Ryan Gosling’s secret role in the sexualisation of 21st-century pop music: “I think, did I do that?”
While his recording career hasn’t reached the same levels as other actors-turned-singers, Ryan Gosling nonetheless believes that he might have accidentally had a transformative impact on 21st-century pop music.
The highlight of his recording career is undoubtedly ‘I’m Just Ken’, the Academy Award-nominated song he performed with incredible amounts of gusto in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and performed live at the Oscars to much fanfare, with the track certified silver in the United Kingdom after shifting over 200,000 copies.
Beyond that, he co-founded the rock duo Dead Man’s Bones alongside Zach Shields, with the double-act’s origins born from a mutual obsession with Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion attraction, naturally. They’ve been quiet for a while, though, but was Gosling really a secret industry trailblazer?
He seems to think so, and in what’s become something of a recurring theme when it comes to his musical proclivities, Disney was involved, too. As everybody knows, Gosling’s first onscreen gig began in 1993 when he landed a role on The All-New Mickey Mouse Club, alongside a trio of future recording superstars.
Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, and Britney Spears were his cohorts, and all three of them capitalised on the music business’s big sexualisation boom. The former literally brought sexy back, while the other two were at the forefront of the shift toward more risqué lyrics, live performances, and themes.
Two of those defining moments came when Spears performed ‘I’m a Slave 4 U’ at the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards with a snake draped over her shoulders, as well as Aguilera’s 2002 album Stripped, particularly the song and accompanying music video for ‘Dirrty’. What does Gosling have to do with that, exactly? More than you might think, as it turned out.
In 2007, the actor acknowledged that there was some truth to the rumours that he’d become such a bad influence on the two soon-to-be singing sensations, telling them things that he shouldn’t have been telling them at such an impressionable age, that their mothers complained to the ‘Mouse House’. “I just told them what I heard, like, positions and stuff,” Gosling confessed.
“I feel somewhat responsible for how sexual she is now,” the three-time Oscar nominee admitted. “When I see her with a snake around her neck, I think, ‘Did I do that?'” He most likely didn’t, but Spears and Aguilera’s scantily clad and lyrically suggestive antics in the early 2000s had Gosling thinking that those conversations they shared during their Disney days may have played a small part in some way.
On one hand, it turned each of them into one of the most popular and bestselling acts of the era, but still left the Fall Guy and Project Hail Mary frontman to wonder if, somehow, things would have turned out another way for both if he hadn’t given them the birds and the bees chat in the early 1990s.
