Recently, I was lucky enough to bear witness to my friend Colette March’s ascent into TikTok stardom when her new song “Franco” went viral. In the wake and absence of Brat Summer, many were searching for a delicious pop star and anthem to sink their teeth into. Colette March delivered Franco Summer.
Franco is an archetype of a DL Italian dude who chases trans girls. But to really get into the archetype, read on for more about how Colette describes the Francos of the world.
Like many trans artists, Colette made Franco Summer happen without a manager nor label. She of course didn’t do it alone; she had the support of other queer and trans artists there to produce, choreograph, and market the song. Perhaps most importantly, she had a sea of Francos — transmascs, butch lesbians, the rare cis man, femmes — flexing their biceps and thirst trapping all over the internet to the addictive song intro. You bet your ass I was one of them.
I recently got dinner at none other than Veselka with the doll herself and discussed the pressures of casting her music video, representation as a trans woman, and how she plans to capitalize on the momentum of Franco Summer.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Motti: Tell me about your alpha, your End Game Franco, the Franco we see in the music video. This guy that’s making me feel horrible about myself.
Colette March: I know, I got scared, because you’re a brilliant Franco. His name is Facundo Rodriguez and he’s a superstar.
Motti: There’s been plenty of Francos who I think are hotter than me. It’s just so funny to be like, ‘Oh my God. Who did she just get?’ How did you get him? Was it a casting call?
Colette March: I don’t want him to not feel special because he’s such a sweetheart. We literally just scrolled through gay bodybuilders on Instagram and DMed them being like, ‘Would you want to be in a music video?”
Motti: Wait, that’s incredible.
Colette March: I followed this gay body builder, and I was just like… let me go through his following and find someone who looks like the ultimate Pokémon Mega Evolution Franco. Franco to the max.
Motti: Is he Italian?
Colette March: No.
Motti: That’s so fucked up. So, what? You got him on a train and took him to Coney Island? I’m setting it up like you kidnapped him.
Colette March: So, he arrived willingly. Our director Friday was already upstate in New York for their film that got into Hudson Valley Film Festival and they had the idea to stay another night in an Airbnb and shoot the music video there. Their partner is Italian and we went to their hometown and his parents played Franco’s parents. We shot this big dinner scene in this beautiful little Airbnb in Middletown, and our Franco drove all the way up.
I was dancing on the table. My tits fell out in front of these lovely parents. I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m so sorry.’ It was a very funny moment. I was shoving bread in the dad’s mouth and stabbing them with a fork. I spilled wine on myself. And then we made out in the woods.
Then a couple days later, we went to Coney Island, and we rode the Wonder Wheel. We took a digital camera onto The Cyclone. There’s about ten different bathroom make out scenes. We got into a fake fight for a scene in Coney Island and people started staring and taking out their phones.
Motti: Did Franco have acting experience?
Colette March: He did theater before.
Motti: Let’s take it back a step. The character of Franco. Tell me about him.
Colette March: I was home for Christmas in a suburb outside of Philly. It’s a blue county, but it doesn’t act like it. It feels very conservative. I grew up with a lot of Italian boys who had family in Jersey or New York, and they all wore wife pleasers and would put on this Italian New Yorker persona. I was in a Wawa at 1 a.m. and those guys are next to me talking about this hunting trip that they’re going on the next morning. I was listening to that, and I thought to myself I used to be so afraid of men like this. I was definitely scared of them in high school, and now I’m sitting in a Wawa looking super fish in my lacy pajamas that I got for Christmas. I got in the car and I wrote the ‘Hello Franco’ intro.
Then I was at my dentist office and my dentist said, ‘Oh my gosh. I know I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but I have another patient who’s a trans woman and she’s happily married!’ She then shows me a photo of the couple and she’s married to a cop.
I grew up with a lot of chasers around me who typically ended up being cops or in the military. It’s so funny to me that these trans women are with these conservative men.
So that played into the Franco archetype a lot.
Then I come back to New York, and I’m going through absolute hell dating here. I was in bed with a man who’s supposedly so progressive, a Bushwick boy who identifies as a leftist, and he turns to me and asks what my take is on trans women in sports. And I’m like… this doesn’t feel any better. I’m in these spaces where, as a trans woman, who is unfortunately attracted to men, I’m constantly negotiating my femininity. I go to some really lonely places. I was thinking about what could have been if I stayed in Pennsylvania. I would have never gotten in touch with my queerness and never would have educated myself. Maybe I would have ended up with somebody one of those guys in Wawa who don’t see me for all my substance.
So when I wrote a song about this archetype, about Franco, I didn’t want it to seem too reckless.
Motti: Like in a Lana Del Rey loves her old Republican men type of way? Lusting over this DL guy who’s presumably treating you like shit but you’re doing it because he’s hot?
Colette March: Not even doing it because he’s hot. It’s these men who treat the trans women they’re with like any other woman, and give them these traditional gender role expectations. When I see these girls with these men, I’m like, ‘I understand.’ I understand the loneliness of growing up in a conservative family and how that drives you to want to seek out this hypermasculine archetype.
Motti: But there’s more for you.
Colette March: And I think that’s where it came from. That kind of shame lived in me for a really long time. That’s why I hadn’t done dance pop before, because I was nervous about making something that didn’t feel connected to me personally, because I’ve always been a big lyricist and a big storyteller. Until I felt like I had the narrative for it. I decided it has to end with me defeating slash killing this toxic way of thinking.
Motti: Doesn’t your character — you or the character you play in the song — end up with Franco? I infer that from the line, “I’ll be the girl you wanted.” Or am I wrong?
Colette March: The end of the song implies that she kills Franco. It sucks because the intro went viral and, if you take the intro out of context, it does sound like she’s relishing it.
Motti: I don’t think that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that if that’s what YOU want to do.
Colette March: The end of the song is:
Sick of the font of my setlist
Just want to make you some breakfast
Then wear your arm like a necklace
I take you down
Down
Down
I’m homicidal
Unstable
I tear him up on the table
I fuck him up like a fable
I take him
Down
Down
Down, down, down, down!
I HATE YOU FRANCO!
Then there’s a dance break that’s very delirious and violent. The post-chorus is screamed. At the end, it says: ‘Franco, is that what you want? Is that what you want? Is that what you are?’
This main character in the song is having little moments of lucidity where she’s actually asking ‘Wait, what’s your politic and your interior life? I’m not the woman that you have in mind, yeah?’
At the end, she sort of snaps out of it and gets out of the situation.
Motti: I obviously cannot relate to being a trans woman, but when I was a girl and dating men, I’d meet a nice, charming boy who came from a nice family, he’d otherwise treat me fairly well, and then out of nowhere he’d reveal something about himself or his politics or how violent he could be, and it’s a whiplash. They’d drop a slur out of nowhere or put their hands on me, and it’s a reminder of who these people are at their core.
So the fact that ‘Franco’ conveys that jolted feeling through sound cues and the way you’re singing the lines is really interesting.
Colette March: I wanted it to feel as though I was studying him. The image in my head is that she has a notebook out and she’s making sure he’s politically sound enough where she doesn’t feel any guilt for being with him.
The rug gets pulled out from under you so quickly. You feel like you’ve covered every base and then you realize how much access and space men have to be really offensive and violent. I feel like a lot of songs about toxic, evil men usually end up with the woman in the story dying. I don’t want this to be like the end of Preacher’s Daughter where it’s a tragedy. I want it to feel almost like you got off the treadmill in your whole body, soaring in pain, but like you feel like you got something out of you.
Motti: Were people perceiving or receiving it in a different way?
Colette March: Because the intro was the first thing I teased, and it picked up steam before the whole song came out, people had thoughts about the rest of the song not sounding like the intro. The intro is the best part of the song and the rest doesn’t sound like it. Why would you release the song that doesn’t sound like the viral part?
I’m sorry you’re used to shorter songs that are a minute and a half long and sound the same throughout.
Motti: It’s also fun when songs sound different! Also, sorry that you fell for a marketing tactic!
Colette March: Thanks for the stream!
Motti: Make your own song.
Colette March: No, literally, make your own song as an indie artist. I’m hesitant to say this and put this out there, but most of the hate that I’ve gotten has been other queer people.
Motti: I’m not surprised.
Colette March: My other music always got hate from straight people but for ‘Franco,’ I had somebody repost the song and say ‘This song is fascist.’
Motti: [laughing] That’s insane.
Colette March: I was just really surprised. I also didn’t think sapphic women and lesbians would embrace it the way they did. They really like it.
Motti: What I noticed, because it was coming up organically on my feed, is that a lot of butches and mascs and tops and trans guys, including myself, saw this trend where they got to flash a bicep. If we want to get really philosophical about it, displays of masculinity feel really appealing from the outside, like this entry level masculinity of a bicep curl. But then you get deeper and deeper into the song, you realize how quickly it could spiral from wanting to be sexy and have a pretty girl on your arm to literal violence. So when the rest of the song dropped, a lot of people like me who did the trend and wanted to be Franco, maybe didn’t like being told he’s actually the bad guy. Because they felt empowered by him.
Colette March: Yes but also, this version of the song, where Franco is the bad guy, is so specific to me and close to home, which is of course why I wrote it. I like that so many queer people have embraced it how they did. Even if it was without the context of the whole song, I think there’s a lot of power in reclaiming that archetype for ourselves in a way. It’s similar but opposite to how the misogynistic bimbo archetype has been reclaimed to be relishing in a hyper femininity that doesn’t care about the male gaze.
Motti: How has it been for you as an indie artist experiencing this level of listenership and attention?
Colette March: I’m just so shocked that people want to take the time to make videos for the song and share it and engage with the content I was making for it. I was posting video after video and constantly thinking of how to promote my songs. For some of my other songs, I would post a whole screen of text over a video of myself, trying to talk about why I wrote the song and what it means to me, but that didn’t have any steam to it. But here I have this campy, story-driven dance song that I can go all in with. I think the dance pop of it is what made people excited about participating.
Motti: It wasn’t like ‘I’ll comment for engagement for this trans girl to get her song trending.’ It wasn’t pity marketing, which happens a lot on TikTok now. You’re not making people feel bad that you went through an experience, wrote a song about it, and now you’re owed listeners. You let me do a little sexy dance and flash my muscles.
Colette March: It’s funny, because my hesitation with dance pop was the fact that I wanted it to still have a story and a lot of meaning to it. There’s plenty of dance pop that accomplishes that lyrically. I want people who listen to my music to experience this Colette March World that’s very expansive, like a fun Romanticopia with all these characters.
People are starting to really get into my music, but it’s also the first time I’m going to be misinterpreted on a wider scale — and sometimes, purposefully. Sometimes people are going to see a trans woman who is very clearly trying. There’s that viral clip of Chappell Roan saying, “You’re gonna have to be cringy.” And you do. You have to be a little cringy to get your art out there.
Motti: What kind of cringy stuff can new fans expect from you in the future?
Colette March: My newest single, ‘SUBURBAN SEX SLUT,’ keeps with the secret vulnerability of ‘FRANCO.’ It’s a sticky heartache coated in 2010s nostalgia, honoring how much artists like Gaga, Britney, and Ke$ha were there for me when I was discovering myself in suburban Pennsylvania. It’s spiteful and sassy, and you can’t really tell which lyrics are quotes from other people and which are directly from the narrator herself.
Something potentially cringe I’ve been doing when I perform it live is the crowd chants ‘SLUT!’ at me, and it feels oddly cathartic — I think because the song comes from such a deep loneliness of growing up a feminine, closeted doll in a town that didn’t embrace me. I’m really hiking up the camp and not taking myself too seriously, which I did too much previously.
The music video for ‘FRANCO,’ directed by queer and trans filmmaker Friday Anderson, is now available on Youtube. The sequel to ‘FRANCO,’ which is also described as the anti-Franco, is streaming now.
FRANCO written and performed by Colette March
Production and additional composition by Christian Reccasina (@fellow.music)
Mix and master by Santi Coto (@santicotomusic)
omg listening now!
Yessssssss so happy to see Colette March being featured here!
She is an icon! She is the moment! So excited to see what she creates next.
And for anyone in the comments that hasn’t yet, stream Franco and Suburban Sex Slut wherever you can get music! Promise you’ll find one of your new favorite artists.