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Before MUSC 403G met in-class for the first time in January, Dr. David Metzer, the course\u2019s professor, conducted an experiment. He sent out an email to his students, asking them for examples of queer music. Not definitions, he stressed \u2014 queer music, for the sprawl of artists and musical movements it encompasses, resists definition \u2014 but songs that might verge on one.<\/p>\n
The responses came in. About half were current pop hits, helmed by Chappell Roan and Billie Eilish, whose queer anthems \u201cGood Luck, Babe!\u201d and \u201cLunch\u201d won over pop culture in 2024. The other half, Metzer told me, was everything else. \u201cI had a 1920s blues song,\u201d he said. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 Pet Shop Boys, Mitski, \u201cBohemian Rhapsody,\u201d drag queen shows \u2014 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 \u201cC\u2019mon Baby, Cry,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI’ve always wanted to teach the course, but I was intimidated by [it],\u201d Metzer told me in his office, surrounded by shelves of music history books. \u201cConceptually, it\u2019s a hard course to organize. I didn\u2019t want to do a straight history.\u201d Metzer, who has taught music history at UBC for 30 years, had seen queerness pop up throughout his career \u2014 writing books, publishing articles, discovering that one of his favourite classical composers, Aaron Copland, was gay \u2014 but had never committed to it in teaching. After all, \u201cqueer,\u201d as an adjective, applies to an entire musical experience. \u201cIt could be songwriters, it could be the listener, it could be a dancer, it could be all sorts of things.\u201d<\/p>\n
Knowing that a traditional chronology wouldn’t be suitable, Metzer structured the course by topic. They include space, voice, eros, homage, sound \u2014 themes that recur throughout queer music. \u201cQueer space\u201d examines how queer musicians congregate (the disco culture of the 1970s, the Michigan\u2019s Womyn’s Music Festival). \u201cQueer eros\u201d features erotic desire (Peaches\u2019 \u201cFuck the Pain Away\u201d). \u201cQueer voice\u201d reveals the vocal journey that comes with transitioning, as trans opera singer Teiya Kasahara will be speaking to the class in March. \u201cI think that just captures the breadth of queer music,\u201d Metzer said.<\/p>\n
The flexibility of the topic structure is complemented by the dynamic of the class, which Metzer infuses with warmth and inclusivity. \u201cI lecture completely differently in this class than I do in the others,\u201d he said. \u201cThe 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.\u201d When one student prefaced their comment as a \u201cvibes-based observation,\u201d Metzer had no reservations. \u201cIt is actually all about vibes in this class,\u201d he joked.<\/p>\n
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. \u201cWe call it \u2018working with and against,\u2019\u201d Metzer explained. \u201cThe 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.\u201d Take Peck\u2019s \u201cC\u2019mon Baby, Cry,\u201d 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 \u2014 in the music video, towards a male love interest \u2014 pleading the listener to cry because it is good for you. \u201cIt creates a queer moment by breaking ideas of emotional control,\u201d Metzer said.<\/p>\n
This widening of musical consciousness \u2014 adding a queer register to the endlessly interpretative exercise of listening \u2014 is one thing Metzer wishes to give his students. \u201cI 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Listening to queer music also means understanding its marginalized past, which is why Metzer hones in on country and hip-hop \u2014 two genres that, for most of their lifespan, kept queer musicians at a distance. \u201cIf you would have talked about queerness and hip-hop in the ’80s or ’90s, people would have looked [at you funny],\u201d he said. \u201cBut 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.\u201d Decades later, pop music is experiencing what Metzer calls a \u201cqueer moment,\u201d epitomized by 2024\u2019s sapphic zeitgeist, which the course\u2019s pop unit celebrates. \u201cMajor 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Looking forward, Metzer intends to involve a wider scope of students in MUSC 403. \u201cI\u2019d like to have non-music students in the class,\u201d he said, estimating that there are only three currently enrolled. \u201cI like when music and non-music students talk together. That\u2019s what I envision for this class.\u201d Fortunately, queerness continues to universalize in the media: Eilish won a Grammy for \u201cWildflower\u201d earlier this month, and Heated Rivalry<\/i> has become a global sensation. For Metzer, that is a wonderful feeling. \u201cI like the fact that some housewife in Nebraska is going to be touched by this love story between two gay hockey players,\u201d he said, \u201cand might be touched by a Chappell Roan song as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
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