Achtung, Baby

In polite company, you might refer to Rufus Wainwright as an instigator. The contrarian's orchestral pop has more in common with opera than it does with the Top 40, and his lyrics are so arch, his wit so sharp, he could almost be from another era -- a European star of the postwar '20s transplanted to the United States of today, a place where celebrities treat rehab as if it were a spa and artists are vilified for expressing political opinions. But despite how his music sounds, the 33-year-old is firmly grounded in the here and now.

On "Going to a Town," the first single from his fifth album, Release the Stars (Geffen), the openly gay artist asks, "Do you really think you go to hell for having loved?" As the mellow piano ballad builds to a multi-instrumental crescendo,Wainwright sings the following in his resonant, vibrating tenor: "I'm so tired of America, I'm so tired of America." To finish this record, Wainwright left New York and moved to Berlin. "After 9/11, I got sick of the whole victimization of Manhattan," he says. "One of my reasons to go to Berlin was to live in a place that had been destroyed and had already recovered. Also, it has good museums and restaurants. Otherwise, I probably should have just gone to Detroit."

Rufus wears a suit by Victor & Rolf, a shirt by D&G and shoes by Gucci. Fragrance: Marc Jacobs Rain.

To anyone who's been following the Canadian-American's career, Wainwright's interest in recovery will jibe with his songs. He's open about his flaws to a fault, and his very public battle with substance abuse resulted in both column inches and his two most recent albums, the beautiful Want One and Want Two. Like many gay men in New York during the early 2000s, Wainwright developed a taste for crystal meth. His yen for the drug led him to an addiction so strong he began to suffer from episodes of temporary blindness. After a surreal week in 2002 when he played himself as a druggy twink on Britcom Absolutely Fabulous, partied with Barbara Bush (the elder of the First Twins) and endured a bizarre, warped evening with Marianne Faithfull and his mother, Canadian folk artist Kate McGarrigle, he sought treatment.

As the story goes, he phoned one of the only people on the planet who could understand where he was coming from -- Elton John. Pop's elder statesman convinced Wainwright to check himself into rehab. Clearly invested in the drama, Wainwright used his struggle as fuel for his last two records. But now with his new album, he's declaring different sorts of intentions. Release the Stars is about an artist who has fully come into his own, disillusioned with fantasies of rock 'n' roll stardom and filled instead with far more theatrical dreams. This one isn't about recovery, he explains. It's about "action." And the album is dramatic, layered and stunning: the exact opposite of what he was looking for when he went to Germany to write it.

"I wound up going for broke -- baroque,"Wainwright explains dryly, speaking from his Park Slope rehearsal space. "My plan was to hook into the dark, cutting-edge, bare-bones mentality that has existed in Berlin before, whether we're talking about when Bowie went there or when Lou Reed wrote about it. So I wanted to sort of, you know, get cool, basically. But when I arrived, the first thing I did was to get a pair of lederhosen, and I started eating a lot of sausages. I became overwhelmed by this wave of German Romanticism. It was silly to think that I could just change my persona and become this angry straight man in two seconds. But because I'd walked into the city with the intention of creating a skeletal record that was all about intimacy, the ideas became that much bigger when they were recorded."

And the songs are huge, from the avant-garde opening discord of "Do I Disappoint You" to the big-band optimism of the title track. "All of his songs are very big," says Zaldy Goco, the New York fashion designer who has been a fixture on the city's nightlife circuit for years and counts Wainwright as one of his close friends. "They're always lush and weighty, even when it's just him playing solo at the piano."

The same aural opulence is also characteristic of some of Wainwright's artistic cousins in New York. Friends and acquaintances like Antony Hegarty (of Antony and the Johnsons) and members of the Citizens Band mix German Romanticism with an aesthetic revival of the Weimar Republic to create luxurious spectacles that are at once purely visceral entertainments as well as critically incisive. "The costumes, the theatricality, the excessiveness of it all serves as a beautiful backdrop for a message," says Citizens Band founder Sarah Flicker. She says that what makes his music engaging is that it's about his "vulnerability, set against all sorts of ridiculous splendor!" She continues, "Much like Weimar Berlin, artists today are using their art to make a statement, a reaction against everything intolerable that has been going on since Bush was elected."

Rufus wears a suit, scarf, and shoes by D&G.

Others agree but take a more pessimistic view of the trend. Adam Parfrey, publisher of Feral House, an imprint that has recently distributed several books about German culture of the '20s, says, "I think this interest in Weimar-period work is not actually a neo-Romantic but a neo-apocalyptic sensibility. [It's] a resigned awareness that all is going to hell and the political climate has been overtaken by murderous and short-sighted monsters, but [that we should] have fun in the remaining few moments while we can." Wainwright counters that sense of defeatist hedonism. "No, the idea of it is, 'Let's go out and improve the situation.' A lot of this record is definitely aimed toward my generation, the thirtysomethings of today who are on the cusp of inheriting a real conundrum and have to use all their might, wit and intelligence, and rectify it." Among the causes Wainwright supports is environmental protection. In a roundabout way, Wainwright is wearing his interest in environmentalism on the sleeve of his new album. On the front cover is a photograph he took in Berlin of the Great Altar of Pergamon, a reconstruction of an ancient frieze that depicts the battle between the Olympic gods and their ancestors, the Titans. Initially, the singer says the frieze appealed to him because of its referencing a changing of the guard. "I didn't know who she was until a few weeks ago when my manager called and told me. He said it was Gaia, the earth goddess -- mother of us all. It's so ironic, because on the back I've put a picture of my mother, to whom I've dedicated the album. There's a weird sort of mother thing going on. You know, for everybody right now. Whether that's Mother Earth or mother mother or motherfucker."

For much of early 2007, Wainwright was in Montreal with his mother, who was undergoing a serious operation. (The procedure was a success.) He and his mother are very close; much of Wainwright's work is about family. He was born in Rhinebeck, New York, in 1973, to McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III, a musical couple, themselves recording artists. The younger Wainwright sister, Martha, is also an up-and-coming musician. Wainwright began piano lessons at the age of six and achieved early acclaim in Canada when he was nominated for a Juno Award (the north-of-the-border equivalent of a Grammy) at 14. It was as a teen that he began to develop his love of opera and classical music. While most of his colleagues and contemporaries were getting into alternative rock, Wainwright's sense of individuality led him to a love of Verdi and Mahler.

Over the years his music has become increasingly ornate, which attracted fans from the fashion world. "If there is a male muse in our world, it would be Rufus," say the designers Victor & Rolf via e-mail. Wainwright provided the soundtrack for their perfume launch last year, and the duo frequently work with Wainwright on his stage costumes. "We like to play in our work with the same complexity, trying to avoid one-dimensionality. We [both] try to escape conventionalism and to put on a show in which we present a nicer version of reality." In keeping with his more dramatic sentiments, Wainwright's next release will be an album of Judy Garland covers ("She's more like mamma mamma," Wainwright says jokingly), which comes on the heels of his recent string of performances singing Garland's material.

Wainwright's next big project, Prima Donna, is a libretto commissioned from the Met in Manhattan. "It's a small story about one day in the life of a soprano," he says. "There aren't huge set pieces or historical shifts -- it's only got four characters." Still, he says the opportunity to write and stage a major production is sweet. He's very conscious of his age and what the times mean for his contemporaries. "I'm 33 right now -- Jesus's age, Alexander the Great's age. We are the ones who are supposed to revolt, attacking the people with the sandbags or defending the people with the sandbags. It's about doing something for us." He continues, "Some people might read this as megalomania, but I'm just going to go with it. When I went to rehab and I had to make Want One and Want Two to deal with my own shit, in a weird way America crashed, too. But I had an opportunity to get my house in order, and now we've gotten our house in order -- and our senate! Now I feel the urge to act, and I assume that the country must feel the same thing."

Styling by Timothy Reukauf. * Hair by Ryan Trygstad at The Wall Group. * Make-up by Natasha Smee at M.A.C.. * Intern: Annette Piazza.