It’s complicated enough to try and define what makes a life queer. The term, as with what it describes, is characterized by opposition, resistance, and refusal. So it doesn’t get any easier when thinking about music. In a 2011 Wire article, “All Sound Is Queer,” the author and Matmos musician Drew Daniel wrote of the limits of labeling artists as gay icons, whether Maria Callas, Bikini Kill, Lady Gaga, or Lil Louis and his “French Kiss.” While codifying LGBTQ+ music might have practical or even poetic uses, Daniel argued that labeling artists can flatten the spectrum of queer identities. “The bagging and tagging of identities on behalf of a celebration of difference is a dead end,” he wrote, adding that it turns gay and lesbians into “a dutiful rainbow coalition of subject-consumers.”
The 13 years since have added a wrinkle to Daniel’s argument. Queer people still don’t want to be told what songs make us feel good, but recent queer anthems of the streaming era, like Troye Sivan’s “Rush” or Kylie Minogue’s “Padam Padam,” have felt more organically anointed, rising to popularity through a groundswell of support, standing in contrast to top-down engineered PSAs like “Born This Way.” Daniel went on to write about experimental sounds’ necessary and destabilizing potential, saying that hearing sound “rather than being hailed by music, [is] so powerfully odd and so potentially ‘queer.’”
I revisited Daniel’s article after reading Zachary Pace’s meticulously researched and thrillingly individual new book I Sing to Use the Waiting: A Collection of Essays About the Women Singers Who’ve Made Me Who I Am—released in January through Two Dollar Radio. The book applies a personal lens to Pace’s experience of queer listening, embracing a stubbornly specific, scrappy, and diffuse way of hearing. That is to say, an honest and relatable one, and one that veers quite far away from one-size-fits-all pride anthems, even as it includes artists who have made some of the most beloved entries in the canon. The essay topics include Cher, Madonna, and Whitney Houston, as well as Cat Power bootlegs, an obscure Hop Along CD-R, and a perfect Kim Gordon playlist of two songs designed to be heard on a loop.
An early clue to Pace’s interest in art’s slipperiness comes in an opening essay. The author is fascinated by rubato, when a piece—or in this case, a singer—briefly plays with tempo but keeps a song’s overall structure intact. When Judy Garland sang “When the Sun Comes Out” in the 1960s or Ms. Lauryn Hill performs “Ex-Factor” in the 2020s, stretching some notes and clipping others, that’s rubato. Queerness itself is similar, Pace writes. It “intentionally rephrases and legitimizes those structures and stereotypes, deviating from the presiding rhythms of sexual and social norms: countercultural rubato.”
Pace’s book, in turn, zeroes in on lesser-known moments of pop divas’ careers as if testing pressure points in their body of work. It’s a credit to the richness of Madonna’s work that there is still something new to say about her, particularly after Mary Gabriel’s recent doorstop biography. Pace, a self-identified “reformed disciple of Madonna’s Kabbalah,” with three Hebrew tattoos to show for it, offers a fascinating take on the pop icon’s mid-career period of spiritual interest which is often remembered as a punchline. The author traces a pattern of Kabbalistic “existential enquiry” from 1994 to 2004, unlocking seductive new interpretations of Evita’s “Lament,” Bedtime Stories, and the 2004 Re-Invention World Tour. An essay on Cher’s film work notes the “unapologetic eroticism” of her characters in Mask and Mermaids, while a 1991 Whitney Houston live performance of Leon Russell’s “A Song for You” is read as a desperate message to Houston’s former assistant, Robyn Crawford. Meanwhile, a playful chapter titled “Mariah, Fiona, Joanna, and Me” affectionately lists the ten-dollar words of Carey, Apple, and Newsom, framing their linguistic somersaults as a kind of a dance in the margins of genre’s playbook.
Pace’s anthropological approach and generosity of spirit come alive in an essay on Rihanna’s “Work,” which reframes the 2016 hit as a piece that is in conversation with Barbadian tuk and Jamaican dancehall. The genres have roots as music of rebellion, thriving in reaction to white oppression as examples of “an expressive possibility [that] flourished out of a prohibition.” “Work,” Pace writes, is a testament to Rihanna’s “queer powers of survival, adaptation, and dynamic negotiation in her articulation of selfhood,” and “recoding” a white Western perception of the margin.
The writer is just as compelling on artists who embrace sounds on the relative periphery. The “lovely ugly” tones of Kim Gordon were a comfort for Pace when living on a knife’s edge in New York as a young adult, scraping by on an entry-level publishing job, subsisting on coffee, bread, and peanut butter. Sonic Youth’s most exploratory music marked an encounter with an “oceanic feeling” that the author craved; they describe it, quoting French philosopher Julia Kristeva, as a desire for “losing the boundaries of the self… into the pain-and-joy of becoming fluid, of liquifying oneself to be other.” Pace hears this molten flux, as well as melancholic longing, in the band’s 1995 “The Diamond Sea.” “At the crest of its extended, formless, instrumental bridge, the guitar overtones conjure sunlight strafing the inmost curl of a breaking tidal wave,” they write.
That is to say: a phenomenon that’s so short-lived it’s hardly there at all. Pace takes clear, infectious pleasure in such ephemeral moments, combing through bootlegs of live performances like an archivist looking for clues in a medieval manuscript. A close analysis of Cat Power’s “Could We” traces its metamorphosis from a threadbare acoustic debut to bluesy stomper in a pursuit of what Pace calls “the transcendence of mind beyond body” and what Chan Marshall calls “openness.” The book’s description of fandom might strike a chord with anyone who goes looking for answers in the music of singer-songwriters, though Pace’s experience may be a shade darker; they describe one Christmas spent alone listening to eight Cat Power records in succession, “spinning around six hours straight.”
It’s the kind of quiet, private listening that Pace knows is sacred. The author’s passion reverberates through this book, part memoir, part critical study, and part signpost to the music they cherish (an “oceanic” Sonic Youth playlist which endlessly loops “I Dreamed I Dream” and “Massage the History” has rarely left my ears this winter). At times, it’s like the author is sitting right next to you, pulling something up on a screen or a stereo and shaking you by the shoulders, saying, See? Isn’t this magic? Part of what makes Pace’s book so refreshing is that the author is uninterested in finding, or inventing, breadcrumb trails that point to an artist’s sexuality, or assembling an alternative taxonomy of LGBTQ+ anthems. Rather, queerness is a kaleidoscopic filter that can destabilize familiar narratives about the artists you love, find hidden nuances, or empower your wildest takes. It’s a bold stance to say that all sound is queer; In I Sing to Use the Waiting, Pace says you may just have to listen closely.
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