough for some (one friend describes Smith’s transformation to me as “swapping Topman for the ASOS Pride collection”), it’s still an unlikely trajectory for someone who could have conceivable continued to play it safe.

In Alexis Petridis’s review of Smith’s latest album, Gloria, he made the (very fair) point that Smith could maybe be making even more interesting music these days: “You wish you got a bit more of the Sam Smith who was recently photographed for a magazine wearing goth-y platform boots, sock suspenders, tight blue satin shorts and an Abba T-shirt. They looked as if they didn’t care what anyone thought”. Even so, it’s pretty impressive that Smith has managed to shrug off their old image to the extent that they have done so far. They might not be here to make friends, but being a pop shapeshifter will probably continue to make them a mint.

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