Before MUSC 403G met in-class for the first time in January, Dr. David Metzer, the course’s professor, conducted an experiment. He sent out an email to his students, asking them for examples of queer music. Not definitions, he stressed — queer music, for the sprawl of artists and musical movements it encompasses, resists definition — but songs that might verge on one.
The responses came in. About half were current pop hits, helmed by Chappell Roan and Billie Eilish, whose queer anthems “Good Luck, Babe!” and “Lunch” won over pop culture in 2024. The other half, Metzer told me, was everything else. “I had a 1920s blues song,” he said. “I had some jazz pieces. I had folk music. So already I could tell from this little experiment that for listeners, this is a music that takes so many different forms. It stretches across music-making of all different types. That was the idea of queer music for me.”
Running for the first time this term, MUSC 403G, Queer Music: Music and the 2SLGBTQIA+ Imagination, spotlights queer voices across history, tracing its DNA from Tyler, the Creator to Queen to George Frideric Handel. Alongside readings, students are assigned songs and performances — Pet Shop Boys, Mitski, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” drag queen shows — to discuss in class. In the one seminar I sat. in on, Metzer led a discussion on Orville Peck, the masked, gay country singer whose drawl and honesty recall the legacy of Roy Orbison. We watched the music video of “C’mon Baby, Cry,” learning about the public and private tensions of country music and how Peck reimagines them in a queer context. Metzer is an animated teacher, reaching over to a piano to play a motif, obsessing over an unresolved chord and the meaning it produces. For him, this class is long overdue.
“I’ve always wanted to teach the course, but I was intimidated by [it],” Metzer told me in his office, surrounded by shelves of music history books. “Conceptually, it’s a hard course to organize. I didn’t want to do a straight history.” Metzer, who has taught music history at UBC for 30 years, had seen queerness pop up throughout his career — writing books, publishing articles, discovering that one of his favourite classical composers, Aaron Copland, was gay — but had never committed to it in teaching. After all, “queer,” as an adjective, applies to an entire musical experience. “It could be songwriters, it could be the listener, it could be a dancer, it could be all sorts of things.”
Knowing that a traditional chronology wouldn’t be suitable, Metzer structured the course by topic. They include space, voice, eros, homage, sound — themes that recur throughout queer music. “Queer space” examines how queer musicians congregate (the disco culture of the 1970s, the Michigan’s Womyn’s Music Festival). “Queer eros” features erotic desire (Peaches’ “Fuck the Pain Away”). “Queer voice” reveals the vocal journey that comes with transitioning, as trans opera singer Teiya Kasahara will be speaking to the class in March. “I think that just captures the breadth of queer music,” Metzer said.
The flexibility of the topic structure is complemented by the dynamic of the class, which Metzer infuses with warmth and inclusivity. “I lecture completely differently in this class than I do in the others,” he said. “The class has a nice, relaxed atmosphere. And humour is a big part of it too. To deal with this topic, you have to have fun with it.” When one student prefaced their comment as a “vibes-based observation,” Metzer had no reservations. “It is actually all about vibes in this class,” he joked.
If there is one commonality to be heard across the expanse of queer sound, it is the unique way artists interact with the boundaries of their respective genres. “We call it ‘working with and against,’” Metzer explained. “The artists will work with all the expectations [of the genre]. At the same time, they work against them too. And I think that’s a queer state to be in. Gotta work with it so everyone knows what kind of song it is. But then you work against it to create these queer spaces or moments.” Take Peck’s “C’mon Baby, Cry,” for instance. The song is inexorably country: Peck croons over twangy guitars, and the music video begins with him entering a bar, wearing a cowboy suit. In the country music tradition, crying is a private act, drawn from the masculine conviction that emotion should be monitored. Peck subverts this: he directs his emotions outward — in the music video, towards a male love interest — pleading the listener to cry because it is good for you. “It creates a queer moment by breaking ideas of emotional control,” Metzer said.
This widening of musical consciousness — adding a queer register to the endlessly interpretative exercise of listening — is one thing Metzer wishes to give his students. “I want them to start hearing larger ideas that have emerged in queer music-making and apply those ideas to the song they might hear on the radio,” he said.
Listening to queer music also means understanding its marginalized past, which is why Metzer hones in on country and hip-hop — two genres that, for most of their lifespan, kept queer musicians at a distance. “If you would have talked about queerness and hip-hop in the ’80s or ’90s, people would have looked [at you funny],” he said. “But queer people have been in these genres, working within these genres. I think queerness stands out all the more because the expectations of these genres are anything but queer.” Decades later, pop music is experiencing what Metzer calls a “queer moment,” epitomized by 2024’s sapphic zeitgeist, which the course’s pop unit celebrates. “Major pop hits are being done by queer singers. We had a little bit of that here and there before, but we’ve never had anything like this.”
Looking forward, Metzer intends to involve a wider scope of students in MUSC 403. “I’d like to have non-music students in the class,” he said, estimating that there are only three currently enrolled. “I like when music and non-music students talk together. That’s what I envision for this class.” Fortunately, queerness continues to universalize in the media: Eilish won a Grammy for “Wildflower” earlier this month, and Heated Rivalry has become a global sensation. For Metzer, that is a wonderful feeling. “I like the fact that some housewife in Nebraska is going to be touched by this love story between two gay hockey players,” he said, “and might be touched by a Chappell Roan song as well.”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source ubyssey.ca ’
