Bloodlight & Bami, Sophie Fiennes’ documentary on the pop visionary Grace Jones, offers an intimate and affecting window into the woman behind the iconoclast. It also doubles as an origin story. To revisit clips of Jones’ freewheeling live performances — her fiery theatrics, show-stopping visuals, extravagantly designed headpieces, and on occasion, Bengal tigers — is to retroactively witness the arrival of one of modern pop’s progenitors. The entire film is shot in vérité, without any talking heads or cultural historians; it’s just Grace and her music. That’s all we need.

And as influential as Grace Jones’ sound was, she is remembered almost equally for her androgyny, from her sensational modeling career to that searing cover art of her landmark album Nightclubbing. Elegant and imposing, as if chiseled from onyx, her androgynous style helped inform her artistic ingenuity. And while there will never be another Grace Jones, she is far from the only pop innovator who defies both genre and the gender binary.

Grace Jones’ “Nightclubbing” (1981)

Historically, paradigm shifts in popular music have been catalyzed by the androgynous. Our most pioneering creatives are the ones not only blurring gender lines and eschewing traditional pop personas, but doing so in the mainstream: racking up platinum albums, dominating the charts, and selling out arenas.

It’s easy to identify these genderbenders in the cultural pantheon — Grace Jones, Bowie, Annie Lennox, Prince — and to recognize their influence on today’s pop heavyweights. Watching Bloodlight & Bami, it isn’t hard to draw the line from Jones to Rihanna, Lorde, Janelle Monáe, and Beyoncé (especially with the documentary’s stateside release coinciding with the landing of Beychella).

But while Jones, Bowie, and the rest of that legendary vanguard has ridden off into the sunset, androgyny remains an indelible influence on today’s popular music through its contemporary torchbearers.

Today it seems that no major pop release happens without some sort of additional creative offering, whether it’s an accompanying short film such as Beyoncé’s Lemonade or Monáe’s Dirty Computer, or something closer to performance art (like the time the world stopped to watch Frank Ocean build a staircase). Even the standard pop music video has gone from a template for Pepsi ads to legitimately cinematic works.

But the trend of melding high culture with pop music was already forming back in 2008, heralded by the arrival of Lady Gaga. The music video for “Paparazzi”, the fifth single off her debut The Fame, doubles as a short foreign film starring Alexander Skårsgard and includes nods to Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Gaga would continue the narrative in the visual for “Telephone”, which Billboard writer Andrew Unterberger called “a ten-minute, high-art-infused, road-tripping hodgepodge of Tarantino, Thelma & Louise and Japanese TV”.

Lady Gaga (Instagram)

Gaga is far from the first person to combine pop with more esoteric ‘high art’, nor is she the first to achieve such resounding mainstream success because of it. But it is important to remember she accomplished this in a more creatively uniform era of pop music, where the predominant sound belonged to artists like Flo Rida and T-Pain.

Her distinct synth pop set the table for the EDM boom that would follow, and The New Yorker’s Kelefa Sanneh commended her for “blazing a trail for truculent pop stars by treating her own celebrity as an evolving art project.”

Lady Gaga reshaped the landscape of pop music, and did so while cultivating an aesthetic that was unique, defiant, and unapologetically androgynous. And while neither biological sex, nor gender, nor sexual orientation are prerequisites for androgyny, her genderbending was so inextricable from her image that all three were regularly called into question, with some tabloids even falsely claiming she was a hermaphrodite.

Gaga took the baseless rumors in stride, saying that “at first it was very strange and everyone sorta said, ‘That’s really quite a story!’. But in a sense, I portray myself in a very androgynous way, and I love androgyny.”

Lady Gaga as Jo Calderone

She’s continued that portrayal, from the emergence of her alter ego Jo Calderone — a greaser type who appeared in the “You & I” music video and at the 2011 VMAs — to the artistic influences she repeatedly cites, including David Bowie, Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, and of course, Grace Jones.

While Gaga was reshaping the genre in her own image, pop music felt the push from another force: hip-hop. Once considered a counterculture with no real mainstream appeal, rap has since invaded the Top 40, its artists positioning itself at equal commercial footing with today’s pop stars.

And like pop, hip hop has seen its most popular and pioneering artists come from the androgynous, specifically an eccentric Southern-bred rapper by the name of Young Thug.

The cover art of his most commercially and critically successful record, 2016’s Jeffery, featured Thugger wearing a decadent Italian gown, sparking equal parts backlash and praise from the hip-hop community. But the Atlanta rapper’s crossdressing isn’t just performative — he regularly rocks a wardrobe he describes “mostly as women’s clothes”, and even landed a modeling gig for a Calvin Klein line of womenswear. In a promotion for that same campaign, Thug declared that “there is no such thing as gender” and that “in my world, you can be a gangsta with a dress or you can be a gangsta with baggy pants.”

It’s those progressive statements, maybe even more than his penchant for rapping in drag, that cement Thug’s status as a totem of androgyny, rather than just a provocateur crossdressing as a ‘fuck you’ to the system. It’s what separates him from, for example, the hair metal bands of the eighties. These ultra-macho bands also often performed in women’s clothes, but as an act of rebellion against the status quo, rather than the challenging of a broader social construct.

Young Thug’s “Jeffrey” (2016)

Young Thug also exemplifies the link between androgyny and avant-garde in the mainstream. His eccentric style and gender philosophy are matched only by his singular sound, one that forgoes once-sacred conventions of hip-hop like lyrics and diction. Spawning not just a SoundCloud community’s worth of copycats, but an entirely new strain of hip-hop branded ‘mumble rap’, Thug’s vocal style skewers pronunciation and disfigures words beyond recognition. Instead of the usual adlibs (your textbook ‘bow’s, ‘ugh’s, and ‘skrrt’s), he wields an entire onomatopoeic alphabet, ranging from ‘airrrt’ to ‘zeeengh’.

Thugger’s subversion of hip hop’s sound, aesthetic, and gender politics has sent reverberations throughout a genre plagued by hypermasculinity, and helped lay the foundation for the mainstream reception of openly gay rappers, such as Young M.A. of the 2016 smash hit “Ooouu”, or Kevin Abstract, frontman of the ascending Brockhampton.

And on the subject of the best boy band since One Direction, we can’t talk androgyny in pop music without acknowledging the British supergroup’s lead heartthrob, Harry Styles. In escaping the confines of his former band’s market-tested image, Styles worked to align himself with the trailblazers in pop music’s annals, inviting comparisons to Mick Jagger and going as far as naming his debut single after the first Prince album following the Revolution’s breakup. Harry Styles certainly does not look or sound anything like Prince, but he has cultivated an androgynous style of his own.

Frequently photographed in Gucci blouses and floral print suits, sporting hairstyles ranging from shoulder-length locks to distinctly feminine pixie cuts, the 1D frontman’s ambiguous style has quickly reached near-iconic status.

And while Styles’ nascent solo career has yet to innovate the same way Gaga’s or Thugger’s has, his celebrity surpasses both, arguably making him today’s leading torchbearer of androgyny. It is his aesthetic and artistry that best illustrate not just androgyny at the forefront of pop culture, but why it is so important.

Harry’s star power, coupled with his flamboyant fashion and sexual mystique, has endeared him to the LGBTQ community. In an excellent Buzzfeed piece, writer Grace Perry documents the singer’s popularity amongst queer women in particular, and describes how his ambiguity helped them realize their own sexual identity. Perry’s shares the experience of one avid fan:

“‘I remember so clearly looking at those GIFs of Harry and being like, I’m gay’, [Julia] recounts. ‘I can’t really explain why… Something about this has unleashed a reality within me that’s like, I know myself now.’ Julia attributes her sudden connection to herself and her sexuality to her love for this androgynous-leaning, charismatic pop star. It was wrapped up in her realizing she had a crush on a woman, who she now realizes she was conflating with Harry.”

Aside from a few coy, cryptic remarks, Styles has remained tight-lipped about his sexual orientation, his press statements on the matter ranging from no comment to an outright denial of his bisexuality. But his androgyny matters regardless of his preferences.

Queer or not, seeing gender blurred in the mainstream helps more of us explore our own sexual and gender identities. It influences us on a personal level, in ways that are both life-altering, like finally recognizing your own queerness, and in everyday ways — a young girl gets the courage to shave her head, a man finally decides to paint his nails. The widespread celebration of androgyny erodes the trappings of heteronormative roles and suggests a reappraisal of how we perceive masculinity and femininity. How can we give credence to the masculine or feminine ideal we’re all held to, when some of the most idolized people on Earth refute it so openly?

Whether it’s Harry or Thugger, Patti Smith or Lady Gaga, watching these superstars dismiss the gender binary is empowering to those marginalized because of it. It contributes to a richer, more artistic pop culture and invigorates a Top 40 that is too often occupied by the same focus-grouped, Disneyfied personas. And that’s all without mentioning just how fucking cool it is to see Young Thug rap in a blouse.

Why is it that the driving forces of change in pop music are so often fueled by the androgynous? It’s not a new phenomenon — Grace Jones was predated by Ma Rainey, another black woman who revolutionized her genre and, in her words, wore “a collar and a tie…talked to the gals just like any old man”.

The links between creativity and androgyny have been extensively researched in modern psychology, dating all the way back to Freud speculating on the relationship between the two in his psychobiography of Leonardo Da Vinci.

More empirical studies weren’t conducted until the early sixties, when Donald MacKinnon, a psychologist who dedicated his career to the study of creativity, analyzed architects and mathematicians to determine traits that were predictive of creativity.

His findings, published in his 1963 paper The Nature & Nurture Of Creativity, found that “the most striking aspect…of all our male creative groups is an extremely high peak on the Mf (femininity) scale. This tendency for creative males to score relatively high on femininity is also demonstrated on the Fe(femininity) scale of the California Psychological Inventory (CPI) and on the masculinity-femininity scale of the Strong Vocational Interest Blank.”

That same year, the renowned Ellis Paul Torrance, another researcher at the forefront of psychoanalyzing creativity, published findings that showed that creative boys possessed more feminine characteristics than their peers, and that creative girls are perceived as more masculine than other girls.

In other words, creative men and women exhibited characteristics traditionally associated with the opposite sex. All of these psychologists hypothesized why this link existed, and in 1980, researchers Jodi B. Weinstein and Philip Bobko summarized it well in The Relationship Between Creativity & Androgyny:

“In being androgynous, especially in a sex-stereotyped society, a person would need to be open to experience, flexible, accepting of apparent opposites, unconcerned about social norms, and self-reliant — exactly those traits identified with creative persons.”

Both Weinstein and Bobko acknowledged that it wasn’t a causal relationship, merely a predictive one. But their explanation corroborates what we’ve repeatedly seen: that the turning points of pop in the mainstream are shepherded by the androgynous.

‘Bloodlight’ refers to the glowing red light in studios that signifies when an artist is recording, and ‘bami’ is a common type of Jamaican bread. It’s a fitting title for a documentary that intertwines Grace’s musicianship with her personal life, a combination that mirrors the other ones that defined her life: she bridged disco and new wave, she fused the masculine and feminine. It’s been ten years since Grace Jones’ last album, but even now, her androgyny — all androgyny in the mainstream — continues to guide us.