Queering the Popular Pitch (review)

At a "Queering" plenary during the 2003 IASPM (International Association for the Study of Popular Music) international conference in Montreal, Jennifer Rycenga spoke of the radical nature of the term "queer." Queering meant to challenge heteronormative representations of gender and sexuality. This was an intervention within musicology aimed at greater inclusiveness.

Yet at the same time speakers at that July 4 plenary identified a stagnancy that had set in, dampening the field's initial transformative vitality. Queer musicology was going through some growing pains, with Queering the Pitch nearly a decade old and a growing retinue of criticisms in tow.¹ Martha Mockus, Suzanne Cusick, and Kip Pegley, for instance, flagged a lack of attention to class and race and to "trans" (transgendered or transsexual) individuals. Many speakers were asking similar questions: Where should queer musicology go next? Whose interests are served by the field's postmodernist orientation? How can queer musicologists address a broader range of sexual identities? Or, quite plainly, who counts? Then and now we continue(d) to ask, What does "queering" mean?

The present volume, Queering the Popular Pitch, attempts to answer some of these questions. It is the product of Sheila Whiteley and Jennifer Rycenga's efforts to capture some of the ideas and energy circulating at that 2003 IASPM conference. Not only does this anthology aim to "evaluate and update" the critical and political orientations of its forerunner (Queering the Pitch), but this younger sibling delves into the more nefarious subject of popular music.

I was eager for this anthology to be released. As I listened to the speakers at IASPM 2003 voice their intents to broaden and expand queer musicology, my enthusiasm was piqued. As a trans person I hoped to see the theorists I had championed and the experiences I had encountered represented within musicology. As an R&B researcher I looked forward to musicology—especially its queer branch—attending to broader subjects and methodologies. How would Queering the Popular Pitch fulfill my wishes?

The editors of this anthology emphasize a plurality of subjects and approaches in their introduction. In many ways this is born out. An impressive total of eighteen authors, evenly split between women and men, discuss a range of subjects and musical genres. Exactly how wide this range is may be a matter of perspective—most of the material still reflects contemporary white Western Anglo culture. With two articles focusing on black American artists, three on Latin genres, and one each on Israeli artists and Weimar cabaret, this may be more diverse than many collections. But does this "radically reconceptualize queer," as earlier calls had deemed necessary?

The multiple, shifting definitions of "queer" (as verb, noun, and adjective) that emerge from this anthology are among its most compelling features. Where Queering the Pitch reined the term in with its subtitle, "the new gay and lesbian musicology" (emphasis mine), this book offers no such fixing. The various readings of "queerness" found in this book are in fact encapsulated in Emma Mayhew's contribution, which explores Sinéad O'Connor's sexual identity. One account of queerness (a "discursive" queerness) is the perception of transgressive or subversive qualities. Mayhew mobilizes this by finding that O'Connor's blurring of private and public domains and her generally transgressive persona are "queer." Rycenga reads a similar queerness in the nonstandard structures of prog rock, and Anno Mungen finds "queering" in theatrical transformations of prerecorded songs. On the other hand, queerness can be "experiential," describing alternative sexualities. For example, Mayhew finds O'Connor's same-sex relationships and (temporary) lesbian identification to be "queer." Similar takes on queerness are found in articles about gay music in renaissance Harlem (Jeffrey Callen), songs about gay men and AIDS (Paul Attinello), and the music and timelines specific to dyke subcultures (Judith Halberstam). "Experiential queerness" can also describe the presence of cross-gender signifiers, such as O'Connor's shaved head and direct style of expression. Gender transgressions are likewise foregrounded in Jason Lee Oakes's discussion of...