Most of the lyrics on VIVICA are, unfortunately, not fit for a family-friendly magazine like The Grind.
The self-titled debut from the risqué alter-ego of Toronto artist Vivek Shraya is an unabashed celebration of sex and pleasure; a brash and bawdy electro-pop romp with song titles like “GOOD TUNE” and “HIGH BODY COUNT.”
“What if what if I wanna lick the smell off your armpits?” Vivica sings over a colourful splash of synths on “SOME WEIRD SHIT,” a relatively-safe-for-work song about finding romance through acts of pure physicality.
Or there’s the hilarious “3WAY,” on which she seeks to persuade a couple to try “something less common” over a sultry, slow-jam beat. “‘Cause one plus one and more one, gives everybody another door,” she croons.
Released on May 20 alongside a series of what she calls “hypersexual and hyperqueer” visuals shot by Christopher Sherman, VIVICA’s raunchiness may come as a surprise to long-time fans of Shraya, who as an author, singer and visual artist is best known for her deeply personal explorations of trans identity, and her often politically-oriented storytelling.
“I’m such a shy person in real life,” Shraya tells me over a coffee at a bustling restaurant in downtown Toronto. Creating an alter-ego, she explains, allowed her to explore her sexuality in ways she never felt comfortable before.
“Vivica is an exaggeration, of course — there are things that she says on the album that I would never say, fantasies that are not mine.” Shraya admits with a laugh. “But the seed of her is somewhere in me. And that’s what makes it exciting.”
Arriving like a neon-hued pleasure craft amid the rising tide of transphobia, VIVICA is fun but subversive; trashy but defiant in the face of those forces who seek to flatten the world into iron-clad binaries .
“You don’t need a man or woman, a god or religion,” she sings on the album’s dreamy penultimate track, “You need Vivica.”
The child of Indian immigrants, Shraya was born and raised in Edmonton. In the early 2000s, she moved to Toronto to try to make it as a singer-songwriter in the city’s burgeoning music scene. As an outsider, she struggled to break through.
“I found the Toronto scene, respectfully, quite insular,” she recalls. “Like if you weren’t in with Broken Social Scene or Sam Roberts or whatever band NOW Magazine was writing about, it was really hard to get traction.”
“And the hard thing about being brown is that people had difficulty knowing which box they wanted to put me in. They wanted to hear the ‘Eastern influences’ when they weren’t there.”
After years of grinding as a musician, Shraya hit a wall, and started channeling her creative energy into writing. In 2009, she self-published God Loves Hair, an illustrated short-story collection inspired by Shraya’s own coming-of-age story as a genderqueer kid raised by Indian immigrants. The book was a hit, especially with queer and racialized youth.
“I had no dreams of being an author, but suddenly there was an audience for my writing, a much bigger audience that I had for my music,” Shraya recalls. “It was the first time in my life that I realized that I’m not just a musician. It was then that I started getting excited about books, films, photography and theatre.”
A decade and a half later, Shraya has emerged as a prolific artist and a true multihyphenate.
She’s released a dozen albums and EPs, and published a long list of books, including novels (She of the Mountains, The Subtweet, a collection of poetry (even this page is white), children’s lit (The Boy & the Bindi) and memoir (I’m Afraid of Men, Next Time There’s a Pandemic).
She’s worked extensively in TV and movies, directing several short films. And in 2023, she created How to Fail as a Popstar, a web series that dramatized her journey as a young artist, which is available on CBC Gem.
When we spoke, she was preparing for the release of both VIVICA and her upcoming book, titled The Hystericals, which is described as “a chilling novel for the post-#MeToo era.
I asked how she manages to balance so many projects.
“I just really like making things,” she responds. “I know that’s really basic, but I’m fueled by the process of having an idea and then turning it into something tangible, something physical, and then using that as a way to build connection with other people.”
“I think of art as a form of intimacy, essentially.”
The Vivica persona began to emerge a few years ago, after Shraya returned home after a six-year stint teaching creative writing at the University of Calgary.
Back in Toronto, she started working with producer James Bunton on a new batch of songs that grappled with the dark state of the post-pandemic world, and the difficult realities of living as a trans person amid a crackdown of LGBTQ+ rights.
The first project borne from this collaboration was last year’s New Models, an experimental and politically-charged album written that Shraya calls “perhaps her most earnest and existential” to date.
“After the pandemic, I kept being asked about ‘trans joy,” she says. “That was always a difficult question for me — like, trans joy is when allies get involved. Trans joy is me sitting at home watching Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.”
At the same time, Shraya started messing around with some of Bunton’s dancier tracks, bright bursts of joy that cut through the everyday doom and gloom. Inspired by Beyoncé’s Renaissance, the “slut-pop” of Kim Petras, and, of course, Madonna’s 1992 album Erotica, Vivica — “a horny, chaotic, shapeshifting nepo baby” — began to take shape.
Shraya began to embrace the revolutionary power of pleasure; the ability to transcend pain and resurface; to reclaim ownership over bodies that have been dangerously politicized.
There is, of course, a rich history of pop stars employing alter-egos as a means to change directions or a vehicle to explore hidden emotions, from Beyoncé’s Sasha Fierce to Garth Brooks’s Chris Gaines.
With Vivica, Shraya wanted to take things even further.
“As someone who hasn’t gone through gender reassignment surgery, I’ve always mourned the fact that I couldn’t sing like a cis woman,” she says. “That’s always been my dream.”
“So with Vivica it was like, let’s use auto-tune, let’s just make this character have a totally different voice. It’s kind of like my sonic transition, because it allowed me to have a different voice, which is something I haven’t done before.”
It’s been a thrilling, unexpected ride, especially at the age of 45, Shraya tells me as we finish our coffee.
“I’ve always been such a late bloomer, in my body and sexuality,” she notes. “A lot of that stems from racism and homophobia, like my first kiss was when I was 18.”
“But I’m someone who loves evolution, who loves reinvention,” Shraya says. “Some people can build a career by doing the same thing over and over again, but I want to offer new things to the people who have stayed with me.”
To mark Pride, Shraya will perform as Vivica at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre on Friday, June 26, and at the brown//out stage on Saturday, June 27. More details here.
