LET'S DANCE

Acquaint yourself with the musical stylings of queer brown pop musician Aish Divine, who is infusing his beats with a big dose of diversity and being the change he wants to see

- Aish Divine

These aren’t boom times for sex. Two years ago, a leading American journal ran an article investigating why today’s youth were having less sex than ever. The writer identified the decline of “couplehood” as a major reason for some worrying statistics. Aish Divine, reading this shortly after getting engaged to his now-husband, was paying attention.

“Apart from the scientific advances and the pressures of having children, there’s the idea that a domestic state doesn’t exist,” says the queer pop artist of Indian origin over a Zoom call from New York. “Not only that, gender has also gone out the window. My engagement was a reckoning in a way, with the assumption that monogamy is part of marriage, among other things.”

He found recourse in Esther Perel’s podcast Where Do We Begin, and release in his latest album The Sex Issue. His sophomore outing after 2018’s noteworthy Mother, The Sex Issue is 15 songs of boisterous beats and world-melding sounds that “serves sex realness with sadness, laughter, euphoria and vogue.” It is also “part autobiographical and part observational about the generation we are part of. I’m musing on my sense of identity beyond just a person who exists.”