Tom and Mike of
hot dance duo Dangerous Muse talk about loving the
’80s, being “supersexual,” and
the power of eyeliner
On a cool
Saturday afternoon in a nondescript Hollywood photo studio,
the members of Dangerous Muse—the new and
impossibly pretty electronic dance-pop duo of Mike
Furey and Tom Napack—prepare to shoot their first
music video. It’s for their hit single “The
Rejection,” which in November 2005 debuted at
number 2 on the iTunes dance charts with practically zero
promotion. As a skeleton crew preps the small, all-white
set—an homage to cheap and simple
early-’80s videos—vocalist and lyricist Mike,
23, consults with director Mike Korbic over the
video’s female dancers’ outfits.
Keyboardist and programmer Tom, 21, chills off to the side
to a mix CD of dance music (Soft Cell, New Order)
playing in the background, at one point quietly
mimicking the chords to Madonna’s newest single,
“Sorry,” on his trusty “keytar.”
Finally, the set
in place, the proto–Robert Palmer black lace and
stiletto outfits OK’d, Mike—sporting the
requisite skintight low-rise jeans and loose-fitting
black top—gets into place, the dancers
strategically placed around him, waiting for the
director’s cue. Korbic calls action, then for
playback. The song’s
Depeche
Mode–esque synth chirps pump through the speakers,
and the women swarm Mike, clawing at his clothes and
pulling him to the floor as he struggles to sing to
the camera lyrics like “I’d like to like you
like you like me / But I can’t, please
understand.”
The meaning seems
clear—a sexy gay boy trying his best to fend off
rabid female suitors. “It can definitely be
read that way, for sure,” Mike says with a
smile the next day by the rooftop pool of a West Hollywood
hotel. But he continues, “I would like to leave
it up to the individual listening to the song. I
wouldn’t want to limited it to any specific
interpretation.”
Mike’s not
being cagey. He and Tom are the product of a growing
pansexual New York City nightlife they discovered
while students at Fordham University in the Bronx, so
much so that when asked they both avoid placing a
definitive flag anywhere on the Kinsey scale of sexuality.
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Vary also writes for Entertainment Weekly and
Variety.