Listening Backward: Queer Time & Rhythm in Popular Music Performance

Abstract

Listening to music has the capacity to connect us with others. In a society structured by the stultifying logic of heteronormativity, patriarchy, white supremacy, and neoliberalism —ideals that usher all of us into normative and limiting modes of relations—musical listening serves as a bastion of collective queer potential. Music can enhance queer collectivity particularly when it offers us experiences of non-normative temporality. In this dissertation, I argue for a form of music participation that I call listening backward: the act of listening closely and collectively to past musical moments in which alternative worlds were once possible. This form of listening, I argue, encourages resistance to normative signifiers of progressive linear temporality and interrogates notions of progress in both musical sound and society more broadly. Listening backward is important for building queer collectives—in the present and for the future—that can develop and sustain coalitions and resist homonormative impulses and neoliberal claims of individuality and competition. In this dissertation I analyze a variety of music performances that vary in their genre markers, the historical moments from which they come, and the forms of participation they encourage. These disparate performances are bound together by the ways that they that render audible a collective participatory ethos and challenge musical and broader social notions of progress and normative temporality. Listening backward is informed by a history of popular music participation in the late twentieth century and encourages an ear toward liberatory and revolutionary politics—it is attuned to hope in the face of limiting and conservative politics of the present. Past musical moments remain rife for the potential for collective experience—we just need to listen backward.