Rock and Roll Book Club: 'Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary'
by Jay Gabler
June 24, 2020
When NPR recently released a list of "The 150 Greatest Albums Made by Women," it described the project as "an intervention, a remedy" that "rethinks popular music to put women at the center." The key word there was "rethinks": telling the history that way doesn't change history, it just changes the telling. Especially now, at a moment when the music world is confronting how much of the industry's institutionalized racism needs to change, it's important to remember that doing better isn't just about looking forward, it's about looking back and looking more closely.
That's what Sasha Geffen does with Glitter Up the Dark (buy now), a new book that details, era by era, just how much popular music has done to break down the gender binary. "Listening to music is inherently a sensual exchange," writes Geffen — an intimate act. What's more, "music's ambiguity also enables the covert expression of queer desire and identity."
Although Glitter Up the Dark is an apt read for Pride week, it's important to explain what distinguishes it from a history of LGBT music like the excellent David Bowie Made Me Gay. Geffen's approach to music is more granular: not just about finding spaces where heteronormativity can be challenged, but ways in which artists scrape away at the restrictive gender binary that seeks to divide the human experience into either/or.
I came to Glitter Up the Dark as a straight cis man, and one of the things I loved about the book is how Geffen celebrates the way that challenging the binary is inherent to the appeal of pop music for all people who approach it with open ears and hearts: it clears a space for all of us to more truly understand the human experience.
Consider, for example, the '80s: my favorite decade of music, and one where you might expect a book like Glitter Up the Dark to touch on the importance of artists like Boy George. Geffen mentions Culture Club, but the chapter on that era is full of revelatory new takes on tracks like Dire Straits' "Money for Nothing." That song and video, Geffen point out, capture a crucial dynamic of an era where swaggering, toxic Reaganite masculinity coexisted with the vast popularity of transformative artists like Prince (who gets his own chapter).
The appliance movers who frontman Mark Knopfler sing for openly disdain the acts making it big on the TVs they're hauling, going so far as to use a homophobic slur. At the same time, Sting's transcendent croon "I want my MTV" counterbalances the muttering men, seemingly inspiring them to second thoughts about the roles they're trapped in. "I shoulda learned to play the guitar," Knopfler sings. "I shoulda learned to play the drums."
The literal voice is one of Geffen's recurring zones of fascination. From Little Richard to Donna Summer to Grimes, the author notes, artists have broken the binary by taking their voices to places where they can't be easily gendered — sometimes becoming more vulnerable, sometimes becoming less so and thus exercising a sort of personal boundary. That's the case with Grimes, notes Geffen, who was initially dismissed by male critics frustrated at how remote her floating voice seemed, how it "did not allow easy entry into her inner emotional state."
Another aspect of pop music that fascinates Geffen is the ways in which it's mediated by technology. Just as one can feel more authentically oneself when dressed in drag than one might when completely nude, artists can use technology to create dreamscapes that may sound "artificial" on the surface but that are, in a sense, more pure than an acoustic guitar could ever be.
Consider a pioneer of electronic music, Wendy Carlos. A trans woman, she wasn't completely out at the time of her game-changing release Switched-On Bach in 1968: released under the telling moniker Trans-Electronic Music Productions. Geffen points out that Carlos used a vocoder to create an entirely new sound for the human voice in the Beethoven movement she reworked for A Clockwork Orange: "The vocoder voice is not a union of two discrete elements. It's a third entity, the likes of which had never been heard before."
When artists ranging from Cher ("Believe") to the Knife explore synthesized vocal explorations, they owe a debt to pioneer Carlos.
Throughout Glitter Up the Dark, Geffen goes beyond the artists you might call the obvious suspects: the ones who fill your basic Pride playlists. With no disrespect to David Bowie, for example, Geffen points out that he layered his personae atop a consistently legible cis identity that gave his listeners, so to speak, an easy out for any discomfort.
Ditto with Mick Jagger, who — Geffen points out — had been known to wear dresses onstage and yet was embraced as an avatar of pure masculine id by the 1981 Rolling Stones fans who booed Prince offstage in the last time he ever made the mistake of playing an opening slot. "Few artists have sustained such a totalizing androgyny for so long as Prince," writes Geffen. He was a man attracted to women, but he took the "hetero" out of "heterosexual." As Geffen puts it, "He is not drawn to women because they are different from him, because their gender accentuates his own by contrast. He gravitates to women because he feels he shares something of their essence."
Part of the pleasure in reading Glitter Up the Dark is the way Geffen reclaims the radical — even in a band like the Beatles, the most extravagantly examined group in rock history. Geffen reminds readers that the Beatles read as rebellious in the early '60s, one reason teens flocked to them.
Here were white men growing their hair long (when that read as effeminate); covering Little Richard and Black girl groups with a sincere respect that opened a door to their work outside the white-supremacist gender hierarchy; and demonstrating what the author calls a "homosociality" that broke its own barriers. You didn't necessarily look at the Beatles and think they were sexually attracted to each other (though some may have fantasized as much); you looked at them and saw four men who were comfortable sharing a mic. You listened to them and heard songs that were gendered without conforming to traditional gender norms, in part because they were sometimes singing songs (like "Please Mr. Postman," an early cover) written for women to sing to men.
Today, writes Geffen,
Something has changed in America. Among more and more people, gender is understood not as an inevitable, unchanging characteristic acquired at birth, but as a language, a technology, a system of communication with a full range of expression. Trans and gender nonconforming people have always survived with or without the acknowledgement of the dominant culture, and the dangers posed by the straight world persist, but at the very least it has become easier for us to find each other, to call out into the dark and hear a chorus of voices calling back in return.
One of our era's most joyous journeys has been that of Janelle Monaé, who for much of her career said she "preferred dating androids" but has since come out as pansexual and "has proudly stepped into her role as a gay icon," writes Geffen. Her stunning music videos have long pointed to a truth beyond the binary, including 2010's clip for "Tightrope." The video opens in a psychiatric institution, Geffen notes, but by the end the artist, "dressed in a tuxedo and shiny oxford shoes, literally dances her way free of the asylum, a group of fellow dapper androids in tow."
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Tune in to The Current at 8:30 a.m. (Central) every Wednesday morning to hear Jay Gabler and Jill Riley talk about a new book. Also, find Jay's reviews online.
July 1: America the Band: An Authorized Biography by Jude Warne (buy now)
July 8: Blues People: Negro Music in White America by Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) (buy now)
July 15: Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir by Linda Ronstadt (buy now)
July 22: Remain in Love: Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, Tina by Chris Frantz (buy now)