The sound that layered her music was this exaggerated, but eccentric take on pop music. The base was crunchy, the snare was clangy, and the melodies were distorted, but that didn’t stop her popularity. She began producing music for artists like Nicki Minaj, Madonna, Vince Staples, and Charli XCX and secured her status as an iconic trans producer. 

Many would be quick to say she’s a pioneer for queer people in music, but queerness has been in music since it began. Artists like Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Sylvester, David Bowie, Prince, and Little Richard are proof that queerness and boundless expression belong in music, and never left it. Now we have musicians like Angel Olsen, Kelela, Sophie, Arca, Lil Nas X and Mykki Blanco that bend gender and sexual boundaries as much as they bend musical ones. Music is powerful because it communicates feeling in a universal language, but many of us forget how gay music actually is, and how much queerness plays a part in the way we see it today. 

Sophie broke musical and spiritual boundaries by expressing herself in unique and eccentric ways. There’s an air of freedom that governs her music. It takes a hold of you, and gives you space to be more of yourself. Songs like “Faceshopping”, tell us how conforming to the limit of perfection can restrict anyone, even trans people. But in her most popular song, Immaterial, we get to see how mutable gender is, and how much of our stories we can create. 

In one of her most critically acclaimed songs, BIPP, she makes an intention to use music in it’s most vulnerable form; a space to feel. Many of the first documented pieces of music were classical and without words, but the audience remained moved by complex melodies and bare emotions conveyed through instruments and tempo. Popular music has words now, and of course more electronic influences but it hasn’t lost it’s bare touch, and SOPHIE is proof of that. 

SOPHIE worked hard to create her own world. On her album Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, she sings, produces and composes most of her work. But much of her status was achieved through producing for other artists. The most popular songs that she produced are hits like, “B*tch I’m Madonna”, by Madonna and Nicki Minaj, “Yeah Right” by Vince Staples and Kendrick Lamar, and “Vroom Vroom” by Charli XCX. 

It’s interesting to see how SOPHIE still manages to penetrate her audience with her boldness even when working with other artists. She isn't the only master of this. Many producers integrate their personalities into their work even if it’s for other people. You have to have a courageous presence to do this, it’s something worth shedding a light on. Jeer, a 10th grade student at E&S and the executive producer of Carver Records, also uses producing as a main expression of his musical talent. We discussed how producing music communicates how we feel in intricate ways. 

"If I'm really happy trying to make a sad beat it's going to feel forced" Jeer says, "or like I'm doing something wrong."

Music offer space to explore a world of feeling. For producers like Jeer, it allows them to channel their current feelings and make it into something tangible. For listeners, It offers us connection and the opportunity to live outside of the overbearing structures that take over our lives. 

Sasha Geffen is an eclectic journalist that writes passionately about music and they point out in his piercing article, “How pop music broke the gender binary”, that music creates a space for us to realize we aren’t so different. It destroys the binary codes that separate us, and it makes us connect without the labels that restrain us in our everyday lives. In a highly gender specific, racist and heteronormative world, a lot of violence was skewed towards marginalized groups and music created a space for them to be vulnerable. 

"Music has this power to kind of connect people who would be really vulnerable and targeted for not responding to heteropatriarchy," Sasha said.

Musician from Tufts University, Alex Leite, is proof of this idea. Her favorite song from SOPHIE is "Faceshopping". It's a brash song that has the ability to rip your eardrums out if your volume is too loud, but the song is about battling imperfection as a trans person. Often times, trans people have hard times feeling a connection with their body and the way they are perceived, and the song dives into what it feels like to create a version of yourself that you feel connected to. Songs like these help trans and queer people feel a cinematic recognition when they listen, they know the song was made for them. 

"I felt really connected to that because as a trans person, there's a very real disconnect between what I want my body to look like and what it actually is." Alex says, "Every time I listen to i'm just like--yeah this is it."

And since music has the power to connect regardless of our every-day structures, it makes room for queerness to thrive. Many may not know that queerness and music are often correlated because of how expressive they are. This world weighs on binaries and restrictions. Music is one of few things that can give us that break and free us from labels that attempt to define us.

“Homosexuality as an identity and the concept of recording music happened around the same time.“ Sasha says, “If you look into some of the early attempts to figure out what queerness is, there's a lot of talk about music and about how it’s the art form that’s most suited for gay or third gender identity because of its porosity and expressiveness."

However, artists that took up the queer space music had to offer often got erased from our history, or had versions of themselves stripped down for the audience to digest more easily. Sasha explains that some of the first blues recordings are of black queer women singing about other women, and sometimes they would also sing about gay men. Billie Holiday, an infamous blues singer from the 40's and 50's, was openly bisexual and mentioned her lovers in her memoir and autobiography before her death. The Harlem Renaissance can also show us how queerness and music are connected. The Famous blue's singer, Frankie Jaxon, often referred to as a "female impersonator", openly enjoyed cross dressing. He also stated cross dressing being a key feature to the Harlem ballroom culture during its renaissance. And even further into the future, music and gender expression continued to be the heart of the queer Harlem ballroom scene in the 70's and 80's. 

Although this fabulousness always existed in music history, the early pioneers experienced much backlash because no one really knew how to deal with them. In The Fabulous Sylvester, by Joshua Gamson, we get insight on how much Sylvester, referred to as the queen of disco in the 1970's and early 80's along with Donna Summer and Gloria Gaynor, was gender fluid before the term “gender fluid” existed. Many record producers and critics couldn’t grab a hold of them. They would try to dial down his femininity and flamboyance so that he could be more palatable.

"His manager's strategy, for sure, was to market him as a plausibly masculine rhythm and blues singer," Gamson says.

Sylvester's first album, Sylvester, wasn't commercially successful. Radio stations would refuse to play his music because of how gay it was. But even in the attempts to repress Sylvester, he still found ways to shine in his most vulnerable forms and touch his audience. After he released Sylvester, he would perform at gay bars and swallow his audience in his pure individuality and expressiveness, something that music has allowed its queer artists to do since it first began to be recorded. 

"Sylvester's sound brought to mind not just a bright, soft, blue skied world--one where race and gender no longer divide us and we love whom, when and how we want--but somehow also it's spiky little clouds of sadness," Gamson says.

Every time we put on our ear buds and blast the song that makes us feel, we are listening to raw expression. That same expression is the very thing that queer and trans people are policed for. They are often fed the idea that if they "dial it down", people would like or accept them, but music is proof that we never have to dial it down. Music is proof we can live outside of labels and connect with people, and queer people have been doing so for ages (with the help of music, of course). The feeling that we get from listening to some really good music, shows the possibility of living outside of the categories that separate us. Let's embrace that feeling. Let's acknowledge the queer space music offers that allows us to feel so good.