50 Shades of Grey: Pragmatism and Queertopia in Music Culture

At last year’s Outside Lands, Moses Sumney gave a cathartic performance. Clad in latex and a leather skirt, his voice pierced the San Francisco fog, entrancing the audience in his siren song. And it was through seeing Moses, in all his divine ambiguity, that I finally found the courage to accept that my gender identity was more fluid than I had previously led myself to believe—Moses’s words permanently etched into my mind. “I insist on my right to be multiple.”

Sumney’s album Græ emerges from a radical new wave of artists, pushing normative boundaries of gender and sexuality, even forsaking labels altogether. Artists such as Blood Orange, SOPHIE, Ivy Sole, and Arca are also momentous figures in the movement, embodying shapeshifting in both gender expression and genre.

Moses Sumney performing at Outside Lands in SF on Halloween in 2021

Yet, this warping movement is only a newborn phenomenon within the mainstream. Only a few years ago, the entertainment industry was dominated by the Buzzfeed phenomenon – centrist takes on diversity that was addicted to the need to create rigid identification. From “Born this way” to “Sissy that Walk,” although they are truly bops and made in good faith, they are representations of an era of the gay politic in which the radical nature of queer thought was reduced to identity and assimilation into the mainstream. 

Despite its claim to materiality, the neoliberal rhetoric of pragmatic politics obscures the radical political imagination and reproduces harm on queer and trans bodies. Because assimilation into positions of power (such as headlines touting the first POC women CEO) fails to dismantle systems of harm such as racial capitalism but only masks it. This sentiment only bolstered by the musical culture that was birthed from it. 

Yet, emerging from the Obama-era, neo-liberal, identitarian gay politics, is a new genre-defying, intersectional queer coalition that is using the musical medium to subvert normative structures. In embracing the grey/gray/græ areas of sexuality and genre, they propose a world that undoes the rigidity of identification, positing that we each contain an inherent multiplicity.

Because queerness, foundationally, lies in the warm embrace of all, a blanket, an understanding that being queer transcends sexuality. Poignant, the words of bell hooks, visionary thinker and pioneer of intersectionality, conveys it best:

“… queer as not about who you’re having sex with, that can be a dimension of it, but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”

Cathy J. Cohen, in her formative work “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?,” defines the term “queer” to stem from “sustained and multi-sited resistance to systems (based on dominant constructions of race and gender) that seek to normalize our sexuality, exploit our labor, and constrain our visibility.” It is more than evident, then, that queerness is synonymous with fluidity and resistance.

But somewhere along the way, after the riots and the manifestos of the 60s and 70s queer politic, we arrived at, what I am sure most of us are familiar with, the queer politic of representation. This politic, emerging from the increasing mainstream of neoliberalism through the 90s and onwards, became obsessed with taxonomy, placing queer people into positions of power and creating sharp divides of identification.

The neoliberalism of this politic not only obscured the vista of utopia, it was deadly. For example, carceral feminism posited, in the early 2000s, that California endorses a 40% expansion of prisons under the euphemism of “Female Rehabilitative Community Centers.” Advocates contended that in order to reduce gender and sexual violence, the construction of “gender-responsive” prisons would alleviate the pain of incarceration and answer the innate desire to be safe. Yet what transpired was just the increased incarceration of queer, trans, and POC bodies. The expansion of the prison industrial complex cannot solve sexual violence. The demarcation of systems in the language of “inclusivity,” “diversity,” and “allyship” only strengthens the system, boxing in any radical expression.

This pessimistic pragmatism, the asymmetrical assimilation of the queer politic, penetrated every facet of culture, including music. And beyond the real, corporeal violence of the identitarian politic inflicted on queer and trans bodies, the culture that this sort of music worked only to perpetuate the harm.

Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” Album Cover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_This_Way_%28album%29

Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” is a striking example of the connection between neoliberal rhetoric and music culture. This song has come to define the Obama-era gay mainstream.  Do not dock me for this as Lady Gaga has been, and still is, a ground-breaking, life-changing artist. However, this particular song has become synonymous with the Buzzfeed-propagated neoliberalism of the mid-2010s. Its lyrics champion the sole notion that being gay is relegated to the realm of identity, that the homosexual identifier is BIOLOGICAL and not socially constructed.

It suggests that queer people would choose to be cis/straight/or inhabit a more normative identifier if only we were not “born this way.” That we are born into our identities, and our sexualities and gender are primordial, forsaking that our system forces us to differentiate ourselves from heteronormativity. We are then led to believe that the mere representation of these identities is liberation instead of changing the system itself. “Visibility” within the racial capitalist system without the ability to dream or to change the system itself becomes the only mode of liberation.

In doing so, the mainstream gay politic forsook the anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, subversive roots of the gay politic, spanning from prison abolition to the creation of the Third World Gay Liberation Front. I do not believe that musical culture inflicted the violence I discussed above in any manner. But still, I find it important to note how these dueling politics of pragmatism and utopianism occupy musical culture. After all, music, and any artistic production for that matter, is an ideological product of its time.

It is abundantly clear that the label fever of modern queer musical culture paralleled and perpetuated the neoliberal gay politic. And in artists echoing this sentiment, we lose a medium of radical expression – music. Yet, not all is lost. On the opposite end of the spectrum (sexuality is a spectrum people!), emerges a cohort of queer artists who choose to challenge classification. 

Moses Sumney’s Grae, released in the midst of Covid Lockdown, is a two-part album musing on what it would mean to disregard gender and sexual labels altogether. The work’s title even calls for a consideration of multiplicity, as in to inhabit a “gray area” where nothing is defined and the space itself lacks an overwhelming need to define itself. Moses interlays his songs with spoken word, challenging notions of binary gender in “jill/jack” and calling to his intersectional identity as a Black, queer artist in “also also also and and and.”  Artists like him, champion fluidity in both their lyrics and their use of multiple genres (such as the rising popularity of interplaying rnb and Aphex Twin-esque ambient work), becoming creative embodiments of radical queerness. 

The utopian gay politic asks us to imagine a world that exists beyond our current system, to acknowledge the impossibility of the abolition of prisons and the heternormative family structure, and to straddle it. Sumney’s polysemous sensibility in terms of the abolition of labels and genre echoes this utopian thought. That if we can inhabit ourselves and the world around us without labels, then it is not far-fetched to believe, then, that our current system can be upended. 

I believe that Moses’s intersectional identity works in tandem with the rhetoric he puts forth. Instead of relying solely on a queer politic that ignores considerations of intersectionality, the album posits that perhaps there is no need to create clear-cut identities but rather, we must “insist upon our right to be multiple,” a lyric that defines Grae. The manner in which we yearn, we exist within our daily lives, the way in which our society and ourselves are constantly harmonious and simultaneously discordant with each other, is not black and white but rather – grey. And only in a consideration of a queerness without bounds, all notions of our systems uprooted, will we find ourselves in liberation.

This piece was written for B-Side’s Spring 2022 Print Edition and has been workshopped for online publication.