Ma Rainey in 1917. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The gender binary cannot really be broken because the gender binary has never been whole. It has always limped along in pieces, easily cracked by a brief foray into the historical record. The Christian colonialist construction of men as inseminating subjects and women as reproductive objects does not extend into ancient history, nor does it govern every facet of the present. Masculinity and femininity, so much as they refer to certain strategies for moving through the world, have never neatly corresponded to the two types of bodies defined in the opening passages of the Bible. Even human bodies don’t hold true to the popular myth of strictly dimorphic sex, as anyone in the intersex community can tell you.

There have always been more than two genders, and music and gender nonconformity have gone hand in hand since long before pop music emerged as a product—since before the concept of “product” existed. But the patriarchal order, in order to survive, needs to brand threatening ideas as artificial, superimposed, harmful, and new, so as to distract from the underlying truth: that patriarchy itself is artificial, superimposed, harmful, and not nearly as ancient or universal as it pretends to be. Hardly the natural order of the human being, patriarchy relies on the illusion of its own inevitability to survive.

The notion that only two genders exist, and that each gender prescribes specific behaviors, movements, and relations, has always been undercut by a thriving spectrum of deviant expressions that white capitalist patriarchy seeks to erase. When European settlers devastated the Americas, they “looked to the existing sexual and gender variance of Indigenous people as a means of marking them as racially inferior and uncivilized: a justification for a forever unjustified genocidal conquest,” wrote Michael Paramo. During the era of American slavery, white men and women similarly clung to the gender binary to distinguish themselves from the racialized people they were brutalizing, stamping out expressions of gender that didn’t fit into the white Christian patriarchal mold as part of a long campaign of hellish state-sanctioned violence. Read More

Cole Porter, Yale College Class of 1913

My father graduated from Yale in 1913.

At the time, getting into Yale must have been a bit like making a reservation at 21. If you were one of the fortunate few, the only real question was did you want a table at seven thirty or eight thirty.

He played football (“badly, very badly”), was a member of the mandolin club, and was fired early on as drama critic at the Yale Courant for asking Sarah Bernhardt rude questions about her love life.

In later years, he found that boys from his dorms, ones with names like Pinky, Weasel, and Lefty, were now ambassadors to Sweden, vice presidents of General Electric, or on the board of the Federal Reserve. And he came to remember that one of the boys down the hall, someone he barely knew back then, was Cole Porter. Read More

Aldous Harding performing at the Oxford Art Factory on November 21, 2015. Photo: Bruce Baker (CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)). Via Wikimedia Commons.

Aldous Harding is a young singer-songwriter, the kind usually labeled a folk musician, but she’s been more fittingly described as “New Zealand’s woman of a thousand voices.” She grew up in Lyttelton, a town near Christchurch, and was discovered while busking in the streets. On her self-titled 2014 debut, she has a high, tremulous voice that’s subtly lisped and bent into an accent, and the tone across songs is uniform—subdued, eerie, a vague mood of the medieval. But on her second album, Party, and again on Designer, released at the end of April, her voice splays. Tonally, it might sound as if she’s blowing into a glass bottle at first—every note shored up on warm bass—then she’ll pull some invisible ripcord in the prechorus, and a sustained wail will spring out, cutting through everything like blades on ice.

I first encountered Harding while I was living in England a few years ago. The weather was gray, the political situation was dire, and my bike kept doing this thing where the pedals would lurch and my ribs would get crushed on the handlebars. I bought a helmet and a heavy rain jacket, indoctrinated myself in the pleasures of lukewarm ale, and eventually began looking online for new music—something dark that would hopefully confirm and condense the British situation.

Harding’s songs are not just sad and morose; they’re funereal. Every note climbed out of my speakers like a black vine, curving its way around my flat until the walls breathed a kind of death chill. I felt I should be lighting rows of candles or wearing a suit. Her lyrics and track titles alone relay that skulls are swelling, stones are being cuddled, birds are not singing but screaming, and someone has broken their neck while “dancing to the edge of the world.”

There’s also her face. When she sings, her eyes wheel around ballistically in their sockets, her teeth grit into a grimace, and her lips purse in this muscular way, as if clenching around gravel. The unspoken coordination of features somehow seems orchestral, complex. It’s totally mesmerizing. Even the promotional literature that circulates with her live show explains that she “does more than sing”—her body and face are a “weapon of theatre.” Read More