About Devendra Banhart's song 'Little boys'

DevBan's [Devendra Banhart] public handling of "Little Boys" follows the telltale path of a spotlighted figure formulating a standard, scripted response in the face of not having a clean excuse. TimeOut New York actually challenged DevBan over the song.

Tony: Your song "Little Boys" is about wanting to marry little boys... Devendra Banhart: Okay, let me explain myself. When we were recording the record, my friend said to me, "You know, man, they're going to play this record in Starbucks." And I said, "Well, I'm going to write a song that will guarantee that will never happen." "Up Starbucks" was the initial go-to response. DevBan tried to position himself as a Mouth-- showing up the man by confronting his morals. This could have just as easily been attained by saying "fuck" or "burn the flag."

But DevBan's mind happened to settle on the subject of being attracted to little boys. So then his explanation became: Devendra Banhart: Then that night we watched the movie Chicken Hawk: Men Who Love Boys, about NAMBLA, the North American Man/Boy Love Association. At the same time, swimming in my head was the idea of a song about a schizophrenic hermaphrodite. [...]

DevBan has settled on the Chicken Hawk explanation when confronted with questions over the song. Never mind that the guy has a stash of songs like "Autumn's Child" featuring phrases like "sweet young thing" and the nursery rhyme-like "A Ribbon" which repeats "I'd like to sleep with you." A run through all of DevBan's tracklists finds Raffi-like titles such as "Lazy Butterfly", "Queen Bee", "Pumpkin Seeds", "Little Monkey", "Happy Happy Oh", "Dragonflys", and "Hey Mama Wolf". His head floats in "Ralph's World" and his music, regardless of the lyrics, resembles the lulling, sing-songy playfulness of children's records. Blender Magazine notes that DevBan spent a portion of his youth in the Venezuelan boy-band Los Cucas ("The Pretty Ones"). The Michael Jackson analogy is cheap and obvious, but when Time Out asked DevBan if he feared getting a reputation like Michael Jackson's, the unwashed DevBan retorted, "You mean his reputation as the king of pop? That would be great!"

source: 'DiCrescenzo #5' by Brent DiCrescenzo; pitchfork.com/features/dicrescenzo/6181-dicrescenzo-5/; Pitchfork; 30 October 2005