文档介绍：Noise Music as Queer Expression
Introduction
“The blindfolds we wear during live performances are a criticism of the superficiality of
gay culture - the fact that it has turned into a market, just like everything else,” says Joel Gibb,
front man of the Ontario-based indie-pop band the Hidden Cameras. With a generation of queer
people throwing aside Foucault for Queer TV, it certainly is difficult to dispute that we are
ing a demographic to which big businesses are trying to appeal unapologetically. Gay
music, for instance, is mass-marketed in palatable sub-genres overflowing with queer
stereotypes, from the show-tune chamber pop of Rufus Wainwright and the ic Fields to
the singer-songwriter folk pop of . lang and Catie Curtis to the electronic disco of the Scissor
Sisters and Junior Senior. But how is queer is queer culture if it simply conforms to the
expectations of mainstream society? The “constituent characteristic” of the term “queer,” as
Annamarie Jagose explains, is “its definitional indeterminacy, its elasticity”(1). True queer
music would be something that can never be mass-marketed, something that eschews widespread
appeal in favor of true artistic expression.
In his essay “Sexual and Musical Categories,” Fred Everett Maus suggests that “…it is
already easy to see that non-positions are queers in the concert hall…[T]hey are
marginals, oddballs, outsiders…products of the degeneration of tonal order”(159). From this
reasoning follows a considerable theoretical link between noise music, both classical and
popular, and queer identity. In Maus’s essay he describes the almost perfect parallel between the
“essentialism vs. social construction” debate of sexuality and the debate over tonality. In
describing the theoretical writings of Heinrich Schenker, he states, “Schenker’s creation of an
elaborate tonal theory in response to post-tonal music resembles, to some extent, sexologists’
Noise Music As Queer Expression