SHE/HER MUSIC

SHE/HER MUSIC 

By THE FRIEND

I don’t have many moves, but overthinking’s certainly one of them. Then I’ll notice something that resists ready thought. I’ve noticed in the last year that pop music’s pronouns are she/her. She dominates. In a demonstrable way that makes me go, as a child of the 90s, was this always so shared? I actually watched the Grammys this year. The performances, the nominees, where the energy was at. It was obvious. Pop’s transitioned. 

If you look at other industries, publishing, movies, sports, politics—the old gender ratios prevail, solidly intact. Deathly traditional. And I know with music, the executives, the producers, the record agents, none of that’s changed an inch. Also, just so this doesn’t sound hollowly rosy, yes, Spotify streams reward the billionaire class of anthem plays. Most artists are paid notoriously nothing. Put this together with the glaring fact we live culturally in the age of the algorithm, it’s warranted to pause. My friend Love refuses to take contemporary pop seriously. Repetitiveness is vast. Most songs feel trapped in a loop not even of their own devising. Regurgitation formalism. But let’s also pause a moment and notice that femme-coded singers & songs are the default. Butch, soft butch, fully girly. Some kind of recalibration has gone down.

Months ago, at a friend’s Bushwick party in a crowded kitchen, we huddled together. A portable speaking blasted the new Addison Rae. Someone said, casually, now this is my diva. And I thought, love or hate her, can Addison Rae be a “diva”? Trace a fictional line from opera houses and Harlem ballrooms to giant stadiums where Whitney and Donna Summer once stood. The very definition of diva. These are out-of-reach celebrities. Judy Garland almost crying on stage. Elvis locked up in a Las Vegas hotel room. Larger than life, god-gifted talents that existed as if forever somewhere else. You know, allure. When I think of generations of happy faggots idolizing the diva, the fantasy of the great feminine voice held aloft, impossibly high, I imagine our eyes raised like altars. The whole point was you can never be her. Nor would it ever occur to the diva for a second to want to trade places, to be us. Raw talent and survivalism placed this person in another category of being. Amy Winehouse was a little like that, though messy and hounded enough to also feel transitional. Maybe circa 2012 there was a generational handoff. 

From sequestered stars, immortal idols, mansioned recluses—to what? Reality TV. Then the algorithm. Authority switched spots. Today, almost every pop girly emerges from a base of planned mundanity. They can—and do—record great albums in living rooms. Some with the very same tech of a corporate sound room. Last December I toured a Sony recording studio in Miami and learned how the whole place had been remodeled to basically a hangout café. Complete with gym, kitchens, showers, common areas to kiki in. The tour guide person was like “We have to lure artists back [from the independent labels] so studio work doesn’t feel like work.” Huh. I mean honestly I thought, ok, interesting. 

Femmeboys in their twenties are our avatar of creator and audience now. Let’s say the 2010s had bestowed this honor on teenage straight girls from the Midwest. That was pretty gender norm, basic template, bland/fun PG angst. Today’s girlies—if you wanna call them divas—have teeth, sex, self-aware plasticity. A kind of fresh mom-dom energy afoot. The Charli/Lorde collab on “Girl, so confusing” is genius. I love this line so much: “It’s you and me on the coin / That the industry loves to spend.” Something’s there. Every queer person I know only listens to music sung by femmes and bad bitches. The inner world of house parties and ratty clubs reflects the outer one. Concert tours (400-600 a pop), award shows, music videos. I’m trying to say the feminine structure of consciousness is like the default position now. The new/old soundtrack to everyone’s inner life. Trauma is collected like grist for the mill and sung back to us, no—for us. As us. Prosthetics for understanding. Every pop song like a little essay in Attachment Studies. I love that. Lesbian Sappho invented lyric space (you could call it head-and-heart space) to contradict Homer and the war machine. On one hand, that’s queer feminist revolt. On the other, love songs tend not to confront genocide. 

My friends live out their emotional lives just like celebrities. It’s a daily thing. The fantasy is some kind of pitch-perfect impersonation of being an ordinary human being hung up on and broken open by d (dick, desire, dopamine). Mopey and relational. “Fame is a gun” means fame is DSM-worthy. It is. I try to remember the immense unreality that’s placed on a person. Then I also remember we’re all paranoid PR agents in 2025. Press kits, branding, our very own surveillance apparatuses on the go. No matter who you are—activist, intellectual, hermit, lurker—everyone on Instagram must offer constant report. 

Public Object Status has always been a transfeminizing experience. I get that the attention economy pulverizes whomever occupies its structures. I think of Ariana Reines’ first book cover image: a hanging dead headless cow at a meat processing factory. These thoughts are among my less-than-sanguine reality checks. Meanwhile, in DMs and at parties, across endless conversations in person or over text I relish something that is not only capitalist cynicism. Queer and trans sociality really is alive. And pop music is sometimes the safest world we know. 

I think how certain tracks more and more act like a proxy for our missing selves. Emotional pornography, highly produced, yet genuine. I’m not claiming it as escape from empire. Though escapism has intensified. Femme realism might remind us we need as much workable dissociation we can muster to hold contradictions. I love how often now protest organizers and political theorists defend the dance floor. It’s not about being duped.

Meanwhile, this lateral move, peer-to-peer transmission feels sacred. Whereas the traditional diva is a little bit like church (which I love), I think content-bonding today focuses less on the crash site of personalities. More on the two-sided dildo of exchanging tastes. It’s weirdly not about headlines or clickbait. We sample and post lyrics, vague bait and flirt, sample and remix. Wink, align, handshake. A playlist is like a wellness check-in, some light night coloring, mental weather updates. Our personal circles which include digital strangers are our audiences, and we theirs. 

Transfeminine currency has always been currency, real & controlled. Yes. No, I don’t think we are all divas now, that all attitudes, meltdowns, entitlement complexes are cute. My boo-friend re: Chappell and Doechii, now those are divas. He/they finds Addison too AI-generated. OK I get it. And yet. We share ourselves sideways now. We relearn touch. Through something artificial (gender, celebrity), we touch. Everyone’s a lesbian.